X-bit labs

Seagate Announces Hard Disk Drive with Flash Cache.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/07/2006 | 04:14 PM ]

Seagate Technology, the global largest maker of hard disk drives (HDDs), on Wednesday unveiled the world’s first hard drive featuring large flash memory cache, which allows to improve boot up speed, performance as well as battery life of mobile computers. Despite of announcement coinciding with a largest trade-show Computex Taipei 2006, the company will only ship the novelty next year.

Seagate’s Momentus 5400 PSD (power saving drive) product with Serial ATA-300 interconnection will be available in 160GB capacity and will feature 5400rpm motor as well as traditional 8MB static random access memory (SRAM) cache.

The main advantage of the Momentus 5400 PSD is 256MB non-volatile (NAND) flash memory cache, which, when combined with Microsoft’s next-generation Windows Vista operating system will allow to increase boot-up time speed, decrease resume time by 20%, reduce power consumption by up to 50%, improve reliability and increase performance. Seagate did not unveil any characteristics of the NAND cache.

“Microsoft is pleased to be working with Seagate on the next generation of notebook disc drives. Seagate’s new notebook disc drives will be able to take advantage of breakthrough features in Windows Vista that will benefit customers by delivering faster boot times and longer battery life,” said Mike Sievert, corporate vice president of Windows client marketing at Microsoft.

Seagate is not the first one to propose so-called hybrid hard drive (HHD) concept. Microsoft and Samsung have already showcased HDDs with NAND flash cache to demonstrate the significant advantages the slight change in the construction of the hard disk drive brings to end-users. Intel is also proposing a similar technology code-named Robson, but Intel places the flash cache on the mainboard, which means that any hard disk drive, even without flash memory on it, benefits in terms of performance and power saving. Intel is planning to push its Intel NAND technology into the market in early 2007 along with its mobile platform called Santa Rosa.

No matter where the additional NAND flash cache is located physically – on a mainboard of a notebook, or on a print-circuit board of HDD – it will require Windows Vista operating system to be utilized properly, which means that neither Samsung, nor Seagate have to boost the time-to-market of the products.