So where are the hybrid hard drives?

Last year I heard a lot of buzz about the new hybrid hard drives soon becoming available, and the power consumption benefits they would provide for notebooks. Samsung said they would launch the first model in January. January has come and gone, and I can't seem to find any new information on them. When I try Google all I get is old stories from the middle of last year when hybrid drives were first announced.

So what's the deal? Was it released or delayed? How much? Worth getting?

 

i'm too intersted in this story - where are they??

 

I'm going to bump this one time only. Does anyone know?

 

bumpity bump.

 

This is something I would like to know as well. Hopefully someone on here knows. I was thinking about buying some 10k HDs in the future, but I rather wait for hybird.

 

what is a hybrid hard drive?

 

well it is a bit too early for now and still in development. Some new hard drive using flash technology is comming out someday but you're gonna expected for around 500$ for that kind of drive i'd say wait for few more years for us

I don't think it's worth getting those drive since its almost the same cost of a laptop

 

you can read about the one seagate is making

They already sold some, i mean a few months ago they were on tiger direct.

They were 100 gb 5400 rpms. They cost like 50$ more than what that drive went for back then non hybrid. something like 160$
You have to consider that all they are are a 100 gb hd with a flash drive of something like 1 gb or so in them
You can go to seagate.com and read about them.

I dont know what happened and why its been so long to reach mass market.

There is no generic speed boost to this technology. What it will do is boost boot up time. Its regular hd benchmarks should be about the same
Also, although it should get better battery life I dont see any huge difference.
Let me try to explain. If you understand vista readyboost you understand the hybrid hard drive.
Only, the flash in the hybrid is connected by the sata channel not usb 2.0 so it should be real fast startup. Not as fast as a solid state drive but faster than vista readyboost.

Ok and when santa rosa comes out, the flash drive is going to be in the motherboard in the sata channel.

Only think about this, you cant use them both. So this hybrid hard drive isnt going to be a big seller to the people who buy santa rosa computers, its going to be for older hardware to use the feature.

 

Hybrid hard drives are the proposed stepping stone to a full Solid State HD, which is at least a year away before becoming a standard option.

Hybrid HDs have a bit of SSD memory to help queue up some info, reduced spinning time, and cache HD info. The main portion of the HD is still done with magnetic platters.

SSD is completely NAND flash, and has no moving parts. It is THE wave of the future.

 

ssd is like SD cards and USB thumbdrives right? how do the "solid state" drives that will be coming in the future work?

 

Same way the small thumbdrives work, only these ones will be huge in storage capacity in comparison...