In an announcement today, Seagate have shown their cards on the biggest thing to come out of laptop hard drive manufacture for years. Dubbed a “hybrid drive” and designed with access speed & power saving in mind, the drive combines a traditional magnetic hard drive with 256Mb of Flash RAM (why not 4Gb as it’s so cheap?) Hybrid drives are already available in high-end desktop PCs at the moment so aren’t cutting edge technology, however to find a device small enough to fit the tiny 2.5 inch form is definitely a step forward. Sony think so too and are the first to offer the drive in their Vaio range of laptops. [SHOW ME]

So what is a Hybrid Drive? The idea behind the Hybrid Drive (or HHD) is pretty simple and two-fold, but first you need to understand why a hard drive is slow. Hard drives always have a period when they “spin-up”. Spinning-up is required by the hard drive to allow the revolving platters inside to come up to speed, ready for consistent and predictable reading or writing. Enter the Hybrid Drive.

The HHD primarily saves power & speed when you write data to the hard drive. To begin with the data is actually stored in the Flash RAM, a form of memory that doesn’t erase when the power goes off (also known as non-volatile). When that RAM is full up (like a bucket filling with water), it’s emptied to the hard drive in one big write and prepared ready for more data. This requires the hard drive to only spin-up once, write the data then spin-down again. This also works in reverse. Frequently asked for files are stored in the Flash RAM so the drive doesn’t need to spin-up to retrieve them - they just come straight from the Flash RAM. According to certain sources it can mean a reduction in hard drive spinning from 90 to over 98 percent! As one of the biggest power & speed drains in a PC is a hard at work hard drive, you can see the savings will be significant.

The second part to the HHD’s effectiveness is the boot-up process. Now this benefit is at present only for the Microsoft Vista OS - other OS’s and BIOS manufacturers have yet to implement the features and driver support from HHD’s. Using Vista, the OS will make a note of the files required during the boot process and get them ready in the Flash RAM for the system when booting. Apparently this can result in a 20% boot speed-up, so if you don’t have Vista, don’t worry too much - the benefits won’t be noticeable to the average user anyway.

So are there any downsides? Well I think the negatives are essentially outweighed by the positives, but they still have to be mentioned. A hard drive’s biggest point of wear occurs during the spin-up and spin-down process. An HHD essentially needs to spin-up and spin-down more than the average hard drive because of the way it works. Why is this? Well once your normal run-of-the-mill hard drive spins-up, it pretty much stays spinning for a while before it spins-down again. Because of this you are more likely to keep the hard drive spinning when you work or just generally use windows. The hard drive will only truly be silent when you stop doing things and the OS is quiet (almost never!) The HHD, however, spins-up, dumps data from the buffer, then spins-down straight away. This equates to more spin-ups and spin-downs, increasing wear and possibly decreasing the life of your HHD, although the amount is probably quite small. The only other real negative, and one that may stop mainstream manufacturers from including HHD’s in their systems for the time being is the price difference. As HHDs cost around 30% more than their less-powerful siblings, and many consumers don’t see the benefits initially, you can be sure they will only find their way into “power” systems for the time being.