Samsung Electronics has now announced that it will launch the first hybrid harddrives in 2007 just as expected. Samsung has also supplied some further information about what advantages the hybrid drives will offer over today’s regular drives. As you perhaps know a hybrid drive uses regular mechanical harddrive technology paired with flash memory working like a big buffer. In this memory buffer files that are frequently accesed are stored, which makes it possible for the mechanical harddrive to rest. Reading and writing data to the flash memory buffert both speeds up response times and reduce power consumption.
We’ve earlier heard information that spoke of considerably faster boot times thanks to the hybrid harddrives and even if reduced power consumption is a nice advantage it has not been spoken off to the same extent. Mainly because laptops will be the ones which will gain the most from this. Samsung has now announced that it hopes to cut the consumption with between 70% and 90% using hybrid technology. This would, according to Samsung, result in up to 30min longer battery time with portable computers.
”Samsung’s hybrid drives, which work with Microsoft’s Vista, will come in a variety of capacities when they appear in computers next year. The drives, though, will contain either 128MB or 256MB of Samsung’s OneNAND flash memory. OneNAND is much faster than typical NAND memory.”
We are really looking forward to hearing more about Samsung’s hybrid harddrives when the first tests arrive as they on paper are looking mighty promising.
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