And the Winner Is...
head 2 head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES
I
t just doesn’t make sense to invest in a hybrid drive today. With per-
formance all over the charts and minimal power savings, we’d rath-
er invest in a traditional notebook hard drive with a larger capacity or
faster spindle speed. Drive makers complain Microsoft is sabotag-
ing hybrid-drive performance with “unoptimized” drivers (naturally,
Microsoft claims that all its drivers are perfectly up to snuff).We agree with the drive manufacturers. To see hibernation times get
worse with hybrid mode enabled makes no sense at all. Limited OS sup-
port also diminishes the appeal of hybrid drives, but we’re confident sup-
port will expand with new iterations of this burgeoning technology. In time,
better drivers and more onboard memory could make hybrid drives pretty
damned sexy. But right now the implementation leaves us cold.PERFORMANCE
Trying to gauge the hybrid drive’s per-
formance was difficult, as throwing a relatively large (in
hard drive terms) 256MB buffer at traditional hard drive
benchmarks can produce goofy results. However, we did
see up to a 10 percent performance boost in PCMark
and about a 4 percent boost in the real-world MobileMark
2007 test. So sure enough, hybrid technology can pep up
your system.
But now for the real mind-bender. While Microsoft
and drive makers claim faster boot and hibernation times
with hybrids, we found that boot performance got slightly
worse and hibernating took an additional four seconds.
Maybe this is why drive makers are openly bitching about
“unoptimized” drivers in Windows Vista.
WINNER: TRADITIONAL DRIVEround^4
PRICE
With a street price of about $100, the 5,400rpm 160GB
FlashON HM16HJI hybrid drive costs about 10 percent more than its spec-
for-spec brother: Samsung’s SpinPoint HM160JI. Considering you’re getting
newfangled hybrid technology for about $10, that’s a pretty darn good value. Of
course, when you realize that a 1GB USB key costs $10, you have to wonder
why Samsung limited the flash RAM in this hybrid to 256MB. Wouldn’t it be bet-
ter to put that $10 toward a bigger drive or a bigger USB key?
WINNER: TRADITIONAL DRIVEround^5
DECEMBER 2007 MAXIMUMPC 17
SAMSUNG’S FLASHON HM16HJI
With Vista’s Hybrid support switched off, the
HM16HJI acts just like a traditional notebook
hard drive.
$100, http://www.samsung.comHYBRID ON HYBRID OFFBENCHMARKS
PCMARK05 HD 3,602 3,
PCMARK05 XP STARTUP (MB/S) 5.8 5.
PCMARK05 APP LOADING (MB/S) 4.6 3.
GENERAL USAGE (MB/S) 3.9 3.
VIRUS SCAN (MB/S) 53.4 50.
FILE WRITE (MB/S) 43.9 40.
BOOT (SEC) 43 41
SHUTDOWN (SEC) 24 20
WAKE FROM HIBERNATE (SEC) 27 27 25
HIBERNATE (SEC) 38 38 34
WAKE FROM STANDBY (SEC) 2 2 2 222
STANDBY (SEC) 6 6 9
HD TACH AVERAGE READ (MB/S) 20 20 33.
POWER CONSUMPTION OF NOTEBOOK 52.5 53
WITH DISK I/O (WATTS)
POWER CONSUMPTION OF NOTEBOOK 49.5 51
WITHOUT DISK I/O (WATTS)
MOBILEMARK 2007 RUN TIME (MIN) 99 99 9999
MOBILEMARK 2007 PERFORMANCE 107 103103
Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of an Asus C90s notebook with a 2.66GHz Core 2
Duo, 2GB of RAM, a GeForce Go 8600 GT, a 160GB Samsung HM16JHI, and Windows Vista Home
Premium.