Topic: Hybrid Hard Drives – Not for This Windows Vista

[Amker]

Hybrid hard drives had at one point the potential of becoming mandatory for all laptops labeled with the Windows Vista Premium logo. But apparently the momentum behind the intimate integration between Microsoft's latest operating system and hybrid hard drives has warren out even before the products managed to debut on the market. Additionally, it seems that while the technology is ready to go, the Redmond company has lost faith in it and is no longer willing to back it with the necessary support. The earliest hybrid 
hard drive notebooks, were planned  for mid 2007, but that moment is long gone and brought with it only a
delay.

A hybrid hard drive is a bundle between a traditional hard drive and flash memory designed to act as a data cache. Essentially, the role of a hybrid hard drive is to increase operating system performance, enhance application response times, cut power consumption and whack the duration associated with the start-up process. The IDEMA (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association) DiskCon conference on September 19 was the stage where HDD (hard disk drive) and SSD (solid state drive) makers pointed the finger at Microsoft for not supporting hybrid hard drives with optimized drivers.

Windows Vista features technologies such as Windows ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive designed to take advantage by additional Flash data cache. But that is all that Microsoft has done to help with the market traction of hybrid hard drives, while the companies behind the product warn that the initiative will fail without the necessary drivers. Still there are additional reasons for a potential failure of the technology. In fact the benefits delivered by hybrid hard drives does not seem to justify the additional price.

"It's all dependent on Vista, and so far, Vista has placed a demand that you have to have a hybrid hard drive to have the Vista premium logo, but now they're not supporting the [driver] development that needs to take place," stated John Rydning, IDC analyst as cited by eWEEK. "All the hard drive manufacturers have found little issues about how the integration has worked; this needs to be sorted out, but it hasn't happened. If it doesn't happen—there's kind of this crunch coming up and people are starting to wonder, 'Is Microsoft still going to keep that Vista Premium requirement for having a hybrid hard drive?'"

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