RSSSamsung Begins Hybrid HDD Shipments
By Ed Oswald | Published March 7, 2007, 4:27 PM
Samsung has begun shipments of the first hybrid flash memory hard drive to its OEM partners. Retail shipments are expected to begin soon, however the company has not specified a date.
The Korean electronics maker first announced its plans for such drives shortly before WinHEC in May of last year. It said that combining flash memory with a traditional HDD had numerous benefits, including faster boot and resume times, as well as increased reliability.
For notebook PCs, which these drives are primarily intended for, battery life is also noticeably better by 20 to 30 minutes.
Hybrid hard drives eliminate the need for the disk to spin continuously, which would contribute to a longer usable life, as well as less risk of data loss from dropping or jarring.
Using ReadyBoot -- not to be confused with the similarly named Microsoft technology ReadyBoost -- boot and resume times are cut by 50 percent, while a 70 to 90 percent reduction in power usage is realized.
Samsung's hybrid drives would also work with a new Vista feature called ReadyDrive, which would negate the need for frequent disc accesses. Right now, support for the technology is only available through Windows, meaning using the drive on other operating systems would show no significant benefit.
The first three drives would come in capacities of 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB. Pricing has not been announced. Samsung will not have the market to itself for long, however; Intel is working on a competing technology called Robson, and Seagate plans to release its own hybrid drives soon.
Hard dives have come a long way, but they've been around for half a century already. I think it's about time someone invented a better alternative than that spinning plate. A hologram crystal perhaps. They can start small with 1 petabyte then move on to the exabytes, zettabytes and yottabyte crystals. But right now I would be happy with a 1 terabyte flash drive.
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These developments, along with the moving to market of technologies such as IBM's MRAM, should portend some nice features and usefulness to come.
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how fast and whats the seek time.
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Given seek times on flash are in the nanoseconds, rather than milliseconds, seek would be ridiculously quick compared to a standard drive. That said, random seek would still be slow, as it's only a large cache, not 100% SSD.
Read/write I expect would be about the same as current HDDs. Flash isn't really faster in that area.
EDIT: might be worth noting I searched around the Samsung website and web for about 5 minutes, but couldn't find any specific data. Be interesting to see some benchmarking when they hit the market.
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I read a test last week, but unfortunately I cannot find the link. Anyway, the performance of new HDDs was a bit disappointing - they were not significially faster than the conventional ones. However, they consume far less energy and they are much quieter than them.
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The tests I've read (I can't find the articles, they were in print), all seemed to describe the performance as "great" for hibernation wake-up, but "on par" for cold starts/restarts. I'm still waiting for 100% solid state HDD. Been talked about for years and years. Starting to think they're vaporware, but maybe they're finally on the horizon.
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Finally!
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Anyone know the spindle speed - I'm guessing 5400 RPM?
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I would hope that these hard drives would have a 7200 RPM spindle speed.
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Sign me up for one.
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