Hybrid hard drives

Has anyone seen the new hard drives from Seagate and Samsung? They have made
a hard drive with a jump drive on it. A hard drive with 256MB of cache.

Aren't HDs with large caches, in some instances -- like random requests -- actually slower, since,
if the requested data is not in the cache, then the cache has to be cleared, and re-written?

"Kirk" <> wrote in message
news:102C73B4-542D-499A-A00D-...
| Has anyone seen the new hard drives from Seagate and Samsung? They have made
| a hard drive with a jump drive on it. A hard drive with 256MB of cache.

The technology that uses these new hybrid hard drives is called Windows
ReadyDrive.
You will generally have a faster system using this technology or at least a
better performing system, with longer battery life for laptops.

"DCR" <> wrote in message
news:E0nch.43365$...
> Aren't HDs with large caches, in some instances -- like random requests --
> actually slower, since,
> if the requested data is not in the cache, then the cache has to be
> cleared, and re-written?
>
> "Kirk" <> wrote in message
> news:102C73B4-542D-499A-A00D-...
> | Has anyone seen the new hard drives from Seagate and Samsung? They have
> made
> | a hard drive with a jump drive on it. A hard drive with 256MB of cache.
>
>

"Gary Mount" <> wrote in message
news:B5A42390-628A-4E0D-873F-...
> The technology that uses these new hybrid hard drives is called Windows
> ReadyDrive.
> You will generally have a faster system using this technology or at least
> a better performing system, with longer battery life for laptops.

It will be interesting to see how well these work from a reliability
standpoint. Flash RAM typically has a limited number of write cycles
allowed (perhaps 100K-1M). I have heard of windows based controller systems
with flash memory instead of hard drives having problems after a few months
unless VM is disabled, the flash cards die in this time.

Regards,
Bob Headrick