Samsung Ships Hybrid Hard Drives

writertype writes "ExtremeTech reports that Samsung has become the first company to begin shipping hybrid hard drives as discussed last fall on Slashdot. (Some photos here.) Unfortunately, there's no word yet (beyond 'soon') on when retail shipments will begin, or when (or if) 3.5-inch models will be available. Note that these hybrid drives are different than the ReadyBoost USB flash drives optimized for Vista; hybrid drives contain a smaller amount of flash, and work as a write cache for your notebook drive, extending battery life."

Comments

Re:well

[NMerriam]

Isnt flash only good for ~30,000 writes?

The have limited cycles per sector, but the drives automagically allocate writes over the least-used sectors. In practice, a modern flash drive should have at least the same lifespan as a spinning disk if not longer.

Re:well

[Jaseoldboss]

PRAM has the properties you describe. Although it isn't a type of Flash memory so I doubt it's the one present in hybrid drives.

Re:well

[Nasarius]

Linux must get full support for NTFS.

*tap tap* ntfs-3g -- I'm using it now, and it's performing nicely even under pretty heavy BitTorrent load. ntfs.fsck still needs to be written, but the situation is now vastly better than it was less than a year ago.

Re:What I really want to know is...

[Dan Ost]

The flash in the hybrid drives won't be used as that kind of cache (you're thinking of the Vista's ReadyBoost).

This flash will be a write cache for the hard drive so that the hard drive doesn't need to spin up as often (this will potentially enhance your battery life). As you make changes to your data, it will be written to the cache and then flushed to the drive (a) when the cache is full or (b) when the drive is spun up for some other reason (a read, for example). Presumably, if the drive is already spun up, the flash won't be used at all and data will go straight to the disk.