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Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the under-the-hood dept.

Erica Campbell writes "Samsung is preparing to release a new Flash memory-assisted computer hard drive that boasts improved performance, reduced energy consumption, a faster boot time, and better reliability. The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it."

5 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. So awesome by Warbringer87 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that buffer is fucking huge. Laptops awesome, wonder when they'll actually work on a regular size one though. Then again, seeing as it's gonna be the first batch out the door, potential issues from what is practically a new drive type will scare me, and my wallet away.

  2. Re:Ship time by VitrosChemistryAnaly · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Wonderful idea for the manufacturers, flash drives only get so many [wikipedia.org] read/write cycles before they go T.U. Not so good for the consumers.
    What would be neat is if you could swap out flash drives in the event of a failure. Or upgrade the flash drive capacity. I'd be more interested in that than a permanently integrated flash drive. You're correct to be skeptical of its lifespan.
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    "It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
  3. Re:Ship time by eebra82 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You're mentioning aged technology. Flash mems have improved since then, plus, it's slightly different technology.

    Additionally, do you honestly think any company (Intel, Microsoft, Samsung) would back this technology if it was limited to R/W cycles in thousands?

    Last but not least, such hard drives will also store data which stays more consistent than regular data. It could store vital boot files, files to your most common applications, etcetera. In other words, files that do not change much over time. It's not like you're going to save your most frequently used documents to this section of the drive.

    So to sum things up, you will not have to worry about the SSD part of the drive. It will probably even outlast the mechanical part of the drive.

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    Full Tilt
  4. Investing in flash technology by kingkade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Flash technology seems promising and looks poised to take over devices that would be better off using solid state components (laptops, etc) that traditionally don't. I've wanted to invest in Samsung and flash technology in general. Samsung seems to only be on the Asian markets, is this so? Does anyone know of and good mutual funds/ETFs that allows one to invest in this specific tech sector?

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    why run from Vincenzo?
  5. Re:SuperFetch uncool... by realmolo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would you want your RAM to be unused? Unused RAM is useless RAM. Seriously.

    I'm sure that Vista is smart enough to free up the RAM that SuperFetch is using if it could be better used for something else. It's really nothing more than a more pro-active version of the disc-cacheing that every operating system already uses.