Hybrid Hard Drive Could Cut Boot Time, Reduce Power Use

Samsung Electronics is demonstrating the first commercial prototype of a Hybrid Hard Disk (HHD) for notebooks and PCs that integrates NAND flash memory with rotating magnetic storage.



Samsung said its HHD boots or resumes up to twice as fast as conventional HDDs, lasts 20-30 minutes longer on battery and is up to five times more reliable. The Hybrid Hard Disk eliminates the need for the hard disk to constantly spin whenever a computer is operating on battery power, and is less susceptible to damage from jarring or being dropped since it is idle most of the time.



Every time the cache is filled, the rotating drive spins to "flush out" or transfer data from the cache, spinning only a few seconds every 10-20 minutes. The Samsung HHD architecture uses the fastest flash device on the market as cache, Samsung's OneNAND flash with 108MB/s read and 18 MB/s write data-rates. The functionality of the H-HHD is automated by the high performance HDD SOC which supports 3.0G Native Command Queuing SATA and an OneNAND interface. The HHD saves between eight and 25 seconds of boot-up time and extends battery life by about 8-10 percent depending on the model of computer.



"We see the HHD as the most advanced and cost-effective means of improving the performance of a notebook computer's storage functionality," said Jon Kang, senior vice president, technical marketing group, Samsung Semiconductor.



The HHD will be exhibited with two cache densities, 128MB and 256MB, at next week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle.

http://www.samsung.com