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Samsung launches Vista-targeted hybrid HDD
By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 3/7/2007
Samsung Electronics Ltd. announced today the shipment of its MH80 Series hybrid hard drive to the commercial marketplace. The new hard drive is offered in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities, Samsung said in a statement, and is currently shipping to "select OEM customers" and will soon be available in retail and commercial outlets.
Optimized to work in conjunction with Windows Vista capable notebook PCs, Samsung's MH80 is a 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive with 128 megabytes or 256 megabytes of flash memory. It combines a hard disk drive with a OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software, purportedly offering faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology, Samsung claimed.
The MH80 contains Samsung's ReadyBoot technology that the company said offers up to a 50 percent reduction in boot and resume times from traditional magnetic media technology. In addition, the drive consumes 70 percent to 90 percent less power than a traditional hard drive, which extends the battery life by 30 minutes before a recharge is needed, the company added.
As the drive's platters are idle 99 percent of the time, Samsung claimed, the MH80 eliminates the need for the hard disk to constantly spin whenever a computer is operating on battery power. Samsung also said the drive operates at a lower temperature than a regular hard drive.
Samsung is just one of a bevy of companies hitching their wagons to hybrid hard disk drive (HDD) technology's star of late. In January, Samsung joined Hitachi, Seagate Technology and Toshiba in forming a new industry group dubbed the Hybrid Storage Alliance to promote hybrid HDD technology. At that time, a manager with the newly formed group told Electronic News that hybrid technology is "very much linked" to Microsoft's Vista operating system and that the alliance would "very soon" be extending a formal invitation for membership to the software giant. Currently, however, Microsoft's name has not yet been added to the group's website.
