Something most enthusiasts are waiting for are the first commerical flash harddrives that will offer superfast access times, high transfer speeds and be completely noise-free. Poor storage capacity and high prices are the two biggest problems today with Solid State harddrives, which are still pretty far into the future though. Samsung and Microsoft have been workig together to create an alternative for the 100% flash drives for some time now and about a year ago we reported for the first time about the hybrid harddrives they were planning. Simply a mechanical harddrive that comes with a decent amount of integrated flash memory. Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD) is the name of the concept and Samsung ie expected to reveal the potential of this technology together with Microsoft later this month.
It’s at the annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference that Samsung and Microsoft will display the HHD model together with Windows ReadyDrive Feature. The latter is a software that is specially designed for the hybrid harddrive’s technology to singificantly decrease the boot time with computer with Windows Vista installed. This is done by storing the most important files in the flash memory and therefore be able to access them faster.
“The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC,.”
The version of the HHD disk Samsung will display on May 24 will be ready for launch, but then it will be specificly optimized for Windows Vista and its software support, which means that we should not expect to see it anytime soon.
“The HHD and ReadyDrive technologies are expected to perform a crucial role in Windows Vista by improving both performance and credibility. Windows Vista will leverage the feature to speed up the system and elongate battery life, while making it less vulnerable to external shock.”
Samsung’s HHD concept seems like a very interesting first step until the first commercial Solid State harddrives appear and it is going to be very interesting to see what kind of performance you can gain from the HHD technology.
Source: Korea Times
