On the heels of its flash-based notebook hard drives, Samsung plans to unveil a hybrid hard drive (HHD) which combines a standard hard drive with flash memory. The benefit of such a drive will be to speed up computer boot times by using the flash memory to provide hibernation support as well and storage for boot-time data.
Samsung will introduce the new drive at the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) later in May where Microsoft will unveil the Windows ReadyDrive technology necessary to support HHDs. ReadyDrive will ship with Vista.
Samsung also hopes that hybrid disk drives will become a lead-in to future flash-based hard drives which could hit the market as early as next year.