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.

Comments

Cost?

[IDK]

What's the cost? Every feature in the world for infinite cost doesn't make a good product...

Does it make DRM a little less annoying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this save us the trouble of digging up a DVD just to play a game that is already installed?

Darn...

[Manip]

When I first read the title my mind thought about a really kick butt cache drive that allowed you to throw in a DVD/Blu-Ray disc, read in its entire contents in one pass - saving power, increasing performance, and that annoying buzzing sound. Shame what they've created here is nothing remotely that interesting or creative. In fact I'd even go as far as to say the Optical / SSD combo drive is a useless concept on the face of it. As if USB slots are hard to come by or laptops lack SSD/MMC card slots?

Re:Darn...

[Animaether]

When I first read the title my mind thought about a really kick butt cache drive that allowed you to throw in a DVD/Blu-Ray disc, read in its entire contents in one pass - saving power, increasing performance, and that annoying buzzing sound.

And have their Blu-Ray license revoked; the licensing party would be none to please with essentially making a copy of the blu-ray onto the SSD.

Of course you, yourself, would still be free to do exactly this using any one of the blu-ray ripping tools.

In fact I'd even go as far as to say the Optical / SSD combo drive is a useless concept on the face of it.

They already give the main advantage 'on the face of it' in the story: you don't end up taking up one of (and often, the only), 2.5" HDD slot in your notebook.

As if USB slots are hard to come by

No, but when's the last time you opened up a notebook to connect an SSD to a hidden internal USB connector and still get the case closing properly?
If you're referring to the connectors for external devices - I'm pretty sure part of the point was to -eliminate- the need for an external device.

Finally, USB2 is nowhere near as fast as SATA3. USB3 gets closer, but it still leaves you with the downside above.

or laptops lack SSD/MMC card slots?

given their a slow interface, I'm not sure why you're even trying to compare them to an SSD.

If I were in the market for a laptop right now and my options included...
- Blu-Ray, HDD 750GB
- Blu-Ray, SSD 64GB
- Blu-Ray+SSD 64GB, HDD 750GB ...I'd say it'd be a pretty easy choice if pricing is kept competitive.

Of course there's downsides as well.. such as, presumably, not being able to upgrade the SSD portion easily.
( aside from pricepoint / performance / etc. which remain to be seen )

Bus bottleneck?

[VincenzoRomano]

As there will only be a single SATA interface, it will be shared between the SSD and the optical drive.
What if you need to burn data that's on the SSD?

Limited Life of SSDs?

[ATestR]

I'm not going to try to track it down now, but I seem to remember reading about SSDs having a limited life time. High read/right operations would effectively use that lifetime up more quickly. This doesn't bother me too much with a normal memory key, since the one I get this year will last at least a couple of years, and by obsolete in a couple of months anyway. But an internal SSD? What do you do if/when that sucker dies? A key I can toss, and buy a new one. An internal chip will require surgery on my laptop.