Samsung Electronics, a leading maker of consumer electronics, semiconductor and other electronics products, on Monday announced its new system-on-chip (SoC) that will enable relatively cost-effective making of so-called hybrid disk drives (HHD).

Samsung’s SoC solution for the hybrid drive incorporates a Serial ATA interface with native command queuing, a hard disk drive (HDD) controller, a SDRAM controller, a OneNAND controller (supports up to 4Gb OneNAND memory), and Agere read channel into a single piece of silicon. The SoC solution also includes a dual CPU core (ARM7 and ARM9) embedded to enable independent operation of the memory, HDD, and motor.

Hybrid hard drives are hard drives with conventional rotating media and SDRAM cache that incorporate additional flash memory cache along with special logic. Whenever cache is filled with the data that the system may require, the rotating media stops, which means that such drives are not only faster compared to typical HDDs, but also are more power efficient and more reliable. The HHD’s advanced capabilities should be supported by operating system, which currently limits their support to Microsoft Windows Vista.

Leading makers of hard disk drives, including Seagate and Samsung, said that they would produce HHDs in 2007. However, given that Samsung is virtually the only maker of semiconductors, among manufacturers of hard disk drives, it may have some advantages over the rivals, who either have to get the appropriate SoCs from Samsung, similar components from other makers or utilize multiple chips from third party suppliers. The South Korea-based maker emphasized that the hybrid drive solutions Samsung developed are collaborated efforts of each business division: memory, system LSI and storage.

Samsung plans to mass produce the SoC in November.