The hard disk drive manufacturing industry recently reached a point where storage capabilities are plentiful and few users could ask for more while most of the time the very same industry has big trouble accelerating the access speed of the drives in order to improve response times and overall system performance.

One possible solution would be to completely dump the traditional hard disk drive design and switch over to the solid state drive design that should offer some performance boost while keeping the energy footprint at a lower level. Unfortunately, the SSD expansion will not come too soon as those drives are expensive and their storage capabilities are severely limited when compared to the hard disk drives.

So, most hardware manufacturers are looking for the middle end solution of combining the traditional hard disk drive design with a big flash memory that should act as a buffer and since the flash is a non-volatile memory it could also be used to store all files needed at boot time by a computer in order to make it start faster.

Seagate may be very well soon launch such a hybrid hard disk drive, the Momentus 5400 PSD, which is expected to come in the 2.5 inch small form factor that is currently used for laptops and other mobile computing devices. The Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid hard disk drive will combine traditional storage technologies with the presence of a big cache memory based on a flash solution. According to the news site tg daily, the manufacturing company promises "faster boot-up and performance when running Windows Vista in laptop PCs", for computer systems using the new storage device.

At this moment technical specification and pricing information are not yet available, but Seagate is expected to launch a new press release within a couple of weeks with more details. The certain thing is that these new hybrid hard disk drives could make computer systems a little bit faster while not being such a big energy consumer like the traditional design.