Posted by Grant Foraker on November 30, 2006 at 12:42:33:
News tid bit.
Hybrid hard drives incorporating flash memory have been talked about ever since Microsoft introduced the concept at the 2004 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Last year, Samsung, the world's largest producer of flash memory, predicted that the first hybrid drives incorporating flash memory and rotating storage would come to market in 2006, a promise that has been borne out.
At the recent WinHEC show, both Seagate and Samsung showed prototypes of the new drive, which they dubbed "ReadyDrive".
The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.
Initially, Samsung forecast that the first hybrid drives would use 128 Mbytes of flash memory, and that booting from the drives would reduce power consumption by about 9 percent overall, increasing a notebook's battery life by about an hour. Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD drive, however, reduces the power used by the hard drive by 50 percent, according to the company, and speeds up the time a system can wake up from hibernation by 20 percent.