Nowadays, all leading laptop manufacturers are offering laptops with a hybrid HDD-SSD primary memory and high-end, high-performance laptops with complete SSD memory.
We hope to see HDD and SSD combinations or future hybrid HDDs that would support write caching, particularly for notebook and especially ultra-thin notebook computers.
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Nimble Storage makes a hybrid HDD and SSD storage systems that allows customers to scale to hundreds of terabytes and hundreds of thousands of IOPS in a single storage cluster, according to the company.
Also introduced were the U150 (sadly enough with no specs, besides the fact that it also ships with both HDD and SSD storage) and the WindBox, an Atom N270-based nettop designed to be VESA-mounted to the back of your monitor.
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Lower prices could make hybrid HDD (or dual storage with both a HDD and an SSD) storage the highest volume ultra-thin notebook computers.
Seagate Technology is a leader in HDD enterprise storage solutions and it makes a lot of sense for them to leverage their HDD and SAS SSD storage offerings with developing PCIe products.
Under the hood, this guy packs an Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB memory, an ATI Mobility Radeon HD GPU (up to 1GB DDR3 VRAM), and either a 500GB HDD or 64GB SSD.
The lower capacity products are intended for dual storage Ultrabook computer configurations where the mSATA SSD will be combined with a HDD in an Ultrabook with performance approaching that of a pure SSD laptop but with overall storage costs approaching those of a HDD.
The U115, is the world's first netbook capable of simultaneously running SSD and HDD.
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At that price, it comes with a Core i3-3217U processor, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD with a 32GB SSD.
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To further simplify things, certain configuration options are the same across the board: backlit keyboards, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 500GB in HDD storage with an optional 32GB SSD to help hasten performance.
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Thus the actual growth of both enterprise flash and HDD storage capacity are not much different (and note that the HDD capacity shipments are measured in Exabytes while SSD capacity is in Petabytes).
The "A-Drive" also addresses limitations of the popular, yet expensive, flash-based SSD, as well as the conventional HDD for the consumer and business industry.
The "A-Drive" represents the next generation of storage innovation providing capacities of up to 1 TB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with 32 GB Solid State Drive (SSD).
Storage-wise, you're looking at a 128GB and 750GB SSD, or just the 750-gig HDD.
PCs will be the hardest hit by the HDD shortage for reasons that were recently enumerated in The SSD Guy blog.
Thus flash memory in ultra thin notebook computers will be most popular ether incorporated into a hybrid HDD (such as those offered by Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Toshiba) or as a dual storage device configuration where the OS and applications are stored on a small SSD and user data is stored on a HDD.
These approaches can combine a smaller SSD that stores the operating system and applications and a larger HDD that is used for user data, or a hybrid HDD that has flash memory inside a HDD that is used to store frequently accessed data on the flash with less used data kept available on the HDD.
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It, too, has 500GB of HDD storage, but in this case it's paired with a 16GB SSD, not a 32GB drive.
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Considering that Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital are all in the SSD business I expect to see more interaction and joint development of HDD and flash products in future industry offerings.
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This approach is said to offer a significant performance boost to a HDD only computer and at a much lower cost for a given storage capacity than a SSD only computer.
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It's exchanging third-gen Intel Ivy Bridge silicon for a fourth-gen Haswell chip and upgrading from an NVIDIA GTX 660M to a GTX 765M GPU. Oh, and Razer's nixed the HDD options from the big Blade's menu -- the Pro packs a 128GB SSD standard, with optional upgrades to 256 or 512GB.
What's more, if you saw the first part of this upgrade diary, then you'll know I was aiming for a trickier-than-average setup, with Windows 8 Pro running on a brand new and untouched SSD, alongside Windows 7 Ultimate running in dual-boot mode on my old HDD.
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Using a combination of HDD and flash memory in either a hybrid HDD or a dual storage notebook computer, where frequently used data (and possibly the operating system and application software) is kept in the flash memory, while the bulk of user content is kept on the HDD, has been shown to provide about 80% of the performance improvements of a pure SSD-based computer.
There will likely be some fall-out for high performance HDDs in these markets and the HDD companies such as Seagate, HGST (part of Western Digital) and Toshiba are introducing their own enterprise SSD products to stay competitive in this high margin business.
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