Samsung ships notebook with hybrid hard drive
updated 10:50 am EDT, Mon April 23, 2007
Samsung R55 Hybrid Drive
Samsung this morning lived up to promises by launching the R55, its first notebook to use a hybrid hard drive. The 15.4-inch widescreen PC uses the recently introduced SpinPoint MH80 80GB drive with 256MB of flash to cut boot times and improve disk access: reading and writing are much faster in general, but Vista Home Premium takes 30 percent less time (down to 40 seconds) and power consumption for the drive also drops 32 percent. Even the hard drive's lifetime expands by ten percent, Samsung says.
Available first in Korea, the R55 shipping with the hybrid drive option will come with a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB of memory, a GeForce Go 7400 for video, and a DVD rewriter. It should sell for the equivalent of $1,939 in the region but will find different prices in Europe and other regions that carry Samsung's notebook PC line. [via MobileWhack]
