Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD
Seagate Technology has joined Samsung Electronics and Sony in launching a combination disk and flash memory storage pedaling the theory that they speed up boot time and significantly boost battery life.
PSD stands for “Power Savings Drive” and offers 160 GB of traditional disk storage and 256 MB of flash memory. Sony was the first to launch a product built around the hybrid drive concept in its Vaio SZ650.
But Seagate will have to convince customers to part with a 30% premium over the average price for this size of hard drive. For this they will get faster boot times (by 20%) and a 25% longer battery life.
Seagate is offering the same size of drive that Samsung was shipping in March. If you believe in Moore’s law and choose to apply it to this industry current drives should be about 60% larger than those produced in March. Samsung also offers 80GB and 120GB models. Having said that Seagate plans to offer hybrid versions across its entire range of drives for notebooks, desktops and mobile PCs in the near future.
Microsoft Vista does contain some technology to take advantage of hybrid drives.
- ReadyDrive in Vista treats flash and hard disk as a single memory space so it can cache frequently used data or as a disk-write cache when the disk is spun down saving battery power.
- ReadyBoot speeds up the booting process and the post-hibernation process caching files required when the system restarts.
Despite these Vista technologies PC users won’t be able to take full advantage of hybrid drives until other PC components conform to the concept. BIOS makers and device drivers still need to take advantage of the flash memory component in hybrid drives.
Hard disk drive manufacturers are already there and the Hybrid Storage Alliance includes the following major players:
- Fujitsu
- Hitachi
- Samsung
- Seagate
- Toshiba
An increasing number of notebook manufacturers are using some kind of flash memory as data storage and this is due to continue rising to over 50% in two years according to iSuppli who ses three families of flash based storage:
- Intel(INTC)’s Robson
- Hybrid hard dis
- Solid state drives
Robson is a code name for a system that uses flash memory to increase responsiveness, speed up multitasking and increase battery life.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt for notebooks, desktops and mobile PCs in the near future. Microsoft Vista does contain some technology [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Pretty cool. Thanks for notifying me of your post. I guess I need to add you to my reader.
October 13th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
[...] not a typo…it is H-H-D for “Hybrid Hard Disk”. Fellow blogger Steve at the Machines That Go Bing Blog brought this one to our attention. Read his review for all the details, or visit the Seagate [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 11:59 am
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