Samsung and Microsoft introduce hybrid hard drive (HHD)

2005-04-27 08:25:02

So here’s the scoop: Microsoft and Samsung at WinHEC introduced their new HHD (hybrid hard drive), designed for use in the next generation of Windows (which we all know as Longhorn). So how’s it work? It’s outfitted with a 1Gbit NAND flash buffer (instead of the usual 8-32MB buffer of volatile memory), and it only spins up the platters and writes to the drive when its good n’ full. If nothing else, this kind of system could be great for conserving juice in laptops by reducing the amount of power-hungry spin-time on the drives; they’re also claiming significant speed increases, especially when boot-time data is written to the flash buffer, but unless they’ve got some tricky trick up their sleeves it’s going to be hard to use that buffer to predictively increase the read speed. Thus, we must continue another year of holding our collective breath for fully solid state hard drives.