Hitachi-LG Debuts HyDrive, Optical Drive With SSD 88
MojoKid writes "A fairly new Hitachi-LG joint venture announced the world's first hybrid optical drive, called the HyDrive. This unique device is a notebook optical drive with an SSD built in. When you slide it into your machine and it connects via SATA 3Gbps, your computer recognizes not only a DVD burner / Blu-ray drive, but also a 32GB or 64GB SSD. This configuration allows you to have an SSD without taking up the single 2.5-inch storage slot within your laptop, so you could then have an optical drive, an SSD, and the standard hard drive as well. There are also a few nice tricks you can play in caching with the on-board SSD. Error-correction techniques can be employed that allowed a damaged disk to be be playable." The HyDrive will ship to OEMs in August; a smaller version usable in netbooks is planned for 2011. The Register has some more technical details and specs.
"error correction" (Score:5, Insightful)
And since it's a Blu-Ray device, always remember that "DRM techniques can be employed that allow a valid purchased commodity disk to become unplayable."
Re:Darn... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I first read the title my mind thought about a really kick butt cache drive that allowed you to throw in a DVD/Blu-Ray disc, read in its entire contents in one pass - saving power, increasing performance, and that annoying buzzing sound. Shame what they've created here is nothing remotely that interesting or creative.
What they've created here is a piece of hardware. Exactly how it gets used will largely be determined by software. There is absolutely no reason it could not be used in the way you envision. Maybe Hitachi doesn't plan to implement anything like this... But that wouldn't stop some other manufacturer from developing what you suggest. Or you could write your own software to do it.
In fact I'd even go as far as to say the Optical / SSD combo drive is a useless concept on the face of it.
Space is generally at a premium in laptops. If you can cram an SSD and an optical drive into the same space, you no longer need room for that 2.5"/3.5" laptop HDD/SSD. You can use that space for additional storage... Or you could fit in a bit of bulkier hardware on the motherboard... Or bigger speakers... Or a larger battery... Or better cooling...
As if USB slots are hard to come by or laptops lack SSD/MMC card slots?
Both of which are poor replacements for your internal/primary storage device.
Re:Darn... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I have no problem using a [32|64]GB SSD on my laptop as my root drive and using a 500+GB rotating disk as my primary data storage mechanism (especially since laptop drives are getting up over 500GB into the terabyte+ range) thus giving me the performance boost of SSD for booting and program launching. Since it's rare that I'll be launching a program AND watching a BD movie, I can't see too much contention on that one interface (although I'm not saying there won't be contention, that's just silly) so I think combining the two could be a very smart move. Provided I can use both drives independently and simultaneously.
If it's an either/or then they have created the world's least useful device, I think.
optical drive failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Over the years, if I've had 1 component fail more often than hard drives, it would probably have to be optical drives. I just cannot see tying my SSD to an optical drive.
Re:"error correction" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Darn... (Score:1, Insightful)
What the heck are you smoking? I'm sorry, but how does it not save space? Instead of an internal 2.5" drive for permanent storage AND a SEPARATE optical drive, you now only need the slot for the optical drive for both the optical drive AND permanent storage.
If done right, this should be great for ~12" to 15" laptops. Smaller than this, and you probably won't have an optical drive. Larger than this, and saving space might not be that much of a concern to begin with.
Re:Limited Life of SSDs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. They can state all they want. But until those 5 years have passed, and we have actual data on a significant amount of SSDs, it’s all just wild guesswork right out of the marketing department.
Oh, and others are not pretty similar, but much much worse. You know that, because you deliberately picked Intel. The only manufacturer to have the balls to make up numbers that are in the acceptable range. (But they are still made up. Unless they got a time machine.)
Re:optical drive failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can not see why I would need a optical drive at all anymore...
The OS installs from an USB stick. And the rest goes over the network.
Optical drives are the new floppies. Except that in this case, some anachronistic companies think they can put stuff on them, and actually sell them. Lol. Sell data. Now that’s just silly...