Where are the hybrid harddisks?

Santa Rosa is out. Ultraportables are being sold with pure SSD. Why are there no hybrid harddisks in any of the new models? Did they turn out to be useless? In march there was a report that Samsung is shipping the first OEM drivers. Has anybody seen any of them?

 

I think now that Santa Rosa has been released they will not take too long to release the laptops equipped with hybrid drives.

 

i think theyll be in ultraportables only for the moment. the largest drive i think is only 32GB, i doubt many laptop owners will want to spend top dollars on 32GB when they can get 160 or 200 for the same price. you may see them in high performance models too, with them offering 2 drives in a laptop, an SSD for the OS and a high capacity data drive for storage.

 

You're thinking of SSD's I think, in terms of the largest capacity being 32GB.

Hybrid HD's are the ones that are still like normal hard drives (with the same sort of capacity as you see in normal hard drives), combined with some Flash memory as well.

 

oh oops hehe

well just how much flash memory will they put there? intel does have turbo memory to use for Vista's readyboost, so what use would hybrids have?

 

The Samsung FlashON series are the products you are looking for.

Google gives me a German site which lists them, but no price yet.

Maybe another month or two.

John

 

They don't need much I think.........as the Samsung drives John Ratsey posted show, they only need like 256 megs of onboard NAND flash for the hybrid HD to do its job. But still much better than the typical cache you have on a hard drive right now (8 or 16 megs).

The purpose of the hybrid hard drives is more for caching, etc....... not the same as Intel Turbo Memory.

 

Yes what I read and understood so far is that there are 3 kinds of flash that they are planing to use.

Vista controls 2.

Readyboost: which works with USB sticks and SD-cards and so on. It speeds up the access time but it is not used for booting but only after windows has started. The files are not reused after reboots.

Readdriver: This used to be called Superfetch and uses the Intel Turbo Memory which used to be called Robson and there are some other companies that are planing to make express card or MiniPci-e devices for it. It works the same as Readyboost only that it can be used for speeding up booting as well. I think it is detected by the Bios or something like that. The OS knows that the device is always there (USB sticks used in readyboost can be removed) and uses the files for booting.

The 3rd is hybrid disk.

Some reports say that the flash in the hard disks work with readydrive but others say that it has its own OS independent managment. What I am hoping for is that hybrid disks dont speed up the access but the flash is used as a hard disk cache to limit disk activity and power consumption.

 

As far as I know that is how they work and their purpose (limit disk activity and power consumption). I don't think overall speed of access would be all that different.

 

I just saw on the Zepto Germany site that they are selling a 120GB Samsung hybrid for 29€ extra compared to the normal 120Gb Samsung HDD. But it says delivery with in 14 days.

 

I've just bought a UK computer magazine ( PC Plus) which has a very brief review of the Samsung HM16HJI hybrid HDD. This means that samples have been around for a month or two.

The review wasn't very positive about the benefits but didn't look at the power saving aspect. Some benchmark test results were:

HD Tach
Avg Read 36.5MB/s
Access time 17.6ms

Sandra
Seqential read/write 43 / 44MB/s
Random read /write 29 / 33MB/s

PCMark 05
XP Startup 5.8MB/s
App load 4.5MB/s
General use 3.8MB/s

The same review looked at a Samsung 32GB SSD. That was giving higher scores for all tests, between about 30% and 200% faster (except the 0.2ms access time which is in a completely different league).

My interest in this hardware would be for the potential extension to battery life.

John