[CEATEC 2010] Hitachi has decided that components have been getting small enough to build hybrid drives that merge optical, SSD and hard disk technology in the same package. The SSD can be used as a primary drive (OS+apps), which is an excellent setup — or it can be used as a cache for the mechanical drives content (it is claimed that this makes movie playback smoother). That would be the case if you think that the SSD size isn’t big enough. Another advantage of integrating all these components is that the data can be transmitted from the disks to the optical drive for burning, without going through the SATA bus (disk drive data path) — thus saving power. This is an interesting development, although we’re not sure if it will become a commercial success as today’s components are largely seen as “good enough”.
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