The Data Storage Institute (DSI), one of the many research groups at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and research (A*STAR), has taken the wraps off a hybrid disk drive said to consume less power than a comparable solid state disk while also being small and light enough enough to satisfy Intel's specs for use in …

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Friday 2nd November 2012 07:13 GMT calonddraig

The thinnest storage for your ultrabook... use the A: drive.

Might be best if they pick a different name to market it under... A-Drive smacks too much of floppies for my liking.

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1. Friday 2nd November 2012 09:25 GMT Robert E A Harvey
  
  A: drive
  
  wasn't that not only the floppy, but the trade name of some high-capacity removable?
  
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  1. Friday 2nd November 2012 11:17 GMT Nigel 11
    
    Re: A: drive
    
    Nicely ironic name if you ask me. It's about the same size as a floppy disk, but stores about six hundred thousand times more about ten thousand times faster. I can think of worse adverts.
    
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Friday 2nd November 2012 09:10 GMT b166er

I don't get this. Tablets and smartphones store up to @32GB, yet it's oh so important for our other portable devices to be able to store 1TB?

Give me solid state in my portables, please.

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1. Friday 2nd November 2012 11:13 GMT Nigel 11
  
  Best of both worlds?
  
  If you never use more than 32Gb this drive will behave like an SSD, because everything you store will be cached in the solid-state part. The difference is that you won't run out should you want to store more. The stuff that you store and subsequently don't refer to for a long time will "disappear" into the magnetic disk. The stuff that is active will be solid-state cached.
  
  Should be the best of both worlds.
  
  Especially if it can tolerate complete failure of the flash cache, and revert to being a magnetic-only disk. Anyone know? The failure mode of solid-state memory is reportedly often to stop working in a flash (sorry). Magnetic disks can also fail like that, but more often degrade progressively and gracefully giving plenty of time to copy your data elsewhere.
  
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  1. Sunday 4th November 2012 02:16 GMT Goat Jam
    
    SSD Failure
    
    I've had two SSD's go titsup on me. In both cases the data remained acessible but the drive would only mount as read-only. This was Linux however, not sure what would happen for Windows.
    
    I'm not saying this is how all SSD's will fail of course. As always YMMV
    
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