Toshiba's NAND/HDD hybrid drives - 9/25/2012 - Electronics Weekly

Toshiba's NAND/HDD hybrid drives

Toshiba is sampling two 2.5-inch form factor Hybrid Drives which integrate HDDs and NAND flash memory in a single unit. They come in two densities - 1Tbyte and 750Mbyte. The drives use 8GB NAND flash memory as a cache memory to support high speed data throughput. As a result, read and write times are about three times faster than in Toshiba hard disk drives with equivalent capacities. In PCs, the new Hybrid Drive reduces application boot times by about 40%* With a 2.5-inch form factor and high capacity, the new drives are positioned as a high performance alternative for portable and desktop PCs. In operation, data is allocated to one of the Hybrid Drive’s three memory layers: DRAM buffer memory, NAND flash memory or the magnetic disk media. This process is enhanced by an algorithm that dynamically learns the user's data access pattern and stores data accordingly to the app...

Full article: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/25/09/2012/5463...