Hybrid hard disk drives may revive notebook market

11 September, 2012 Isaac Leung

Hybrid hard disk drives may be the transitional step between the conventional spinning disk magnetic hard drive, and purely solid state drives (SSD).

While it was expected for magnetic hard disks to give way for solid state drives, the cost of pure memory-based storage versus the capacity offered by these solutions posed a problem for Ultrabook makers, as they struggled against tablet devices.

Ultrabooks, which are super-thin laptops, currently use a hard disk drive which has a SSD as cache. This device is 7mm thick, but still considered too thick and slow compared to the instant-on tablets.

An IHS iSuppli Storage Space market brief claims a thinner hybrid HDD measuring just 5mm thick will give the Ultrabook industry something to write home about.

These new hybrid hard disk drives contain a built-in layer of NAND flash memory, offering a new way to store data which is not just backwards-compatible, but also cheaper than pure SSDs.

Hybrid HDDs were introduced in 2006 and 2007 by Seagate and Samsung, but these early versions had low storage capacity, slow speeds, and flash memory of just 256 megabytes.

These companies have made their own advances in the technology, but now, Western Digital and Toshiba have also started developing hybrid HDDs, with 5mm versions expected in 2013.

According to the report, shipments of hybrid HDDs are expected to surge by a factor of six in the course of four years, rising from 1.2 million units this year to 25.0 million units by 2016.

The hybrid HDD may eventually replace many conventional hard disk drives, and revive the ailing notebook market.