Samsung ships a hybrid notebook

ONE OF SELLING points of Intel's upcoming Santa Rosa chipset is Robson technology, or selling more Intel-Micron flash modules.

However, when we talked with Seagate AT last years' IDF in San Francisco, we learned that hybrid hard drives are on the way. Around a month ago, Samsung begun shipping 80GB hard drives featuring 256MB of very fast flash memory, replacing THE old 8MB and 16MB DDR333 and DDR400 chips.

After sampling A decent amount of hybrid hard drives, Samsung introduced its first notebook featuring a hybrid hard drive, coming to a selected country near you. Samsung does not ship its posh notebooks to the USA, however.

The R55 comes with 15.4-inch LCD, Intel's dual-core processor at 1.83GHz, a GeForce Go 7400 graphics card and the already-mentioned hybrid hard drive. The price is set at 1900 US dollars, which is a bit steep if you ask us.

Samsung claims the hard drive offers 26 per cent read and 71per cent write advantage over classical hard drives when hard drive handles files smaller than 10 Mb, lowering the power consumption by a third.

Sadly, every novelty has to be paid for. µ