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Hitachi-LG Debuts HyDrive, Optical Drive With SSD
MojoKid writes "A fairly new Hitachi-LG joint venture announced the world's first hybrid optical drive, called the HyDrive. This unique device is a notebook optical drive with an SSD built in. When you slide it into your machine and it connects via SATA 3Gbps, your computer recognizes not only a DVD burner / Blu-ray drive, but also a 32GB or 64GB SSD. This configuration allows you to have an SSD without taking up the single 2.5-inch storage slot within your laptop, so you could then have an optical drive, an SSD, and the standard hard drive as well. There are also a few nice tricks you can play in caching with the on-board SSD. Error-correction techniques can be employed that allowed a damaged disk to be be playable." The HyDrive will ship to OEMs in August; a smaller version usable in netbooks is planned for 2011. The Register has some more technical details and specs.
Obviously, it does. ;)
Related: http://www.serialata.org/technology/port_multipliers.asp
Yes.
Because Blu-Ray players require firmware updates.
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Read the article.
Reading has no wear effect on SSDs. Writing does, but it's a very high limit. Intel set the bar pretty high with the the X25-M, and it was something like 20GB per day, every day for 5 years the enterprise version is even higher, since it uses SLC instead of MLC flash memory). I haven't tracked the latest releases from other brands, but I imagine they are pretty similar.
An optical drive is barely noticeable on a 3 Gbps SATA connection. Unless the SSD is really saturating the interface on its own, that won't be a problem. And that's only if you do tons of other stuff, if you just burn something the SSD will be idle 95% of the time.
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"No retail sales are planned, but these are expected to increase the price of laptops around $200,"
So they don't give you OEM prices, but if consumer prices are 200$ then OEM prices should be around (normal prices for an optical drive) + X (where X is 200 - standard markup).