Toshiba have already announced plans to realse mechanical harddrives with integrated NAND Flash cache and thinks it will make a big impact in retail. The company is not as positive when it comes to the business market, due to lack of demand.
So called hybrid harddrives are expected to become more common the near future, not the least in cheap ultrabooks as an alternative to SSD. Currently Seagate is the only one offering a complete solution with NAND Flash inside a mechanical drive; the Momentus XT series. Toshiba will launch competing products in the future.
“Toshiba continuously watches the market and see if a hybrid solution can benefit in the enterprise space. We do see some potential benefit for such a device, however, at this time Toshiba offers SSDs and HDDs for all required tiers in the enterprise segment. We do not see much demand for a hybrid enterprise HDD at this time,” Joel Hagberg, VP of marketing of storage solutions at Toshiba America Electronic Components.
The advantage of a hybrid harddrive is higher capacity and lower cost compared to a real SSD, and that the drive learns your habits and patterns with time. While Toshiba sees great potential for this kind of products in retail, it no plans to introduce them in the business segment.
The reason is said to be that this will be a too hard and complicated commitment, with few real advantages. Such solyutions doesn’t have a place on a market, since companies buy specific storage media for specific purposes, Toshiba does not rule out the possibility in the future. Toshiba points out that a closer cooperation will be required between componwnts and eco system, than is available today, for hybrid solutions to achieve their full potential. Current hybrids only operate in the hardware and what they are looking for is a closer cooperation with the operating system.
“There are a number of sophisticated elements that need to come together in order to realize the full potential of hybrid HDD technology in user applications. The level of responsiveness and performance that we would like to see associated with this upcoming generation of hybrid HDDs requires cooperation and collaboration from components in the ecosystem. Early caching solutions and hybrid drives have been waiting for the operating system providers to enable features that deliver performance value to the end customers.”
Source: Xbitlabs
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