Samsung Hybrid Hard Drive for laptops ships

Samsung is betting heavily on Hybrid Hard Drives (HHDs) for portables and much like hybrid vehicles, HHDs aim to use up less juice while doing their thing. Samsung's MH80 series of 2.5-inch drives come in 80/120/160GB flavors and augment that traditional storage with either 128MB or 256MB of the company's trademark NAND flash. Samsung claims that the drives offer five times the reliability of a traditional hard drive, boot Windows 50 percent faster (by caching data in that flash, natch) and eat up 70-90 percent power, which translates into roughly 30 more minutes of laptop time. Unfortunately, all of those great features are gonna cost you...probably. Samsung hasn't revealed how much the drives cost as they're only shipping them to OEMs for now. But keep your eyes peeled as they should start popping up as options for high-end portables.

For more on the drives:
- see this Engadget post