Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD) released to OEMs

Samsung and Microsoft have been touting the wonders of the hybrid hard drive since 2005 -- in other words "forever" on a technology timeline. Now, finally, Samsung is pushing their ReadyDrive-friendly HHD out the door to OEMs starting today. The MH80 series of 2.5-inch drives build in 128/256MB of NAND flash to augment the traditional 80/120/160GB of traditional hard disk capacity. Samsung claims that their new HHDs offer 5x the reliability of conventional hard disks while shaving up to 50% off Windows Vista boot times and cutting power consumption by 70-90% to deliver about 30-minutes more laptop run-time off battery. Sweet. No prices given, but look for 'em to hit higher-end laptops as relatively costly (no prices given) options any day now. With any luck, the higher cost will be offset by more bang-for-the-buck.

[racefanaz @ May 27th 2009 1:36AM]

i have a samsung hybrid which was the first mod i made to my vista dell laptop, although it did not cure all vistas woes its boot time is amazing, from completely shut off, plugged in or battery its FULLY operational, fully loaded and usable in about 15 seconds, my xp3 laptop takes around 3 minutes to fully load everything up to speed

[Zadillo @ Mar 7th 2007 7:19AM]

OK, so I have to admit I haven't been following this tech too closely. Will these be able to be placed in current laptops, allowing them to take advantage of the performance and battery life improvements, or will these require other hardware in new laptops only to take advantage of the functionality?

[Vince @ Mar 7th 2007 8:00AM]

So, is this really better than a SSD? I guess it all comes down to cost per gig, but I would go for SSD if I were really worried about power consumption, boot time and that oh-so-hard to pin down high-tech style.

[F1ghter @ Mar 7th 2007 8:10AM]

It isn't 'better' than SSD, per say. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. SSD is more reliable, faster, and consumes less power, while hybrids are cheaper and offer more storage. At the moment, only 32GB and 64GB SSDs are in the works, at prices nearing a thousand dollars for the smaller.

[Ihar `Philips` Filipau @ Mar 7th 2007 8:19AM]

Sweet. Will try to get the thing for my next laptop. No need for guesses where /var would be mounted ;-)

[CB @ Mar 7th 2007 8:57AM]

Presumably only Vista would take advantage of this?

Could an XP machine have it's boot time upped and have improved seek?

[Adam @ Mar 7th 2007 10:37AM]

If the logic is done in the firmware, this should be O/S (software) agnostic, meaning it speeds up all access to the drive, not just from Vista.

[Tremelune @ Mar 7th 2007 2:14PM]

I thought the average power consumption of laptop drives was about 2-3W...Removing them from the equation completely would probably save you a maximum of about 10 minutes for most laptops...

[orskier @ Mar 7th 2007 6:39PM]

The logic actually comes from the OS in the form of new T13 (extension of SATA) commands. This puts a dependency on the OS. Other OS's will not work with these drives unless they implement these commands.

Yes, reducing the power consumption of of a drive is a small portion of the overall platform power, the fact that a workload can finish sooner when reading/writing to/from faster memory (NAND in this case) allows the entire system to be idle longer, thus saving substantially more than just disk power.