Hitachi is yet another harddrive manufacturer that has realized the potential of using memory chips instead of mechanics and harddrive platters inside its hardrives. The alternatives available today are DRAM, which is very fast but can’t store data without power, and flash memory, which is slow but can store data without power. To bypass these two problems Hitachi has used both memory technologies, it is namely working on a memory harddrive to store the data in DRAM and then send it on to the NAND Flash memory in the same unit.
The NAND Flash memory will also be considerably faster than what we’ve seen on the market so far. Instead of transfer rates at about 33MB/s Hitachi has managed to triple that to almost 100MB/s, which sounds almost too good to be true. Hitachi is not expected to launch its combined DRAM/NAND harddrive for another year and then costing about $1,100 for 32GB. The harddrives will not be for the retail market either, but we’ just have to wait and see if it will be able to live up to the expectations.
