'HyDrive' Hybrid SSD/ODD Now Official Discussion

Hitachi and LG have officially announced the HyDrive, an optical drive/solid state disk (OD/SSD) combo unit for notebook computers.

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Seems like an odd pairing especially with how fast some people go thru optical drives.

 

What do you mean? I have never had the notebook optical drive die on me ... in fact I rarely use it, mostly when installing applications & reinstalling the notebook.

In the days of digital downloads and digital distribution, I think it is a very good idea to have such a dual function device. It does not take up th slot for either of these functionalities, rather provides them both at the same time.

Of course ultraportables without an optical drive cannot make use of this.

 

Its an interesting concept to say the least. The optical drive is so rarely used unless gaming (and with Downloadable games now thats falling by the way side) so it might be a very reasonable new componet.

My only issue will be if i have to set the boot order to CD/DVD drive to use the SSD as an OS drive... what happens if i forgot to take a DVD out of the optical drive part of it.

Or if i need to reinstall an OS can it reformat itself and load an OS to itself...

Just a little worried it will get confused

But still a very interesting concept and if it works and can get capacities up just a bit then i see it being a very useful componet

 

They don't say, but I wonder if these will come bundled as CD/DVD drives only, or if they'll come out with Blu-Ray versions too.

 

I'd rather they come up with faster miniPCIe SSDs with built in I/O controller (or notebooks with their own I/O controller to the miniPCIe) for OS/programs. Then just two 750GB 5400RPM drives for storage

 

True, but eventually the optical drive will end up going away (like the disk drive before it) as things move to USB or SD card or all digital download so this takes a componet that is already dieing and makes it mildly useful for a bit longer.

Because much like the floppy until its completely gone you will still run into times where its needed to have a cd/dvd/brd

I'm honestly surprised that optical media has survived as well as it has. Its easy to scratch and make unreadable, its breakable, and its huge for such limited storage capacity and speed

 

Someone wants discs to stay around.

 

I have no problems with optical drives, as I burn cds all the time to play in my car stereo. Not many of us can be lucky and drive an Audi, which includes SD(I think one or two I saw had two card slots and newer ones support SDHC models) card slots in most of the cars I have seen since 2007. If more companies included SDHC cards then yeah optical drives could see a faster death, but for not it will be around and I will still use it.

As for this, I like idea a lot, but $200 is a bit much to pay for the combo specially when it only comes with a 32gb drive and possibly no TRIM feature. Not to mention those HDD-SSD combos are going for a bit less for the same SSD storage space, no?

 

I noted this in the other thread here at NBR somewhere, but I don't understand why they don't use this same concept in a 2.5" HDD instead of ODD. Since most notebooks now favor elimination of an internal ODD to keep things slim and light, and most notebooks have only a single drive bay, it would probably be a better seller. I'm sure they could manage 32GB to 40GB of NAND within the confines of a 9.5mm 2.5" HDD. The hybrid tech of the Samsung Momentus XT is ok, but I'd rather have control over what goes on the SSD, and they could make it so you could dedicate a certain amount of GB for an HDD read/write cache too, so your HDD would still benefit somewhat like the Momentus XT.