Thread: Hybrid Drives

These are hard drives that include both rotating disks as well as Flash memory based storage. This is an attempt to combine the benefits of the two types of storage media: the inexpensiveness of rotating platters and the non-volatility of Flash memory.

The Flash memory component in a hybrid drive is merely a temporary storage area; the data is finally written onto the disk. Like the cache in , regular hard drives, the Flash memory improves performance, and since unlike cache memory the data is not lost when powered down, startup time is reduced since there is no longer the need to wait for the disks to rev up.