Digital Home Thoughts: Samsung Begins Shipping Hybrid Hard Drives

"Samsung has announced that its has begun commercial shipments of its MH80 line of hybrid hard disk drives, making itself one of the first companies to roll out a hybrid hard drive unit to OEM customers. Samsung's MH80 line will initially be available in 80, 120, and 160 GB capacities; the drives themselves are 2.5-inch units with either 128 or 256 MB of onboard OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software. Drive manufacturers and Microsoft have been touting the potential performance benefits of hybrid drives for some time; the basic idea is that by combining flash memory cache with a traditional hard drive, a hybrid drive can enable power-sensitive systems (like notebook computers) to start up and resume operations more quickly, since they'd be accessing vital data out via flash rather than the platters. Hybrid drives would also use less power (since they'd have to spin up less frequenly) and be less vulnerable to damage from shocks and drops (since the drives wouldn't be spinning as often)."



Well, it's sure a step in the right direction, and if they let me I'll probably replace my laptop's drive with one of these, but I still can't help but ask why we don't have fully-flash drives yet. Sure, a hybrid drive will allow faster response times, but imagine the speed one would get with your entire OS on flash. 8) Look for these hybrid hard drives (HHDs) to appear in laptops and in retail stores soon.