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Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Samsung have joined forces to form the Hybrid Storage Alliance. The group will promote new "hybrid" drives that combine traditional hard drive technology (platters and spindles, oh my!) with massive quantities of flash memory. Why bother? From the looks of it, hybrid storage is all that and a slice of pie.
"NAND caching will emerge as an important technology enabler, especially to improve the performance of portable PCs running the Windows Vista OS," said John Rydning, IDC's Research Manager for hard drives. "Hybrid hard drives combine the best features of two storage technologies in a single product to deliver high capacity, responsive storage for portable PC users. Formation of the Hybrid Storage Alliance by HDD industry participants is prudent to raise awareness of hybrid HDD technology benefits."
Hitachi GST claims that the implementation of hybrid storage drives into notebook computers will result in faster boot and resume times, as core system components can load faster off of the flash NAND storage. The use of flash memory is also claimed to result in higher reliability and improved drive lifespan due to the reduction of platter spin times. Best of all, these drives will fit in today's laptops, as they are designed as drop-in replacements of existing notebook form factor drives.
The first batch of hybrid hard drives to hit the market will support the ATA T13 Open Standard, and will able to write data in an idle state due to the flash memory. This means that their usage in laptops should lower power consumption and potentially save close to half an hour of laptop battery life over a full computing session, according to estimates from the Alliance. This is all meant to tie in with Windows Vista's ReadyDrive feature, which enables PCs running hybrid drives to take full advantage of their capabilities by optimizing drive reads and writes.
Although hybrid disks are currently being promoted as battery and drive life extenders for the mobile platform, we expect to see desktop PCs taking advantage of the improved hardware reliability and performance offered by hybrid drives in the future. While some of us may drool at the forthcoming 1TB hard drives, the real object of our lust (currently) is SanDisk's 32GB flash hard drive. Those performance numbers command respect
Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Samsung have joined forces to form the Hybrid Storage Alliance. The group will promote new "hybrid" drives that combine traditional hard drive technology (platters and spindles, oh my!) with massive quantities of flash memory. Why bother? From the looks of it, hybrid storage is all that and a slice of pie.
"NAND caching will emerge as an important technology enabler, especially to improve the performance of portable PCs running the Windows Vista OS," said John Rydning, IDC's Research Manager for hard drives. "Hybrid hard drives combine the best features of two storage technologies in a single product to deliver high capacity, responsive storage for portable PC users. Formation of the Hybrid Storage Alliance by HDD industry participants is prudent to raise awareness of hybrid HDD technology benefits."
Hitachi GST claims that the implementation of hybrid storage drives into notebook computers will result in faster boot and resume times, as core system components can load faster off of the flash NAND storage. The use of flash memory is also claimed to result in higher reliability and improved drive lifespan due to the reduction of platter spin times. Best of all, these drives will fit in today's laptops, as they are designed as drop-in replacements of existing notebook form factor drives.
The first batch of hybrid hard drives to hit the market will support the ATA T13 Open Standard, and will able to write data in an idle state due to the flash memory. This means that their usage in laptops should lower power consumption and potentially save close to half an hour of laptop battery life over a full computing session, according to estimates from the Alliance. This is all meant to tie in with Windows Vista's ReadyDrive feature, which enables PCs running hybrid drives to take full advantage of their capabilities by optimizing drive reads and writes.
Although hybrid disks are currently being promoted as battery and drive life extenders for the mobile platform, we expect to see desktop PCs taking advantage of the improved hardware reliability and performance offered by hybrid drives in the future. While some of us may drool at the forthcoming 1TB hard drives, the real object of our lust (currently) is SanDisk's 32GB flash hard drive. Those performance numbers command respect
