Hard Disk Makers Team Up For Hybrids

January 8, 2006: As a means to push the use of hybrid hard drives combining the speed of flash memory with conventional platter drives, a number of vendors have signed on for the Hybrid Storage Alliance.

With founding members including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba, the Alliance will work to promote the use of hybrid storage technology on laptop computers. The Alliance says hybrid hard disks can improve on batter life, give faster response and greater system durability to laptop users.

The first market chase for the Alliance will be customers of the Microsoft Vista. The new operating system takes a little longer to boot up, something that a hybrid flash-hard disk technology could theoretically speed up. Other goals of the Alliance centre around accelerating the market adoption of hybrid technology and demonstrating the value of using flash memory to extend the notebook performance.

Joni Clark, chairperson of the Hybrid Storage Alliance, says the hard drive industry is constantly looking for ways to improve the value of systems to customers. “Adding non-volatile memory to the hard drive brings about a host of mobility benefits that increases the value users want in notebook PCs,” she says.

A hybrid drive enables boot-ups to occur from a flash memory chip on a laptop. By increasing a system’s ability to access stored data, the technology could also work to prolong the life of a laptop’s battery. The Alliance says a hybrid hard drive could improve a laptop’s performance (in the time it takes to boot and access applications) by up to 20 percent.

After extensive market research, IDC suggests that hybrid disk drives could make up 35 percent of all hard disks drives on laptops by the year 2010.

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