NEW Hybrid Hard Disk From Samsung and MS

maverik-sg1

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DailyTech Reports:

Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive (HHD) which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs.

The new product will be introduced along with Microsoft’s Windows ReadyDrive feature at the U.S. software maker’s annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference on May 24 in Seattle. ReadyDrive refers to software technology that supports the HHD.

The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC,.

Samsung and Microsoft have been co-developing the product and revealed the first prototype at the same conference last year. But this year’s model will be almost identical with what will be sold in the market later this year, though the basic concept of the product was unchanged, Samsung said on Monday.

This one will be more fitted to Windows Vista as Microsoft plans to release the new operating system within this year. We have tailored the hybrid disk to Windows Vista,’’ said Samsung’s public relations official Lee Seung-han.

The Hard disk drive is the most used data-storing device of a PC. The hard disk drive market is becoming more lucrative year by year. According to market researcher iSuppli, global hard drive sales increased 23 percent from 305 million units in 2004 to 376 million in 2005.

Samsung is the sixth largest maker in the world, with a 7.2 percent share in 2005.

The HHD has been developed at Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor division. The company hopes the HHD will be the gap-filler between the traditional hard disk and next-generation flash-driven hard drives, which Samsung aims selling as early as next year.

The world’s largest flash memory maker hopes it can expand its memory chip market dominance to the hard drive market by developing flash-driven static disk drives (SDD). However, high prices and a low storage capacity of flash memory are hindering the commercialization of the SDD, leaving the market opportunity to the hybrid drives.

The two firms aim to market the HHD- and ReadyDrive-equipped laptops from late this year in accordance with the launching of Windows Vista. The HHD and ReadyDrive technologies are expected to perform a crucial role in Windows Vista by improving both performance and credibility. Windows Vista will leverage the feature to speed up the system and elongate battery life, while making it less vulnerable to external shock.
 
best of both worlds then,flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. things can only get better.
 
Samsung/MS Claims are not only do you have instant boot-up (somewhere between I-Ram and RAID) but that it's also 1.5x faster than a SATA2 in 'normal' operation.

Of course the power draw is a lot less - designed for notebooks but can easily be made desktop friendly, everything your yonah/merom desktop system would need ;)
 
Think I read something about Toshiba trying to do this also in a mag once. I know Toshiba has a 2p sized 4Gb HDD but I dunno what else they have.

Pretty kewl tho :P

Boardy
 
No word on price i notice.

I thought they had given up on this, i remember the announcement that they were going for it about a year ago.

Interesting points raised in several articles i have read, a year ago the big problem with the technology was the reliability of the NAND at only 100 000 write/erase cycles, which isnt a lot.

Article written just over one year ago here, hopefully these issues have been sorted:

http://www.overclockers.com/tips00771/

Will be interesting to see how well it works.

G
 
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