Samsung Electronics Co. announced today that it has begun shipping its first hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory. The new laptop hard drives are designed to work with the ReadyDrive feature in Windows Vista, using the flash memory as a cache to limit the amount of time the hard drive spends spinning. Samsung claims this will mean 70% - 90% less power consumption. Currently only Windows Vista supports ReadyDrive, so it won't improve performance under any other OS.
The first 3 models from Samsung are 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB, and are available with either 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. They also have a prototype with 4GB of flash memory. Later this year Intel is expected to start selling their own competing solution which puts the flash memory on the motherboard.
Source:
Computerworld
Source:
Computerworld
