Hybrid Hard Drive

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Hybrid Hard Drive

• William Sullivan
• HTM 304
• 10/09/2007

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• Hybrid drives were first released in early 2007
  (Samsung)
• At the moment hybrid drives are only compatible
  with the Windows Vista operating system.

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Hybrid Hard Drive

• A new large-buffer computer hard disk drive.
• Employs a large buffer (up to 1 GB) of
  non-volatile flash memory to cache data during
  normal use.
• The hard disk drive is used only in two
  situations
• 1) to empty the buffer when it is near capacity
• 2) to retrieve data not already stored in the
  buffer.

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Benefits

• Decreased power consumption
• Decreased heat generation
• Decreased noise levels
• Improved reliability
• Improved performance

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Drawbacks

• Increased seek time for non cached data.
• if hard drive has spun down and
  
  needs to spin up
• Increased cost
• flash memory chips are still pretty
  expensive
• Increased frequency of spin up and spin down
• may cause more wear on the hard disk

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The Future?

• Solid State Drives- a data storage device that
  uses solid state memory to store persistent data.
  

• Could replace hard disk drives

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Pros

• Pros
• Faster startup
• Reduced read and write latency (seek) times
• Faster boot and application launch times
• Few to no mechanical parts
• Cons
• Flash memory is expensive
• Low recoverability

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Hard disk drive-left, Solid state drive-right