CES: Disk-makers join to push flash-embedded drives

The five largest manufacturers of hard-disk drives will work together to promote a new technology that promises to improve system performance, the companies said Thursday.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., Seagate Technology LLC, Fujitsu Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. have formed the Hybrid Storage Alliance group to promote the technology, which is expected to come to market later in the first quarter.

Hybrid disks include flash memory that works like a buffer between the computer system and the disk. The memory will be used for short-term storage heading both to and from the disk and will mean an overall reduction in the amount of time the disk spins. That will reduce power consumption and a performance boost is also expected because reading and writing data from flash memory is significantly faster than from a disk.

"It takes advantage of the capacity of the hard-disk drive and the snappiness of solid-state technology," said Marc Noblitt, senior interface market development manager with Seagate. "When the PC comes out of hibernate it has the correct data in the flash to come out much quicker."

The technology has been developed by Microsoft Corp. and support is built into the new Vista operating system that goes on general sale on Jan. 30. It's designed to eliminate the delay familiar to many computer users while the machine locates and loads a file from the hard disk. By anticipating the next required file and having it in flash memory the system can get it immediately.

The group will evangelize the technology to users and seeks to expand beyond its five members to companies such as chipset vendors and benchmark system makers, said Joni Clark, product marketing manager for notebooks at Seagate.

Several of the companies have already demonstrated prototype drives with built-in flash memory.

Last year Samsung demonstrated drives with 128M bytes and 256M bytes of embedded flash at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle in May and followed up in July by announcing the development of a drive with 4G bytes of flash memory. Both Seagate and Hitachi are planning drives.

Hybrid drives face competition from an Intel Corp.-backed technology called Robson, which seeks to achieve the same benefits by placing a flash memory cache in the computer. It has the advantage of working with any current hard-disk but requires a new interface card, said Noblitt.

"On boot performance and overall performance both should be comparable," said Noblitt. When it comes to battery performance he said he thought hybrid will have the edge. "We're storage companies and we know when best to get data so we think we'll have the advantage."

The Intel system is due in new laptops from the second quarter of this year.