Hybrid drives: Coming soon to a laptop near you

Just yesterday we reported on SanDisk's 32 GB, NAND flash-based solid-state laptop drive, which the company has announced for sale to the OEM market. While SanDisk isn't the first vendor to develop such a device, their announcement, along with Samsung's recent NAND flash advancement, is helping to set the tone for this year's Storage Visions conference. Solid-state storage is here, it's a viable option and it's finally (relatively) affordable. Manufacturers of traditional hard drives will see a significant challenge in the coming years from flash drives, though the transition of the mass market will likely coincide closely with the declining price of NAND flash.

In the meantime, there's a middle-ground: hybrid hard drives. Hybrid drives use a small amount of flash memory coupled with a traditional hard drive to offer many of the same advantages of full solid-state drives (data access speed, durability, low power-consumption). And hybrid drives offer more storage at a much lower price than their solid-state counterparts. Hybrid drives are likely to start popping up in many high-end laptops this year and a new vendor alliance, called the Hybrid Storage Alliance, will work to raise the profile of the new technology. Consisting of vendors like Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate Technology, Fujitsu and Toshiba, the alliance will be officially announced at next week's Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas.

For more on hybrid drives:
- see this eWeek article