SanDisk Shows off Compelling Hybrid Solution

By Greg McNevin

November 16, 2007: With the solid state disk (SSD) market heating up by the day, SanDisk has announced an interesting take on hybrid drives, presenting a flash-based disk that works in conjunction with a regular magnetic hard disk to speed up system operations.

Designed for use in notebooks, the ‘Vaulter Disk’ is not a hybrid drive itself, but a separate PCI Express module that attaches to a standard hard drive.

Hybrid drives already offer onboard flash memory to speed up operation, however, these solutions have limited flash capacity, and no where near enough space to house an operating system in its entirety.

SanDisk’s 8 to 16GB cards on the other hand, have enough capacity to hold an operating system, quite a few programs and a chunk of frequently-accessed data.

As with all SSDs, this will no doubt see system performance and battery life increase, however, as it does not do away with the sheer capacity of magnetic storage the solution is offering the best of both worlds.

The device will be offered to OEMs in the US next year, and should start appearing in notebooks soon after.

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