The drives themselves were meant to launch with Vista, and while they are about a month late, they have still arrived in ‘the first quarter of 2007’, which is what Samsung promised.

The drive itself is dubbed the MH80, and while there is no pricing yet available, we know that it is a 2.5-inch hard drive suitable for notebooks and is available in 80Gb, 120Gb and 160Gb capacities, coming with either 128Mb or 256Mb of Samsung’s OneNAND memory, their ‘premium NAND flash memory’.

The MH80 is optimized for Vista and is designed to work with Microsoft’s ‘ReadyDrive’, which is meant to deliver 50% faster boot and resume times, 20 to 30 minutes of extra battery life depending on the notebook as the drive users 70-90% less power than regular hard drives, and greater reliability as the physical hard drive itself will be used less often thanks to the flash memory.

It’s worth noting that ReadyDrive is different to ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost is the name given to USB flash memory drives that plug into desktop or notebook computers to effectively deliver the same kind of boost that ReadyDrive offers. The big difference between the two seems to be that ReadyDrive designates flash memory that is built directly into the hard drive.

There are concerns that flash memory only has a limited read/write lifespan, and the inability to replace the flash memory that is built into a hard drive, but previous statements from Microsoft have suggested that the ReadyDrive/ReadyBoost technologies are designed with flash memory lifespans in mind, and that today’s flash memory devices have a much longer lifespan than those of a few years ago.

There is also concern that while ReadyBoost can easily handle USB flash drives up to 2Gb in size and larger, Samsung’s new MH80 ReadyDrive only has 256Mb of memory. However at the CES 2007 show in Las Vegas, Samsung engineers stated that 256Mb represented the right balance between price and performance. In any case, there can be no doubt that flash memory sizes will increase in drives in the future if deemed necessary and/or is demanded by consumers.

Samsung is part of the Hybrid Drive Alliance, which wants to use flash memory in conjunction with magnetic hard disk drives as a form of ‘write cache’ to speed up access to commonly used data.
So, you can expect to see new notebook computers from different manufacturers now boasting that in addition to running Vista, they also come equipped with a Samsung ‘ReadyDrive’ to boost performance even further. It likely won’t be long before all drives come with hybrid technology either, taking computer performance to yet another level for consumers and businesses, while hard drive technology itself battles with pure flash ‘hard drive’ alternatives.

But hard disk drives shouldn’t worry about being superseded just yet: the price for hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk technology is still far, far cheaper than the equivalent in flash. Nevertheless, with the availability of pure flash drives on the market, and now these new hybrid models, flash has reached a level of maturity that hard drive makers have found impossible to ignore.
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