Seagate Technology said on Tuesday that it had teamed up with Intel Corp. to demonstrate its forthcoming solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) at Intel Developer Forum. The new Seagate hybrid hard drive will, for the first time, utilize Intel Smart Response caching technology. The two companies believe that the new SSHDs from Seagate will offer great performance amid large capacities for ultrabooks.

"Solid state hybrid drives will help ultrabook designers achieve key price points and performance goals. SSHD products are being embraced by industry leaders such as Intel as demonstrated by the collaborative efforts with the SATA-IO member companies leading to Seagate’s new hybrid drive capabilities, which can significantly improve SSHD performance and help drive general adoption in the PC ecosystem during 2013 and beyond," said Emil Yappert, vice president of product line management at Seagate.

At this year’s forum, Intel will announce support for the Serial ATA international organization (SATA-IO) hybrid information feature with Intel Smart Response Technology, targeted for a release in the second half of 2013. According to Intel and Seagate, Intel smart response technology is expected to accelerate the performance of solid state hybrid drives enabled with the SATA IO hybrid information feature by up to 30%, as measured by the PCMark Vantage HDD suite. Microsoft has also included native support of solid state hybrid drives in Windows 8, utilizing the flash memory of the drive to achieve best-in-class boot performance.

In the Advanced Technology Zone of the event, Intel will demonstrate Seagate’s latest solid state hybrid drive design, accelerated with Intel smart response technology, which run common office productivity applications almost on par with solid state drives.

Current-generation Seagate Momentus XT 750GB hybrid hard disk drives comes in 2.5" form-factor, uses Serial ATA-600 interface, 7200rpm motor and combines the magnetic media with 8GB single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash cache. The Momentus XT uses Adaptive Memory technology to identify data usage patterns, and then moves the most frequently retrieved sectors to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. By contrast, Intel's smart response technology is a fully-fledged caching solution that involves larger amounts of NAND flash memory and therefore can cache not only frequently accessed LBAs, but current states of applications, enabling rapid standby, resume and other functions. For Seagate, this is a complete change of concept.

“Solid state hybrid drives accelerated with Intel Smart Response Technology should enable more innovative Ultrabook and all-in-one desktop system designs,” said Adam King, Intel director of notebook product marketing.

Tags: Seagate, HDD, SSHD, HHD, Intel