GiantSitel's Mix and Match Blog: Interesting New Type of Hard Drive

Well, ok. Probably not the most interesting of things for me to talk about, however it is quite intriguing. Everything from Cars to Computers have a branch called 'Hybrids'. In the more commonly known Hybrid Cars you have both an internal combustion engine (small Petrol engine) and an electric motor system. They effectively work in parallel, but with the electric motors taking priority at lower speeds. This gives the 'best of both worlds' the top speed of the petrol engines, and the fuel-efficient electric motors for 'town-cruising'. The Toyota Prius has sold over 2 million units - just to show the popularity of these systems.

This is more than slightly related to the Hard Drive I am about to talk about, for it is a Hybrid Hard Drive. Now for some of you this might seem very foreign in deed. So first I must talk about the two common varieties of current Hard Drives.

The 'Old-Fashioned' (and most common) are the IDE/SATA Hard Drives, which are mechanical and effectively are a step further forward from a spinning disk(They have several arms and levels to improve efficiency). They operate at 5,400 rpm up to 10,000 rpm. These have become very cheap sources of data storage, with a 1TB Hard Drive being available for around the £50 mark quite readily. However due to the mechanical motions cause problems during transport/shaking etc and it also takes time for the drives to 'spin-up' to these quite high speeds!

SATA 500GB Hard Drive

The 'New and Improved' Hard Drives are the SSD (Solid State Drives), which are frankly, just big USB memory stick except they are designed to go inside the computer. They use flash memory which has instant access capabilities - you can access any part of the drive from any part of the drive instantly whereas this would take time with the spinning Hard Drives. They are better for many reasons, there energy usage is a lot lot lower (giving better battery life for laptops), the transfer rate of data is a lot quicker, and they are instant to spin up to maximum speed and are effectively completely turned off when not in use(therefore no wasted energy). There durability is also incredible as they have no moving parts - the only things that will do damage is a sledge hammer or lots of water! (Or maybe a Land Rover...anyway I digress). The only disadvantage is the cost(currently), for a similar 1TB drive would cost £2/3 THOUSAND, for the £50 needed to buy the 1tb Sata HD you wouldn't be able to get anything larger than a 32gb SSD Drive - This is clearly a huge price difference!

120GB SSD Drive

However, there is now a new compromise, a hybrid of sorts. It combines the best features of both a SATA Hd and an SSD Drive. I won't go into the technical details, other than it contains a 4gb SSD drive as well as incorporating a traditional 500GB HD. The clever part is how it uses the SSD. Anything the hard drive thinks you will use frequently(Like the Operating system), will be stored on the SSD part of the drive(Only the really really commonly used files), meaning that when they are needed it is instantly released to the hard drive bus at a speed of around 300mb/s. It will also learn from your common usage, it has been shown that the first boot up of this drive it is only the same speed as a normal hard drive, however by the 5th boot-up, it will have doubled its speed(or halved boot-up time!), an incredible feat. All for a price that is relatively reasonable, a 500gb Hybrid for ~£90.00!