Western Digital Teases 5mm Hybrid Hard Drive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 10, 2012 2:29 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Hybrid Drive
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- SSHDs
Intel's Ultrabook push has forced hard drive makers to do two things: take hybrid drives more seriously (because of the Ultrabook performance requirements) as well as focus on thinner drive form factors. Seagate brought its NAND equipped hybrid Momentus XT to market two years ago, but we haven't seen widespread OEM adoption partially because of the lack of a second source for hybrid hard drives.
Today Western Digital announced a 5mm thick hybrid HDD with 32GB of MLC NAND on-board. WD isn't saying anything else as far as details of architecture (NAND controller, what gets cached, etc...) or availability but I should be able to see the drive in person later this week.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
13 Comments
View All Comments
name99 - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link
You can't justify what they are selling by saying "well, if they sold something else it would be awesome".jjj - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link
The second source is Toshiba,they announced their first hybrind way before this announcement.About this drive we can guess the HDD controller is Marvell since ,i don't think, LSI even has a 7mm HDD SoC but no idea what controlls the NAND,would be cool if Marvell had a native hybrid controller.Guess we'll find out more on the 13th and then on sept 21 see what Seagate has new.
extide - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link
Hybrid drives with a decent amount of cache! I would love to recommend hybrid drives to friends and colleagues, but with only 4-8GB of NAND on them I really have a hard time doing so. Now, with 32GB, I think we have finally hit a point where these drives will actually work very well. I would love to see these sort of drives becoming the 'de-facto' standard in low end (especially for laptops) essentially replacing non hybrid drives entirely.