PC World: Samsung Readies Hybrid Hard Drive

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,125761,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,125761,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Samsung Electronics plans to unveil next week a prototype hard drive that can improve system performance and extend battery life on laptops, the company said today. The drive is called a hybrid hard drive, because it includes flash memory storage space in addition to the usual magnetic disk storage. The flash memory acts as a storage buffer, holding data until it's full and only then writing the data to the disk. This cuts down on the amount of disk activity--typically the new drive spins only a few seconds every 10 or 20 minutes--which means battery life is extended by between 8 percent and 10 percent, according to Samsung's measurements."</i><br /><br />Faster performance, better battery life? Sign me up - though since it requires Vista, it will be slow to roll out. I'm a bit surprised at the small amount of Flash (128MB and 256MB) though - I would have thought with prices being what they are, 512MB or 1GB would have been the sweet spot.

[Damion Chaplin]

I'm still waiting for flash hard drives, and never really understood why they never caught on. Was it price of flash ROM vs. disc platters? A nice 10-20GB flash drive to store windows on would mean screaming performance and huge power savings in laptops and tablets. I was thinking of this while listening to your latest podcast about the UMPC. One huge thing that makes small computers (subnotebooks, tablets etc.) run so slow is the superslow (and supersmall) hard drive they have to use in order to save space. I've always wondered why they didn't equip tablets with 5GB flash drives for the OS. Just pare XP down a little. I mean, do we really need Windows Movie Maker on a tablet PC? Way to go Samsung, now let's see some more! :)