Hybrid laptop drive on Newegg?

[Fraggable]

I was searching for a new drive for my HP DV8235NR and ran across this Samsung drive listed as a hybrid drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822152089

As far as I can tell it only has 256MB of NAND memory, I guess that's non-volatile memory. The drive is actually a good price, even without the memory.

So am I just out of the loop or were these drives not supposed to show up for another few months? What does a measly 256MB of memory on a HDD do for you for performance?

A little research reveals that this is only an advantage in Vista, where the 256MB of NAND memory is used for ReadyBoost. In XP it does nothing. However, apparently the drive itself gives some great performance, approaching 3.5" desktop drives according to the 1 review I found.

 

[zig3695]

yup its for readyboost. i figure it will be much faster then a usb flash drive, but even microsoft recommends to equal the amount of ram you have with readyboot ram to get the absolute most performance. certainly within a year from now you will see harddrives with 2 and 4gb of flash ram on them, those will be the speed kings.

 

[bigal40]

Yeah in a year or so when they have >160gb 7200RPM hybrid drives with at least 2gb of flash memory I'll be ready to upgrade to vista and pgrade my HD

 

[zig3695]

heh. i just tossed out my last xp key. a 3 boxes are now running vista, oem home premium flavor. the laptop came with vista on it, so i really only had to buy two keys, and for the 1/2 off oem type price i was pleasantly surprised how affordable it was to convert everything to vista. of course, all three pc's were capable of running it, thats the big key.

 

[erwos]

A lot of the newer Santa Rosa laptops come with TurboMemory - in which case you don't need a hybrid drive, since the flash is already on the motherboard.

The actual performance benefits are kind of slim right now, except in a couple corner cases.

 

[zig3695]

i think the benifits of readyboost are more felt then they are potrayed on benchmarks. everytime i add a readyboost drive to a vista box it just seems smoother, even though it might not be a great deal quicker.