Samsung Samples First Hybrid Hard Drive to OEMs; Retail 'Soon'

[Shaman]

"Samsung said Wednesday that it had begun shipments of its first hybrid hard drive to select OEMs, and that retail shipments would begin "soon".

The new MH80 2.5-inch hybrid drives for notebook PCs will be available in 80-, 120-, and 160-Gbyte capacities, with either 128 Mbytes or 256 Mbytes of onboard flash memory, for caching purposes.

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Samsung representatives weren't immediately available to answer questions on the drive's retail availability or pricing.

Although Microsoft has touted flash drives as a means to improve the performance of its Vista operating system, there are two types of flash drives. The first, more common form is known as ReadyBoost, where a specially formatted USB flash drive stores Windows system files, making boot cycles and restores from hibernation faster and more efficient.

Samsung, meanwhile, is part of the Hybrid Drive Alliance, which uses flash memory as a type of write cache for a hard disk drive. DRAM is commonly found in virtually all disk drives, as a means to cache data being read from the disk, and burst it across a Serial ATA bus to the main PC. User-generated data, generated much slower than a machine, requires non-volatile memory to gather it, store it, and then burst it to the disk. The result is that data is written to the disk in a concentrated form much less frequently than a non-hybrid hard drive, resulting in significantly less power being used in a notebook PC from spinning up the hard disk.

Acording to Samsung, its MH80 drives feature Samsung's "ReadyBoot" (not ReadyBoost) technology that offers up to a 50 percent reduction in boot and resume times from traditional magnetic hard drives. In addition, the drive consumes 70-90 percent less power than a traditional hard drive, which extends the battery life by 30 minutes before a recharge is needed, the company said.

In a ReadyBoost flash drive, flash caches of 2 Gbytes or so are considered ideal. But at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in January, Seagate engineers showing off their own hybrid hard drive prototypes said that 256 Mbytes had proven to be the peak of the cost-vs.-performance ratio."

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[Expert]

Ρε γμτ...όλα στο pc είναι ηλεκτρονικά εκτός απ τους δίκσκους...

Κάτι πρέπει α γίνει και με αυτούς...

Πιστεύω ότι είναι ένα part του υπολογιστή μηχανικό που κρατάει τις επιδόσεις πολύ πίσω

Για να δούμε...θα προσφέρει πραγματικά τπτ η τόση μεγάλη έξτρα cache...