First Hybrid Cars, Now Hybrid Hard Drives

Coming on the heels of SanDisk’s plans to replace hard drives with a Flash memory-based drive is the Hybrid Storage Alliance, which seeks to marry Flash memory in a platter-based drive for notebooks.

By adding 256MB of Flash memory to a 2.5-inch notebook laptop, the members of the alliance — Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Samsung ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú hope to extend the life of mobile laptop batteries, reduce heat and improve laptop performance.

“The notebook market is where the crying need for this technology lies today. We will look at other platforms after that,” Michael Hall, a spokesman for Seagate, told internetnews.com.

The alliance cited research from IDC, which predicted that hybrid hard disk drives will constitute 35 percent of all hard disk drives shipped with laptops by 2010.

Details are still somewhat sketchy, as it will be a few months before products appear. Hitachi and Seagate declined to give any indications on how much these drives will cost, but Albert Kim, senior manager of storage products at Samsung estimated the hybrid drives will carry a 15 percent price premium over traditional hard drives with the same storage capacity.

Full article: internetnews.com