Thursday, May 18, 2006
PC World: Samsung Readies Hybrid Hard Drive
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 04:02 PM
"Samsung Electronics plans to unveil next week a prototype hard drive that can improve system performance and extend battery life on laptops, the company said today. The drive is called a hybrid hard drive, because it includes flash memory storage space in addition to the usual magnetic disk storage. The flash memory acts as a storage buffer, holding data until it's full and only then writing the data to the disk. This cuts down on the amount of disk activity--typically the new drive spins only a few seconds every 10 or 20 minutes--which means battery life is extended by between 8 percent and 10 percent, according to Samsung's measurements."
Faster performance, better battery life? Sign me up - though since it requires Vista, it will be slow to roll out. I'm a bit surprised at the small amount of Flash (128MB and 256MB) though - I would have thought with prices being what they are, 512MB or 1GB would have been the sweet spot.
Faster performance, better battery life? Sign me up - though since it requires Vista, it will be slow to roll out. I'm a bit surprised at the small amount of Flash (128MB and 256MB) though - I would have thought with prices being what they are, 512MB or 1GB would have been the sweet spot.
