After bragging about the technology for many years now, the very first 2.5″ Samsung Hybrid Drive is now on it’s way to various manufacturers.
But what is a hybrid hard drive? In basic terms, it’s a merge between a normal Hard Drive and a Flash Drive, with the intention of reducing the number of times the Hard Drive disk has to spin. This is done by saving the temporary data that would normally be saved somewhere in the disk onto the flash memory, and when that memory is nearly full, the disk would start spinning in order to “empty” the flash.
The pro’s of this new type of Hard Drive, is that it allows you to cut the power consumption a bit (Samsung claims that it will add an average of 30 minutes to a laptop’s battery life), and in some cases, will increase the performance, like, for example, during the boot of Windows Vista (which will supposedly load in half the time with these disks).
Instead of approaching the market with Hybrid drives, it would have been a wiser choice to work on SSD (solid state drives) – at least that’s what everyone else is moving toward.