Hybrid Drive - History

History

In 2007 Seagate and Samsung both introduced hybrid HDDs primarily targeted to OEM notebook computer manufacturers. Although the technology was initially supported by Microsoft, a number of issues prevented their success over the next year in the market with Windows Vista.

In May 2010, Seagate launched the Momentus XT 7200 RPM 2.5-inch solid state hybrid drive, which has a 4 GB single-level cell NAND chip, used as a read cache managed by the drive itself. Seagate calls this adaptive memory and claims it removes the OS, driver, and software dependency previously required to take advantage of the integrated flash memory. The SSD portion of this new drive is also now a larger 4 GB, compared to 256 MB in the past. Benchmark results conducted and published by Seagate of the Momentus XT place the 7200 RPM hybrid drive's performance firmly between high-end 10,000 RPM drives and solid-state drives on a number of tasks, such as system boot time and application launch speed. For example, according to these benchmarks, system boot time using this hybrid drive is approximately 41% faster than the same task using a non-hybrid 7200 RPM drive, while a "best-in-class" solid-state drive performs approximately 44% faster than a standard 7200 RPM drive on the same test. According to The Register, in the first year after launch Seagate sold 350,000 units of this hybrid drive.

In 2011, Hitachi LG (HLDS) introduced its own hybrid hardware.

In October 2012, Apple Inc. presented Fusion drive. While not a hybrid-drive per se, technology is using standalone Solid-state drive and a Hard drive to improve performance.