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...

"error correction"

[Speare]

Error correction techniques can be employed that allowed a damaged disk to be be playable.

And since it's a Blu-Ray device, always remember that "DRM techniques can be employed that allow a valid purchased commodity disk to become unplayable."

Re:"error correction"

[Pojut]

Because Blu-Ray players require firmware updates.

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...

[Ephemeriis]

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.

What they've created here is a piece of hardware. Exactly how it gets used will largely be determined by software. There is absolutely no reason it could not be used in the way you envision. Maybe Hitachi doesn't plan to implement anything like this... But that wouldn't stop some other manufacturer from developing what you suggest. Or you could write your own software to do it.

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.

Space is generally at a premium in laptops. If you can cram an SSD and an optical drive into the same space, you no longer need room for that 2.5"/3.5" laptop HDD/SSD. You can use that space for additional storage... Or you could fit in a bit of bulkier hardware on the motherboard... Or bigger speakers... Or a larger battery... Or better cooling...

As if USB slots are hard to come by or laptops lack SSD/MMC card slots?

Both of which are poor replacements for your internal/primary storage device.

Re:one SATA port, two devices?

[ThoughtMonster]

Obviously, it does. ;)

Related: http://www.serialata.org/technology/port_multipliers.asp

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?

Re:Bus bottleneck?

[Kjella]

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.

optical drive failure?

[LordKronos]

Over the years, if I've had 1 component fail more often than hard drives, it would probably have to be optical drives. I just cannot see tying my SSD to an optical drive.

Re:optical drive failure?

[Hurricane78]

I can not see why I would need a optical drive at all anymore...
The OS installs from an USB stick. And the rest goes over the network.
Optical drives are the new floppies. Except that in this case, some anachronistic companies think they can put stuff on them, and actually sell them. Lol. Sell data. Now that’s just silly...

Re:Limited Life of SSDs?

[LordKronos]

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.

Re:Limited Life of SSDs?

[Hurricane78]

Bullshit. They can state all they want. But until those 5 years have passed, and we have actual data on a significant amount of SSDs, it’s all just wild guesswork right out of the marketing department.

Oh, and others are not pretty similar, but much much worse. You know that, because you deliberately picked Intel. The only manufacturer to have the balls to make up numbers that are in the acceptable range. (But they are still made up. Unless they got a time machine.)