The Benefits of Hybrid Drives

feminazi writes "Flash memory is being integrated with the hard disk by Seagate and Samsung and onto the motherboard by Intel. Potential benefits: faster read/write performance; fewer crashes; improved battery life; faster boot time; lower heat generation; decreased energy-consumption. Vista's ReadyDrive will use the hybrid system first for laptops and probably for desktops down the road. The heat and power issues may also make it attractive in server environments."

Hybrid Drives!

[Sixtyten]

Will they increase fuel economy as well?

Another benefit...

[mbstone]

Another benefit of hybrid drives is, you can use the carpool lane even if you're by yourself.

Re:Catastrophic Failure of Flash Memory

[servognome]

Hopefully, the engineer who designed this hybrid drive has, at a minimum, integrated an LCD counter and a tiny speaker into the drive. The counter shall display the running total of the number of writes to the flash memory. The tiny speaker shall beep like crazy when the total exceeds 99900.

It was in the original engineering design, but the lawyers said it would be cheaper to just include a warning in the fine print of the warranty.

Re:Catastrophic Failure of Flash Memory

[evilviper]

Someone will be awfully upset when she makes a final save of her million-dollar PowerPoint presentation for the CEO and discovers that the save is the 100001st write to the hybrid drive.

Yes. Everyone knows flash RAM will explode in a gigantic fireball on the 1st attempt to write to it, once it has gone beyond spec.

Damn, can't show off!

[kickdown]

Damn. The RSS feed made me think this might be about hybrid _cars_, not hard drives. I was already dreaming of making clever comments about how cool it is to own a Toyota Prius. Now I make whiny comments about getting it wrong instead. Damn. Mod me down for futility and insignificance.

Re:Catastrophic Failure of Flash Memory

[dillee1]

You mean Dell is so much ahead of the market and already integrated the technology into their laptops?

Re:Catastrophic Failure of Flash Memory

[jawtheshark]

Hopefully, the engineer who designed this hybrid drive has, at a minimum, integrated an LCD counter and a tiny speaker into the drive. The counter shall display the running total of the number of writes to the flash memory. The tiny speaker shall beep like crazy when the total exceeds 99900.

Just enter "4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42" and everything will be okay.