A
new form of mobile storage was born when an engineer went
running down a hallway while holding a hard drive and ran smack
into another engineer carrying fl ash memory. Before he could say
“You got fl ash RAM on my hard drive!” the concept of a hybrid storage
device was well at hand. Hybrid hard drives employ fl ash memory as
supersized buffers and promise better performance, less power con-
sumption, and increased reliability.
But do they deliver on all those claims? To find out, we pittedSamsung’s FlashON HM16HJI against itself—running all our tests
with and without the drive’s onboard flash memory enabled to find out
if hybrid technology is really about hard benefits or just hype. In addi-
tion to holding 256MB of flash memory, this SATA150 drive spins at
5,400rpm and packs 160GB of storage across its magnetic platters.
We used our trusty Asus C90s notebook and Windows Vista Home
Premium to test the drive in both scenarios.Hybrid Drive vs. Traditional Drive
OS SUPPORT
OK, Linux users, Mac folk,
BSD heads, Windows XP
peeps, and, umm, BeOS
dudes, please get the hell
off this bus because hybrid
drives work only with the
inbred European royalty of
OSes: Windows Vista. Yep,
hybrid drives are currently
supported in Vista exclusively,
as part of the Microsoft fea-
ture called ReadyDrive. It’s
not that support for hybrid
tech is impossible in Linux or
any other OS, it’s just that no
other OS has seen fit to sup-
port it yet. And since Vista’s
been such a massive suc-
cess with power users and
the technically savvy (not!),
this category is easy to call.
WINNER: TRADITIONAL
DRIVERELIABILITY
Long-term hard-
disk reliability is nearly impossible
for anyone to gauge in a meaningful
fashion. Still, common sense dic-
tates that a hybrid drive should be
more reliable over time. In theory, a
hybrid drive will suffer less wear and
tear because the OS can write data
to the flash RAM instead of spinning
up the motor, platters, and heads
every time you save a file. Because
the OS spends a good part of its
time writing to flash, the odds of
you causing the head to crash
when you, say, jostle or whack
the notebook are lower than with
a standard drive. But if this is the
case, shouldn’t hybrid-drive mak-
ers be offering longer warranties?
Nonetheless, hybrid technology
certainly can’t hurt reliability. Even if
you finally wore out the flash RAM,
which would take decades, the
drive would still work.
WINNER: HYBRID DRIVESAMSUNG’S FLASHON HM16HJI
Features 256MB of flash RAM integrated
with the 160GB drive
$100, http://www.samsung.comPOWER CONSUMPTION
Drive makers and Microsoft claim hybrid drives have substantial power benefits
because every time you spool up a traditional hard drive’s motor, you consume your notebook’s battery
power. The more times you spin up, the more power you use. A hybrid drive’s larger buffer (256MB
vs. 8MB) can theoretically reduce the number of times the OS has to reach out to the platters to read
or write data. But who are we kidding here? While that might be true under certain workloads—those
that only skim data from the flash memory buffer—our own tests found negligible power savings from
hybrid technology. In the majority of workloads, you’ll exceed the flash’s 256MB capacity and thus tap
the battery anyway. We expect to see more of a power savings when onboard buffers get larger.
WINNER: TIEhead 2 head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES
round^1
round^2
round^3
BY GORDON MAH UNG16 MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2007
MOBILE HARD DISKS