Seagate shipping their first Hybrid Hard Drives for notebooks
October 8 Carl Nelson
Subscribe to our FULL RSS feed!
Although they were a bit late to ship their hybrid drives compared to Samsung, Seagate are now shipping their first units to retail and OEMs as of today.
Hybrid hard drives are an exciting development for laptop users, as they have various advantages specific for mobile computing. For instance, Seagate is claiming that just by swapping out your current hard drive with a Momentus 5400PSD, you should expect to improve battery life by about 20-30 minutes (depending on usage). As know first-hand, those extra 20-30 minutes can be very crucial when trying to finish that last document.
The best thing about these hybrid drives is that their technology is instantly recognized and supported by all versions of Vista. Simply swap the drive out, and Vista will engage ReadyDrive, which puts the most commonly accessed data into the hybrid’s cache, and attempts to park the drive as much as possible, and SuperFetch, a technology which pre-loads data into the cache that is expected to be accessed more often.
Furthermore, the Momentus 5400PSD can withstand more shock than any previous laptop drive - up to 900 G. Imagine holding your laptop above your head, and dropping it to a concrete floor. The laptop will very likely be destroyed - surely it won’t boot up. But the drive will remain intact, and all data on it will be safe.
This combination of performance, durability, and lower power consumption makes what has to be one of the coolest advancements in hardware for notebook users. I can’t wait to review one of these.
Filed under: Mobile Computing
Tags: Mobile Gaming, New Products, Peripherals, Power Consumption, Vista
No comments yet.