Haven’t hybrid drives been around for awhile now? It seems Toshiba is finally catching up as they’ve just announced their first hybrid hard drive that combines mechanical platters with nand flash memory. It’s basically a hard drive with a small SSD built-in, sort of. The drive is laptop size or 2.5” and you can get it in 750gb or 1tb sizes and it runs off of the 6gb/s SATA interface. Sadly I don’t see any actual speeds listed in the PR, I hope it’s fast though considering how late Toshiba is to the Hybrid drive party..
Toshiba’s Storage Products Business Unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a committed technology leader, today announced customer shipments of its first Hybrid Drive, the MQ01ABDH series. The series provides the ideal combination of performance found in solid state disks (SSDs) and the capacity and cost-effectiveness of hard disk drives (HDDs) with capacities up to 1 terabyte2 (TB).
Developed to enhance the PC user experience, the new 2.5-inch 9.5mm high SATA Hybrid Drive series features “self-learning” caching algorithms that learn the system user’s data access patterns to optimize performance. The self-learning caching algorithms also manage which user data is stored to the NAND Flash for quick response to the near future access from the host, as well as how the data in the NAND Flash is updated based on intelligent access pattern learning.
“Hybrid Drives represent a significant innovative technology for Toshiba in combining the high-performance features of NAND Flash, with the key HDD attributes of large capacity and cost-effective data storage,” said Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Toshiba’s Storage Products Business Unit. “As the only storage company which designs and manufactures HDDs as well as NAND flash, Toshiba is in a unique position to capitalize on these benefits because the expertise on how these technologies function resides within Toshiba.”
Toshiba’s MQ01ABDH series transforms the user experience with extreme responsiveness and breakthrough performance enabling faster system boot-up times and data access. Available in 1TB and 750GB1 capacities, the MQ01ABDH 100 and MQ01ABDH 075 drives are ideally suited for ultrathin and standard-sized notebooks, gaming PCs, all-in-one and slimline desktops and other digital computing applications where a no-compromise approach to system performance and storage capacity is desired.
The MQ01ABDH series will be featured in various notebook PCs, with the first systems shipping in time for the holiday season.
For more information on Toshiba’s line of industry-leading SSDs, HDDs and Hybrid Drives, visit
