Finally, Seagate has joined the fray by shipping its first hybrid hard drive (HHD) to OEMs and thus making good on its pledge to the Hybrid Storage Alliance. The 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 PSD ships in 80-, 120-, and 160GB capacities with a SATA 1.5 interface, 8MB of cache, and 256MB of flash memory to buffer cached write requests to disk. Seagate's HHDs are said to reduce boot time from 40 to 32 seconds while cutting average power consumption from 0.78 to 0.45 watts. Not quite the hysterical orders of performance improvements and battery savings originally promised eh Microsoft, Samsung? According to Melissa Johnson, a Seagate product manager, the sub-par performance for all HHDs stems from first generation issues with both the BIOS and Vista device drivers, "they don't know how to utilize the flash." Oh dear.

Continue At Source (via www.engadget.com)

Send via e-mail | Submit to Digg | Add to Live Favorites