backtop

Print E-mail del.icio.us 38 comment(s) - last by crystal clear.. on Mar 9 at 8:08 AM
Samsung releases its first hybrid hard drives

While Fujitsu may have snagged the headlines on Monday for its 7200RPM 160GB SATA/300 2.5" hard disk drive (HDD), Samsung is looking to make a few headlines of its own with the availability of the world's first hybrid HDDs. Samsung new MH80 Series hybrid HDDs will be available in capacities of 80GB, 120GB and 160GB.

Samsung new MH80 HDDs will be fully compatible with Windows Vista and will offer OneNAND Flash onboard in capacities of 128MB or 256MB. The onboard flash allows for up to 50% faster OS boots, quicker resume times and increases in battery life of up to 30 minutes.

"As a leader in both hard drive and flash memory technologies, Samsung brings to market a unique hybrid hard drive that is sure to revolutionize the notebook computing experience," said Albert Kim, National Sales Manager, Storage Systems for Samsung Semiconductor. "The MH80 hybrid hard drive provides the ideal solution for two major issues that notebook PC users continually face: faster boot and resume performance and extended battery life."

Samsung claims that the MH80 Series offers five times the reliability of traditional HDDS while consuming 70-90% less power.

Hopefully, Samsung's claims will pan out in real world testing. Internal testing by Lenovo engineers has shown that hybrid HDDs aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
Nice
By zephyrprime on 3/7/2007 3:30:19 PM , Rating: 5
Nice but they gotta put in a reasonable amount of flash like 1GB instead of the piddling 128-256MB they used. Come on. Flash is cheap. Samsung - do better!




RE: Nice
By VIAN on 3/7/2007 4:57:18 PM , Rating: 2
I would've expected at least 1GB as well. This article doesn't even say the price of these new drives either, but I doubt it's going to be cheap.


RE: Nice
By codeThug on 3/7/2007 6:16:11 PM , Rating: 3
They gotta dump their old stock somewhere.

Can't just have it hanging around the warehouse...


RE: Nice
By SquidianLoveGod on 3/7/2007 6:41:32 PM , Rating: 2
Its still early days yet, I wouldn't be surprised if 1gb showed up eventually.


RE: Nice
By TomZ on 3/7/2007 9:34:59 PM , Rating: 3
I'd guess the decision for 256MB was the "sweet spot" in terms of performance versus cost. After all, the HDD and laptop markets are highly competitive and cost-sensitive, so I'm sure that they had to be careful that the delta cost isn't too much.


RE: Nice
By kmmatney on 3/7/2007 10:44:13 PM , Rating: 2
Good point - HDDs are pretty dirt cheap already. Even adding a $10 flash chip could make the drive less competitive.


RE: Nice
By TomZ on 3/8/2007 9:09:48 AM , Rating: 3
I came across the Microsoft presentation that says that in their tests, for Vista 256MB is the optimum cache size:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b970...


Being a hybrid, I expected.....
By marvdmartian on 3/7/2007 3:16:50 PM , Rating: 5
When I heard they were making hybrid hard drives, I expected to hear that they ran on electricity most of the time, but had a teeny-tiny gasoline engine for a power boost, during heavy usage of the drive!

8000 GB/Gallon, baby!! ;)




RE: Being a hybrid, I expected.....
By Kougar on 3/7/2007 3:33:44 PM , Rating: 5
Oh, you must be confused with the new upcoming graphics cards. They will feature a hybrid mini 4-stroke E85 engine and lithium-ion battery for extra power assist when they require more power than the physical wall outlet will be able to handle. ;)


By S3anister on 3/8/2007 12:27:15 AM , Rating: 2
that, is the FUNNIEST thing i've heard all day. seriously.


By codeThug on 3/7/2007 6:18:04 PM , Rating: 3
:)

I'd mod you up, but i already posted.


Unanswered questions
By brystmar on 3/7/2007 3:05:46 PM , Rating: 2
When and where can I buy one, and how much will each model set me back?




RE: Unanswered questions
By RogueSpear on 3/7/2007 6:42:07 PM , Rating: 2
I have some questions too.

Would it be possible for the drive manufacturer or some third party to create a 2000/XP device driver so that Vista wouldn't be required to take advantage of these drives?


RE: Unanswered questions
By Flunk on 3/8/2007 4:19:51 PM , Rating: 2
You won't need special hardware these drives will have the same SATA or IDE interface as a normal drive. All of the cacheing is done in hardware.


RE: Unanswered questions
By Flunk on 3/8/2007 4:21:22 PM , Rating: 2
Oops, my post above should have said this:

You won't need special software/drivers these drives. They will have the same SATA or IDE interface as a normal drive. All of the cacheing is done in hardware.


RE: Unanswered questions
By TomZ on 3/8/2007 4:40:43 PM , Rating: 2
That's not really true. While the hardware interface is the same, a new ATA command set has been added for ATA-8 that allows the OS to manage the NV cache.

Therefore, you would need software running in your OS that knows about that functionality - support for it would not be automatic. AFAIK, Vista is the only OS that supports it, although I would imagine support could be added in other OSs.

More details: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b970...


RE: Unanswered questions
By typo101 on 3/8/2007 8:50:07 PM , Rating: 2
Then how will Vista's ReadyDrive manage the SSD? Is it just going to appear as a separate partition? I would like that because then I could think of a couple uses for a little sata solid state partition in Linux.


RE: Unanswered questions
By TomZ on 3/8/2007 11:20:49 PM , Rating: 2
Through new ATA commands - see my post above.


hybrid hard drive + /vs ready boost?
By nerdye on 3/7/2007 9:45:51 PM , Rating: 2
One of the curiosities I have when I first read this article is, how would this hard drive perform on a vista pc that already has 2 - 4 gb of speedy ram, and a 2 - 8 gb usb thumb-drive in use for ready boost mode? Obviously if we give platter based hard drives integrated 128mb - 256mb of nand memory it will speed up random access speeds of the hard drive, which is what ready boost does, but how about both of these technologies in conjunction? Will ready boost be less useful with such a hybrid hard drive to the point that we won't care about ready boost anymore (obviosly these hard drives will have to match ready boost's usb thumb drive capacity of 8+ gb to do so), and just buy a hybrid as all of us enthusiasts wait for an affordable 100 - 200gb desktop nand based flash hard drives to arrive to the market? I'm quite excited about alleviating our platter based hard drive bottlenecks to our bad ass pc systems!




RE: hybrid hard drive + /vs ready boost?
By TomZ on 3/7/2007 10:08:31 PM , Rating: 3
I think ReadyBoost is really intended to speed up application starts. But I personally don't spend a lot of time in a given day waiting for applications to start, so I kind of wonder about Microsoft's investment in that feature.


By nerdye on 3/7/2007 11:30:32 PM , Rating: 2
Yet you do wait for applications to start everyday, every time you restart windows you wait for it to boot up, which the hybrid drive speeds up in a very strong fashion, as does ready boost! So you argue that you don't reboot your OS all the time, yet you will scoff at the long OS boot times of yesteryear once equipped with the technology of tomorrow. Plus faster random access time of your hard drive is seriously going to eliminate bottlenecks of simple taks and make one feel like their pc is truly responsive beyond dual/quad-core offerings!


By Bladen on 3/8/2007 2:34:44 AM , Rating: 2
AFAIK ReadyBoost is limited to 4GB.


160 GB?
By vorgusa on 3/7/2007 3:28:27 PM , Rating: 2
Where is Desktop version. I would think this would be useful in desktops too, which should be able to get higher storage capacities.