Seagate, Toshiba to Make SSD + HDD Hybrid?

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The best of both worlds, perhaps?

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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • chodaboy
    I think i'd rather have a single drive(casing) with 1 ssd partition (boot, so it will need to be bigger then 4GB) and another partition that stores the data on a platter. This way i'll be able to fit this into my notebook's single slot.
    Reply
  • joytech22
    Sounds interesting, would definitely be cheaper than a SSD while reading the most-used files faster.
    Also make's a sizable HDD but the memory could be increased to at least 10-15gb to hold a good amount of startup applications and other frequently used app's.
    Reply
  • Is this not the sort of thing that was being talked about 5 years ago? And if I recall, Samsung actually produced in 2007?
    And which was at one point going to be a requirement for installing Windows Vista on laptops, before Microsoft came to their senses and realized that would eliminate far too many customers?

    Revolutionary and game changing indeed.
    Reply
  • The Greater Good
    Sounds neat, but not impressive. I'd rather use a 60 gig SSD (or two in a RAID 0) as the boot drive and use a magnetic drive as the storage/backup option. Yeah, it will cost more... but the speed will be worth it! Well, worth it if you hate waiting for things to load.
    Reply
  • maigo
    Wouldn't all the read/write cycles of a 500 meg drive kill the 4 gigs of SDD extra fast?
    Reply
  • zodiacfml
    for me, its good if the price premium over a standard HDD for the same disk space is around $20-$50. i don't game a lot and don't use professional apps so they can be installed on the hdd.
    Reply
  • An online store here in Finland already have it posted as a pre-order product, 148 Euros for the 500GB part, but then again, here the taxes are much higher.

    The Specs.:

    Kapasiteetti: 500 GB + 4 GB (SSD)
    Pyörimisnopeus: 7200 rpm
    Välimuisti: 32 MB (Cache)
    Form factor: 2.5"
    Korkeus: 9.5 mm (Height)
    Liitäntä: SATA2 (3 Gb/s)
    Reply
  • AsianJetlag
    Pretty useless tech I have to say.

    Just wait 2-3 years for SSD manufacturing costs to drop.
    Reply
  • cmcghee358
    Seems to me it will lack the performance of SSDs, all the while being more expensive than it's HDD counterparts. Mediocrityx2. No thanks. Especially when you can get a 30-40GB SSD for 80-120 bucks. Nice try but they won't find a customer base for this until the SSD portion exceeds an OS install by 150% at least.
    Reply
  • shin0bi272
    wouldnt this be along the lines of buying a usb flash drive and a standard hard drive (except for the speed diff on the ssd vs usb of course)? Here buy this 500gb hard drive and we'll throw in a 32gb usb flash drive. Then you could install windows to the flash drive and save everything else on your 500 gb drive. Why not just buy a 32gb ssd and keep your current hd? I mean seriously at this point who is buying their first computer? With current prices on 32gb ssd's in the 100 dollar range its not really that much of a stretch to think that people wont be getting an SSD as their boot drive soon.
    Reply