That is at least what people at laptop manufacturer Lenovo now claims in a blog as it discuss the situation of Hybrid HDDs of today. They claim that the models of hybrid harddrives that will appear with the launch of Windows Vista will not keep what they promise. There are several clear advantages, such as less wear and tear of the mechanical parts, but the claims that the integrated flash memory buffer would increase the performance significantly seems to be exaggerated. As you perhaps know hybrid harddrives consists out of a mechanical harddrive with a larger amount of integrated flash memory. This memory is used as a memory buffer and will result in a mix of a mechanical drive and an SSD drive.
Hybrid harddrives will support the ReadyDrive technology Windows Vista brings, but according to Lenovo the drives will not work as expected with the first generation hardware and it instead recommends consumers to put their money on RAM or a faster harddrive.
”Frankly, we’re underwhelmed at the performance we’re seeing from first generation flash-assisted technology, both in battery life gains and in performance gains. Obviously this technology is still undergoing growing pains and Microsoft and Intel will be working hard to improve the technology by the time it ships.”
