Toshiba Launches Two New High Capacity Hybrid Hard Drives
Toshiba Corporation today announced that it will launch two 2.5-inch form factor Hybrid Drives that bring new levels of high speed read and write performance to notebook and desktop PCs. The new drives, which integrate high capacity hard disk drives and NAND flash memory in a single unit, will be available in two capacities, 1 terabyte (TB) and 750 gigabytes (GB). Sample shipments started today.
The new drives—the 1TB MQ01ABD100H and the 750GB MQ01ABD075H—use hard disks to deliver high level capacity and 8GB NAND flash memory as a cache memory to support high speed data throughput. As a result, read and write times are about three times faster than in Toshiba hard disk drives with equivalent capacities. In PCs, the new Hybrid Drive reduces application boot times by about 40%. With a 2.5-inch form factor and high capacity, the new drives are ideally positioned as a high performance alternative for portable and desktop PCs.
In operation, data is allocated to one of the Hybrid Drive's three memory layers: DRAM buffer memory, NAND flash memory or the magnetic disk media. This process is enhanced by an algorithm that dynamically learns the user's data access pattern and stores data accordingly to the appropriate tier. High speed access is achieved by storing frequently accessed data in the NAND flash memory.