PCWorld has announced that Samsung will introduce a hybrid hard drive next summer. The drives will be available with either 128 or 256 MB of flash memory, and will write to the disk only when the flash is full. This should provide better battery life for laptops, and faster access for all computers since flash can be read hundreds of times faster than a magnetic disk.

Microsoft is including support in Vista. No word on how Samsung has dealt with the tendency of flash to degrade with repeated cycling.

Two prototype versions of the drive will be on display at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle next week. The prototypes will have either 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. Samsung expects to begin delivering sample drives to customers in the third quarter and to start shipping in volume in January next year.

Microsoft is building support for hybrid drives into Windows Vista under the name ReadyDrive.

It’s one of a number of technologies the company is building into the new operating system to help improve system performance. These include ReadyBoost, which allows a removable flash memory device to act as system memory, thus providing an instant memory boost without having to install new RAM boards, and SuperFetch, which preloads frequently used applications into memory to improve system responsiveness…

[tags]vista,flash memory,winhec,hybrid hard drive,windows hardware engineering conference,hhd[/tags]