Hitachi-LG HyDrive merges optical drives with SSDs
updated 10:55 am EDT, Mon May 31, 2010
Hitachi-LG HyDrive
Hitachi-LG started its week at Computex with its unusual HyDrive. The storage combines a thin, slot-loading Blu-ray combo drive with a 32GB or 64GB solid-state drive. Its creator sees it as a way of creating netbooks, tablets and ultraportables that can fit an optical drive without needing a second drive bay.
The SSD component has a peak read speed of 175MB per second and writes at a maximum 60MB per second; Hitachi-LG claims it can be 30 to 60 percent faster than a rotating hard drive for booting up and loading apps. Both the SSD and the Blu-ray drive attach through SATA II.
Moneual will be the first company to use the HyDrive in a shipping product and plans to ship the Family PC with the drive in August. ASUS' N61DA notebook and future Eee Top all-in-ones will also have the hybrid storage, and all of AMD's new 8-series system chipsets already support the technology. Stand-alone kits and other customers haven't been unveiled so far, but later variants will have as much as 256GB of space.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Apr 2010
Pretty nifty idea
These would be awesome in future macs (especially the minis). The built-in SSD in the optical drive can serve as the boot drive while the "normal" drive can be for internal storage.