Laptop hybrid hard drives

I just ordered a new HP DV5000t. The hard drive options were limited to 5400 rpm. I have read all of the discussions on 5400 vs 7200, but this is a different question. Are there any hybrid hard drives available for laptops, yet? I know that Vista is written to optimize the use of Hybrid drives (and may even REQUIRE hybrid drives for laptops), but will XP recognize, and take advantage of these drives currently, if they are available? Is there a considerable performance increase? Battery life increase? Heat increase (or reduction)? Thanks...

 

There are no "hybrid" hard drives u speak of. At least not available to consumers. There are some sort of different hard drive, either flash or some other technology, but its rare (aka not in any store) and very very expensive. I suggest u stick to regular hard drives and worry about future tech when it's introduced.

And no, vista will not require hybrid drives, because vista is 6 months away and these are not even close to being out to the public, so by requiring these drives will force 99.9999% of pple to not be able to use vista. Im no economist, but I think that spells trouble to microsoft and their sales.

 

Hybrid drives are in production at Samsung and Hitachi. They should be making consumer release by Christmas or for Vista's release in early-mid next year.

A hybrid drive uses an extraordinarily large cache of solid-state memory to load programs MUCH faster than standard. Basically I want to say hybrid drives will have about 5-20gb of cache vs 8-16mb like current drives. This will revolutionize seek times, and wil be an excellent solution for both mobile and desktop users. Until solid-state memory drops significantly in price, these hybrid drives should be king...that is, once they finally hit the consumer market.

EDIT: Until current technology is completely phased out, no Operating System will exclude it (not even Vista).

 

I refrence this article regarding Mobile Vista and Hybrid drives:
http://theinquirer.net/?article=32404

Maybe this is a joke, I'm not sure...

 

Yeah, pretty sure thats a BS page... and coming from a page called the Inquirer... what else can you expect?

 

The Inquirer is much different from the Enquirer The Inq is somewhat respected among tech news sites, if a bit chicken-little in their articles. But what that article probably means is that manufacturers won't get the "Designed for Windows Vista" logo on their machines if their laptops don't include the hybrid drives. Microsoft wants you to think it's their software making things faster, not just advances in hardware.

 

Ah yeah, but still... too close to Enquirer for me. I doubt they'd even need hybrids for "designed for vista" stickers. However, I can see needing dual core for getting the logo mark.

 

If that's really a requirement, then MS know that Vista won't be done by Q1 '07

 

I found this at microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/hwrequirements.mspx

From what I understood from the included documents, the requirements are for systems that support hybrid disks. ie if a notebook supports hybrids, then there are requirements to be met that guarantee that vista can use the disk. BUT if the notebook doesn't support it, then the whole section doesn't apply.
Hybrid disks are listed under the special storage section, not the general.

I don't know, you read it yourself and see if you understand it differently.