Comments on: Samsung goes commercial with hybrid hard drive

Last year, the company showed off a prototype of a drive that uses flash to cut power. Now the company will show off the finished product.

[R_Harvey]

Technically speaking, hard drives already come with flash inside them

Huh? Maybe I'm wrong - I'm no engineer - but I thought hard drives came with cache RAM.

Flash memory is life-limited - wouldn't a drive writing to flash memory burn through 100,000 or so read-write cycles in a relatively short time?

Is this a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later situation? You get longer battery life now, but your hard drive starts corrupting your data after year and a half (or, just outside the warranty period)?

[challman]

You are correct.....

Hard drives come with cache memory. I believe it is DRAM. I agree about having Flash on the hard drive. Over time, it will slow and eventually fail:

"Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write/erase cycles before failure. In normal use, mid-range flash drives currently on the market will support several million cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. This should be a consideration when using a flash drive as a hard drive to run application software or an operating system."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

[Stalin Hornsby]

I was looking for EIDE detection software when I saw this dock w/ SATAPCI

COMPUTERs are us had one pc component card just waiting for the unknown tablet pc user; to be announce yet available?!?@#$ Really they do. Just without the HDD Flassh drive.

[olaolua]

Flash is non-volatile

Not exactly - the cache memory only holds its contents as long as the power is on; but flash retains its contents even when the power is off, just like a hard drive.

[Chris from Kazoo]

Birth of the Flash Laptop?

Is this the birth of the flash RAM laptop? I have a Corsair 4GB thumbdrive, 5 of these strung together would make a zippy laptop!

PS: I think there's an error in the story. I'm sure the author meant "Boot-up time is also REDUCED,"

[TV James]

Ready Drive or ReadyDrive?

Same paragraph uses both descriptions. A minor point, but here's where a semi-open Wiki interface could allow for quick and easy (once approved) minor corrections to articles.

[Maccess]

Yet another good idea...

...with a proprietary implementation that will soon be ignored, once again by the market.

The idea of a hybrid drive is great, the implementation that requires Vista "because of the interaction between the processor, flash, and disk) is a bad idea.

It sounds like yet another thing that sounds good on paper (fater, power saving, etc), but is actually the reverse in the real world because of the added processor load.