Samsung MH80 Drives It Home

Samsung's new MH80 160-Gbyte hybrid hard drive outperforms standard drives of the same capacity by using a OneNAND Flash chip as its cache buffer. The hybrid hard-drive technology embeds large nonvolatile Flash memory buffers to cache data during most access operations.

Ideally, the drives reduce access time during I/O operations by maintaining highly used data sectors in a buffer. The larger the buffer memory area, the less access time needed to offload data between disk platters and Flash storage.

The MH80 was tested on Hewlett-Packard's 6515b notebook running Windows Vista. Since Samsung was first to market this year with hybrid hard-drive technology for notebooks, it likely aimed to solve Vista's slow boot process.

PRODUCT: SAMSUNG MH80 PRICE: $299 DISTRIBUTORS/ INTEGRATORS: CMS PRODUCTS COMPANY: SAMSUNG SEMICONDUCTOR SAN JOSE, CALIF. (408) 544-4000 www.samsung.com

After several reboots and random reads, engineers found booting Vista with the MH80 was about twice as fast as a standard drive of the same size.

Timing on reads was more difficult to measure. Access time actually began to drop as more data reads were performed during 3-minute testing periods. The difference was not noticeable, however, when data was accessed randomly. Average users should experience faster access during normal operation. Some of the high I/O stress tests stepped outside the bounds of normal operation, so this might explain why engineers could not measure significant gains in read access.

The MH80 comes with a 128-Mbyte or 256-Mbyte Flash memory configuration, a telltale sign that the MH80 series is primarily designed for improving boot speed. What's more, the OneNAND chip on the MH80 comes with Microsoft's ReadyDrive software to boost Vista's boot time.

Hybrid drives consume less power than standard magnetic ones, as platters do not have to constantly rotate during normal operation. Data is offloaded back and forth into its Flash memory buffer. In principle, the drives should last longer, as mechanical movement of heads and platters is cut significantly.