Seagate set to ship hybrid NAND drives

SEAGATE IS CERTAIN of its leading position on the market, and this year's IDF appearance was pretty much low-key, but the point was delivered. While Intel is touting its NAND Flash on a motherboard tech, Seagate is shipping hybrid hard drives under the extension PSD.

If you're not aware what Robson Technology is, the answer is quite simple: flash chip on a motherboard which is used by an operating system, placing all of the important application data close to the system memory, as opposed to talking with the hard drive as the last (and desperately slow) reserve.

We had a nice talk with several industry analysts and Seagate reps, and learned that Microsoft is clearly behind the fast caching technology out there. So, an interesting question is arising: what will bring better performance - extra logic on the motherboard or the integration of the same products (NAND Flash) into the hard drive itself?

It'll make for one interesting benchmarking battle. However, scythe will hit the fan once hybrid 3.5" drives for desktop start receiving the face-lift treatment in the form of embedded flash memory. You can expect those to start hitting the market in 2007. µ