Hybrid Hard Drives

Although flash based hard drives are becoming more popular, they still don't have the same value for money that current hard drives achieve. For same price as a 32 GB non-volatile flash disk you can get a whopping 750 GB hard drive. For the meantime you can take advantage of a combination of these two technologies.

Hybrid hard drives, or H-HDD combine these two technologies to offer an increase in performance as well as an improvement in power consumption. The flash memory itself is stored within the drive and takes up the slack where the normal hard drive leaves off. Speed can be increased dramatically because there is no mechanical latency in the memory like there is in the hard drive. Power consumption can be improved because frequently used application data can be stored and then pulled from the flash memory.

These advantages apply mostly to notebook hard drives. They are much slower than desktop hard drives and power consumption is a much bigger issue for notebook users. With these additions H-HDD manufacturers hope to make laptop hard drives reach similar speeds to their desktop counterparts.

Currently, hybrid hard drives require that you run Windows Vista, not because it needs Vista, but because it needs ReadyDrive, a feature that comes with Vista. Which data is stored on the flash part of the drive is controlled by the operating system, and in Vista, ReadyDrive takes care of this. ReadyDrive sees how you use your programs and which ones you use the most, it then puts the most heavily accessed application data onto the flash memory part of the hard drive.

Power is saved when there is a read/write done onto the flash portion of the disk. Because there is no motor, flash media draws much less power. However, when the data is written to the disk the motor still needs to be used and therefore uses that power that was saved.

The flash media suffers from a slower transfer rate than the main part of the drive, but with its much faster access speeds, makes up for this. The fast cache that has become an integral part of hard drives is not replace in these models, but the flash part just complements the functions of the drive.

In actual use there is not really much advantage to this kind of hard drive. Despite some hype, there is very noticeable difference in real world applications and doesn't save much power either. Waiting for a true flash-only drive would be the best best, or just stick with the traditional kind.

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