ExtremeTech is reporting that the new Samsung hybrid hard drives will be available for purchase by end-users within a week’s time. CMS Products is apparently already taking orders for the new 160GB SATA 2.5 inch MH80 notebook hard drive for $299. According to a sales associate at CMS Products, the new drives should begin shipping at the end of next week or by July 2nd at the latest.

These new hybrid hard drives feature 256Mbytes of flash memory which are then utilized as an internal write cache. These hybrid hard drives are part of the new Microsoft “ReadyDrive” initiative. The concept is pretty simple. Data that needs to be stored is first stored in the cache. When the cache is full, data is written at once by the drive – thereby eliminating the constant need of starting up and stopping the hard drive. The hard drive now only needs to spin up when the cache is full or when data is requested from disc.  The net effect? Longer battery life of approximately 30 minutes. However there are other benefits too. Drive power consumption is cut down between 70 to 90 percent, boot times are faster, and hibernation times are faster too.

Although the drives will be available shortly, it appears the only platforms that will fully take advantage of the new drives are Windows Vista based systems with possibly the latest chipsets. We’ll find out soon enough!

For those interested, here is the full feature list of the new 80GB 2.5 inch drive:

  • 80GB Formatted Capacity Per Disk
  • TuMR head with wireless suspension design
  • Serial ATA 1.5Gbps Interface Support
  • SATA Native Command Queuing Feature set
  • Device Initiated Bearing Spindle Motor Technology
  • Load/Unload Head Technology
  • ATA Security Mode Feature Set
  • ATA SMART Feature Set
  • ATA Automatic Acoustic Management Feature Set
  • ATA Device Configuration Overlay Feature Set
  • Multi-Burst On-The-Fly Error Correction
  • FlashON
  • NVC Command Set(T13 ATA8 Extension)
  • Quick Power On Ready
  • NVC Power Management

There are three models – an 80GB model, a 120GB model and a 160GB model.

[Check it out]

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