Why hybrid hard drives aren’t delivering in the marketplace

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

It sounded like a good idea, when in 2005 Microsoft and Samsung introduced the idea of hybrid hard drives, drives with flash memory as cache. But they haven’t set sales figures on fire. Why?

The hybrid hard drive would cut down power consumption, increase battery life, and, most importantly, whack boot-up time, the companies said.

But so far, you don’t see a lot of them on store shelves and the benefits are somewhat disappointing, said hard drive executives at Diskcon 2007, taking place in Santa Clara this week.

“The initial versions haven’t delivered the performance consumers expected,” said Dr. Richard New, director of research for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

The problem, said New, might be correctable if drive makers put in more flash. Right now, hybrid drives have about 256MB of memory. If you put in 4GB or so, the flash could hold a lot more storage, which in turn would reduce power consumption and help boot-up time. That would raise prices, though. Source: News.com

We Say: Price vs. Performance, the same old equation. I also think the major focus in terms of new hard drive technology has been SSD drives - hard drives entirely made with flash memory. That would be even more attractive in terms of power savings, for example, than a hybrid, though prices, as well as drive sizes, still aren’t to my satisfaction..