Samsung Prepping Hybrid Hard Drives

Samsung plans to demonstrate prototype flash-and-hard-disk hybrids next week at WinHEC, aiming to improve start/resume times and extend laptop battery life.

Samsung Electronics has found another use for all that flash memory it’s manufacturing: packing it into hard drives. At next week’s WinHEC 2006 conference, Samsung plans to demonstrate new Hybrid Hard Disk (HHD) storage devices, which combine a conventional magnetic platter storage with NAND flash memory.

The basic idea is that each hard disk has a cache of 128 of 256 MB of flash memory with the idea of improving startup and resume times for notebook computers and other portable electronic devices which require hard disk storage, while simultaneously extending battery life by reducing the amount of time hard disks spin up to access data. When the flash-base drive cache is filled, the system spins up its hard disk to flush data to magnetic storage: the result is a disk which spins up for a few seconds every 10 or 20 minutes, rather than a disk which spins more-or-less continually during active use. Furthermore, the speed of flash memory means users should not see delays or lags when material is written to cache or flushed to disk.

Microsoft seems bullish on the idea: “Hybrid hard disks and Windows ReadyDrive Technology are integrated advancements that improve the performance and reliability of computers using Windows(R) Vista(TM), especially notebook computers,” said Mike Sievert, corporate vice president, Windows Client Marketing at Microsoft. “We are very pleased to see Samsung moving so rapidly with HHD technology to prepare for high-volume production in time for the Windows Vista launch.”

According to Samsung, HHD-equipped systems will boot or resume up to twice as fast as conventional hard disk-based systems, and offer 20 to 30 minutes more batter life. The company plans to begin shipping units in large quantities in January 2007.

Obviously, the technology is better suited to some things than others: applications or services which are constantly seeking and retrieving material from hard disk