Samsung has actually begun shipping hybrid hard drives to computer manufacturers. The small amount of flash memory incorporated into the drive will let it spin up less often to save power and decrease boot times.
Their MH80 line of drives will be available in capactities of 80, 120 and 160 GB. That pretty much covers the sweet spot for drives sold for the average PC today. They will also be available with either 128 MB or 256 MB of flash memory. That seems a little small, but Samsung thinks these capacities offer the proper price to performance ratio.
Just a couple notes on the drive: it is designed with Vista in mind and supports Microsoft’s ‘ReadyDrive’. What all of this will translate to is boot and resume times reduced by 50% and 70-90% power savings. That will give you extended battery life on notebooks – and that is where I think these drives offer the most gains.
