If any of you read PC Magazine, as I do, you know who John C Dvorak is. If not, well, he's kind of a big name in the PC industry. Every issue, he has two seperate columns in PC magazine, along with several other publications, and his own blog. Anyway, for the last several months, one of his biggest gripes with the industry has been the lack of what are called Hybrid Hard Drives (HHD's for short). HHD's utilize flash memory for the disk write cache, instead of a small RAM chip, like standard HDD's (Hard Disk Drive)....
The disk write cache holds data that is frequently accessed from the HDD by the system RAM, so that data can be accessed quicker than reading it straight from the HDD. Standard HDD's have caches of 2MB, 8MB, 16MB, or 32MB with some of the newer 750GB to 1TB (TerraByte or 1,024 GigaBytes) drives. HHD's on the other hand use flash memory which is cheaper to produce in larger capacities. A HHD could have a write cache of 128MB, 256MB or even up to 1GB. This would reduce the amount of time the hard drive would have to be spinning to seek data, as it would all be written to the cache at once, and the hard drive could be in an idle state for longer amounts of time, decreasing wear on the drive, and decreasing power consumption. Unfortunately, these HHD's are only supported in Windows Vista by the Vista ReadyDrive feature. The good news is this could potentially increase battery life in a laptop by as much as 30 minutes. For desktop users, it should still mean better hard drive performance, as data would be retrieved directly from the cache , and the disk platters themselves would have to be accessed less often .
CMS products is taking pre-orders right now for the first of these HHD's, produced by Samsung. This version of the Samsung MH80 is a 2.5", 160GB drive carrying a price tag of $299. The MH80 has 256MB of flash cache. Samsung has also announced 80GB and 160GB versions of the MH80 drive. Drives are expected to ship no later than July 2nd.
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