14 DAY TRIAL // Hybrid hard disk drives were something of an inevitability, due to how well SSDs have been doing even despite their obvious disadvantage, price-wise. Western Digital is now ready to say how the world is responding to them.
A hybrid hard disk is a normal HDD with some NAND Flash memory integrated into it. The much faster NAND stores frequently used files, including system files, maintaining a good system performance.
They aren't really many yet though. Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba have been doing their best to keep the regular HDD market floating in reasonably calm waters.
They can't really lag much longer though. WD expects 5mm-thick (0.19 inches) and 7mm (0.27 inches) units to be selling liberally in the second half of 2013.
“All major PC OEMs have shown strong interest in our 5mm and 7mm hybrid designs as an alternative to solid-state and dual drive configurations,” said Stephen Milligan, the president of WD, during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts.
Western Digital revealed 5mm drives back in September and has started manufacturing them this very year (2012).
Since then, Samsung has created a motor that will let it make 7mm units of its own, with 500 GB capacity. Granted, it has only mentioned normal HDDs in that form factor, but adapting the concept for hybrid models should be simple enough.
“[We are] providing engineering samples to our customers. In the first half of calendar 2013, we will be supplying call samples and gearing up for volume kind of activity the back half of 2013,” said Mr. Milligan.
Alas, even with manufacturing having already started, the general populace still has to wait for several months before hybrid HDDs become an option in ultrabooks and notebooks. We imaging hybrid units will come in portable packages as well, in which case Windows To Go will probably be supported (the whole OS can be run from a USB storage drive on any Windows 8 device).