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Samsung’s hybrid hard drives as most of you know, are a mix between flash memory which has faster read/write speeds then traditional hard drives and regular hard drives. They are being added as a buffer to replace the previous 2MB of cache that most of today’s drives have. The new drives will have 128MB or 256MB of buffer to allow for faster transfer of data between the processor, memory and hard drive.

The new HHDs are supposed to appear on the market by early 2007, about the same time that Windows Vista is released to the public market. Conventional cache is volatile memory that is erased when the drive is turned off. HHDs will add a new layer of cache consisting of Flash memory that is non-volatile which can be used faster when the drive is powered on of course.

Aside from the new buffer that is being added to the drives, nothing new has yet been released about how big the magnetic part of the hard drives will be yet. We can only hope they will all be TB level drives, but of course they will probably start out being just your typical 120GB and 250GB models.

Samsung is also still reportedly working on solid state hard drives (SSHD) that will be composed of completely flash memory which would allow for a huge jump in transfer speeds within the computer. It would almost eliminate the need for separate memory and hard drive storage space. You could realistically use virtual memory and it would transfer just as fast as traditional DDR RAM.

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