In a major push towards the storage drive technology, a strong alliance comprising of Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung,Seagate,Toshiba, Western Digital have formed for providing the generation next hard drive solution.

What is this “Flash based Hybrid Hard Drives” ?

Regular hard drives or hard disk are based on spindles or circular disks arranged on each other.They are accessed through a head which moves around those discs to get information.Its based on complete mechanical formulation.

Hybrid Hard Drives are based on Flash, in simple words its made of same thing our pen drive or usb drives are made up of.The goal of Hybrid Storage alliance is to integrate flash into conventional hard disk completely.So we can think of these Hard Drives as a huge pen drives,But not exactly.To make it perfectly work as regular hard disk will be a challenge and thus with their 100 years of experience the alliance is formed.

Why do we need these Hybrid Storage Hard disk?

The major reasons are:

• The falling prices of flash based storage devices.
• Microsoft’s integration of SuperFetch in Windows Vista which gives an excellent performance with these kind of hard disk.

Potential Benefits of Hybrid Hard Drives

• Faster Boot and Resume: When a system is turned on , conventional hard disk have to spin and reset to default position, which delays the boot sequence.Moreover the cache is on the flash hard disk itself ( technically stored in NAND flash ) before system goes to sleep.
• Lower Power Consumption: Conventional Hard-Disk take a lot of power, why ? because its mechanical.Spinning, moving of head.Which in turn needs more battery power on laptops.Flash Hard Drives eliminates it.
• Higher Reliably: Since the platter spin is gone, the chances of mechnical flaiure is also eliminated, hence a longer life.
• Greater Durability: Every time data is pulled off from flash memory, the system has greater shock tolerance because the platter is not spinning.
• Ease of Installation: Incorporating hybrid flash hard drives are easy as plugging a pen drive to a system.Moreover Windows Vista comes with a native support for this.
• Data Separation and Data Security: Having flash on hard drive keeps all the system information in one location so the security or encryption mechanism can be employed to protect data centrally.It also helps in case of sudden system failure.

More information of this alliance group can be found at Hybridstorage.org. Now since we have seen this point, some of the questions on my mind are, How trustworthy are flash drives ? I have seen them crash when they fall ? How will they make it faster access ? Though the platter or mechanical part is removed but all the data getting stored at one place… how its going to faster ? What do you think ?

Tags: flash memory, pen drives, storage drive, usb drives