Samsung Semiconductor executives said Monday that the concept of a hard drive incorporating flash memory will be a reality, and come to market in mid-2006.
The drive, first talked about at last year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle, will be manufactured by Samsung's hard disk drive division, according to the company. The drive will be initially targeted at notebooks, where the drive's low power consumption will yield the most benefit.
The hybrid hard drive will mount a one-gigabit OneNAND flash chip inside a hard drive, which will serve dual duty both as a write buffer and as a solid-state boot disk for the operating system. The act of writing data to the hard disk, such as user files or cached images while web browsing, would instead be intercepted by the hard disk. Only when the flash memory's "write buffer" was full would the hard disk be spun up, minimizing the time and power that would be spent keeping the drive's rotating media spinning.
"What's different now is that it's real," said Ivan Greenberg, strategic marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, in an interview. "The Longhorn base drivers have been made final, and made the plan of record."
Samsung and Microsoft will demonstrate a prototype of the drive at WinHEC using an emulator to simulate the system, Greenberg said.
At this point, however, only Samsung has signed up to manufacture the drive, Greenberg said. As an extra incentive, Samsung plans to appeal directly to OEMs.
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Samsung: 'Hybrid' Hard Drives
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