14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung is already shipping their first hybrid hard drives. The MH80 series is now making its way to Samsung's "select OEM customers" and will be available at retailers near you shortly.
The hybrid HDDs were announced a couple of months ago, now arriving about one month later than originally planned. It was supposed to be launched at the same time with Windows Vista, but Samsung managed to keep its general promises to make the device available in the first quarter of this year.
The MH80 series features 2.5-inch hybrid hard drives (HHD), which include between 128 and 256 MB of flash memory. The entire range of HHD products has been optimized to work in conjunction with Windows Vista capable notebook PCs, combining a hard disk drive with OneNand flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software support. Thus, the drive's platters are idle 99 percent of the time, extending the overall reliability of the drive. With such options, the new HHDs are supposed to offer faster boot and resume times, as well as increased battery life when compared to traditional magnetic hard disk drives.
According to Samsung, the new hybrid drives reduce boot and resume times up to a 50%. The OneNAND flash memory is used to store frequently used files that are usually managed by the system RAM. The use of this technology leads to around 70-90% less power consumption than with traditional hard drives. Such power savings should translate into 20 to 30 minutes of additional battery time, depending on the notebook brand and battery type. Moreover, the new breed of hard drives should be operating at a lower temperature than regular HDDs, reducing the possibility of mechanical damage and drive failure.
Information about the price of the MH80 drives is not yet available.