While Samsung may be bragging about its 30GB Flash-SSD which
offers better battery life and no noise compared to traditional hard drives,
Seagate is taking a more modest approach. The company has announced its first
hybrid 160GB hard drive with an additional 256MB of non-volatile cache, the
Momentus 5400 PSD.
The large cache allows for faster booting and resume, lower
power consumption, greater reliability and higher drive performance due to the
loading of system files into the 256MB cache. Seagate is also applying
perpendicular recording technology to the 5400RPM hard drive to achieve its
large capacity and greater read/write speeds.
The hybrid drives will be fully supported by the oft-delayed Windows Vista
operating system thanks to what Microsoft calls “ReadyDrive”
technology. "Microsoft is pleased
to be working with Seagate on the next generation of notebook disc drives. Seagate's
new notebook disc drives will be able to take advantage of breakthrough
features in Windows Vista that will benefit customers by delivering faster boot
times and longer battery life," said Mike Sievert, corporate vice president
of Windows Client Marketing for Microsoft.
ReadyDrive basically takes full advantage of 256MB of cache
when performing system operations – something that Windows XP won’t have the
ability to do. Bottom line, if you’re looking to get a hybrid hard drive in the
future, don’t bother running it on Windows XP.
