OK, the idea of a hybrid Flash- Hard drive seems a little foreign to me. The concept is likely sound a sound one, but I’m just not sure I can see the immediate advantage that would make me want to rush out and buy one of these puppies.

MS and Samsung have jointly developed a hybrid hard drive (HHD) that uses a 1Gbit NAND flash memory as a read and write buffer (here and here). The drive caches data in the flash memory so that it can stop spinning for long periods of time, as the computer reads and writes to the flash instead of to the disk. When the drive isn’t spinning, it uses less power, so this technology will be attractive for mobile hard drives. There’s no word in any of the articles I’ve seen so far as to how flash memory’s erasure endurance issues are addressed, if at all. From what I’ve read, NAND flash is good only for from 100,000 to 1 million writes, which doesn’t seem like a lot to me if it’s being used as a hard drive replacement. [Read the rest]