Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that it has begin to offer notebook manufacturers the so-called hybrid hard drives (HHDs), which integrate flash cache to boost performance under Microsoft Windows Vista operating system (OS). Samsung claims that it is the first company to offer such products on the market.

“The MH80 hybrid hard drive provides the ideal solution for two major issues that notebook PC users continually face: faster boot and resume performance and extended battery life,” said Albert Kim, national sales manager, storage systems for Samsung Semiconductor.

Samsung’s MH80 HHDs in 2.5” form-factors are available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities with 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. Samsung claims thanks to its  ReadyBoot technology, the new MH80 offers up to a 50% reduction in boot and resume times from traditional magnetic media technology. In addition, the drive consumes 70-90% less power than a traditional hard drive, which extends the battery life by 30 minutes before a recharge is needed, according to estimations by the manufacturer.

Samsung’s HHDs feature the company’s own System-on-Chip solution for hybrid disk drives, which incorporates a Serial ATA interface with native command queuing, a hard disk drive (HDD) controller, a SDRAM controller, a OneNAND controller (supports up to 512MB 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.

The MH80 hybrid hard drive is currently shipping to select OEM customers and will soon be available in retail and commercial outlets.