Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:

Samsung today announced that next week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) it will demonstrate the first commercially available hybrid hard drive. What is a hybrid hard drive? It’s a drive that combines Flash memory with a standard hard drive to speed up booting, improve drive life, and reduce the chances of a problem due to dropping the laptop or PC.

The benefits, especially in the mobile space, are numerous. HHDs will be able to boot or resume operation up to twice as fast as a traditional hard drive, and are five times as reliable. Additionally, the drives provide an extra 20-30 minutes of battery life over their predecessors.

Either a 128MB or 256MB cache would act as the first step in storing data. The hard disk would only need to spin to save data when this cache is filled, roughly once every 10 to 20 minutes. The cache could also assist in allowing a PC to boot quicker. [Source: BetaNews]

We Say: Show me the price first… if it’s reasonable, I’d be interested in taking a look at one of these for my PC (well, once I see a review, anyway). I would assume you should just be able to plug an IDE version or SATA version into a PC. Samsung says the first HHDs will ship next quarter.

Have comments? Want to see what others have to say about this story? Join the discussion here!

About RealTechNews
When blogs became “hot,” we looked at the category and found a gap. Tech blogs were furiously covering gadgets and gizmos and new products from Asia, and the mainstream tech sites were diligently doing product reviews and news items, but no one was really sitting in the middle and bringing the best of both worlds to one place. Enter RealTechNews (RTN). Our mission is simple: We aim to bridge the gap between the informal and mostly amateur-run tech blogs and the polished but often slow and advertiser-supported tech portals.