Friday, March 9th 2007

Samsung first to ship hybrid hard drives

Samsung has started shipping hybrid hard drives with 128 or 256MB flash memory to OEMs. The drive is available in 80, 120 or 160GB with 5400RPM and SATA interface. It should be available to retail shortly. These drives will become mandatory for Vista certification in June 2007, so expect all the major companies to feature such hard drives in their notebooks soon.
Source: Heise (German)
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8 Comments on Samsung first to ship hybrid hard drives

#1
WarEagleAU
Bird of Prey
Ok..a slow spin rate but it has flash memory. Does that make up for the slower spin speed?
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#2
Saurian
WarEagleAUOk..a slow spin rate but it has flash memory. Does that make up for the slower spin speed?
Check out the webpage. These are 2.5" drives for laptops. 5400 rpm drives are basically "par" for the laptop field, as 7200 is "par" for the desktop field.

It's a new technology? Why release it on 7200 rpm spindle speed? They can milk the CRAP out of this for money being the first one to market. Later they'll release the 7200 rpm and milk it for cash too.
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#3
Benpi
Can someone please explain the flash memory part of this to me? From what I understand, my iPod nano uses flash memory, and it is much slower read/write than my HDD. What's the point if it's slower than the disk?
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#4
Wile E
Power User
BenpiCan someone please explain the flash memory part of this to me? From what I understand, my iPod nano uses flash memory, and it is much slower read/write than my HDD. What's the point if it's slower than the disk?
I think the main goal is for an "instant on" effect.
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#5
tkpenalty
Wile EI think the main goal is for an "instant on" effect.
Yeah. 16MB Cache = 256MB Flash memory/Cache. 7200RPM HDDs are already fast so it doesnt need that much cache.
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#6
AshenSugar
the extra cache is also from what i have read about these drives used to store the MBR and such, so the drive dosnt have to check the MBR with slow seek/read times, properly done a 4200 or 5400rpm hybrid drive could be as fast as a 7200 or possably even 10k rpm drive, alot of the time on hdd is spent seeking files/parts of files if thats reduced by using flashmemory to store that information and to cache the most used data(think prefetch) you can DRASTICLY improve seek times and thus imrove constant trasnfer rate on top of reducing seek times.

smart idea, if done properly it could give us steller results on fullsize drives :)
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#7
wazzledoozle
I dont like the idea of flash memory attached to a HD. Hard drives last a long time, but flash memory wears after after so many thousands or millions of writes.
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#8
AshenSugar
im sure the flash memory is used as a cache only not the SOLE data older, so if the flash died im sure they would still have a readable drive, just one they need to backup and replace, thats how the test drives i have read about and seen work, the flash is used to cache stuff like the boot files and MFT and for faster reading/seeking
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