The last time I saw a discussion on these flash/magnetic "Hybrid" drives, the primary motivation for their design was power savings - performance enhancement was sort of a bonus. The focus wasn't in improving 'Hibernation' since that really isn't a power-saving feature (IMO) - it's more like a bookmark function. On the other hand, if the cache was sufficient to allow the laptop to "Wake" from "Sleep" mode without having to spin the disk - that would probably be a significant power savings.
Mainly, though - the power savings was realized in the number of times the laptop was able to extract some oddball bit of hard-disk information - say a page from cache or a 2k cached web page - without having to spin up the disk for it. I also seem to recall that the hybrid disks included some additional ATA commands that would allow updating OS drivers to manage that cache more intelligently - although that concept may be a figment of my mediocre memory.
Anyway - that's what I recall from a few months ago in 'Popular Science' or some other such sort of thing.
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The last time I saw a discussion on these flash/magnetic "Hybrid" drives, the primary motivation for their design was power savings - performance enhancement was sort of a bonus. The focus wasn't in improving 'Hibernation' since that really isn't a power-saving feature (IMO) - it's more like a bookmark function. On the other hand, if the cache was sufficient to allow the laptop to "Wake" from "Sleep" mode without having to spin the disk - that would probably be a significant power savings.
Mainly, though - the power savings was realized in the number of times the laptop was able to extract some oddball bit of hard-disk information - say a page from cache or a 2k cached web page - without having to spin up the disk for it. I also seem to recall that the hybrid disks included some additional ATA commands that would allow updating OS drivers to manage that cache more intelligently - although that concept may be a figment of my mediocre memory.
Anyway - that's what I recall from a few months ago in 'Popular Science' or some other such sort of thing.