Samsung Hybrid Hard Drives to Ship to Users Next WeekCMS Products has begun taking preorders of the new 160-Gbyte SATA 2.5-inch MH80 notebook drive on its Web site, for $299. A company sales associate said the drives should begin shipping at the end of next week, or by July 2 at the latest. Samsung’s first hybrid hard drives will be available for end-user purchase in a week’s time, although only a limited subset of customers with the latest hardware may be able to take advantage of them.

The new drive contains 256 Mbytes of flash memory, which is used as a “write cache” as part of Microsoft’s “ReadyDrive” initiative. The drives store data to be written on the flash cache, writing it all in one fell swoop when the cache is full. Writing the data all at once allows the laptop’s drive to only spin up when it needs to, instead of operating at full speed to write a few bits of data here and there.

The result is a somewhat longer battery life; overall, about 30 minutes, according to Samsung. However, the technology — which Samsung calls “ReadyBoot” cuts the drive’s power between 70 and 90 percent. Moreover, times to boot the PC and resume it from a hibernation state will be cut in half, according to the company.

Trusted Storage Spec Finalized
The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) said on Tuesday that it has finalized a new draft specification for “trusted storage“–basically any hard drive that uses encryption as a means of protecting data.This spec, which builds on previously released storage security use cases, will provide the architecture for implementing trust and security services directly on storage devices and is now being made available to the industry for review, according to TCG.

Seagate’s Michael Willett, who is a member of the TCG storage work group, says that under the new spec, drive encryption and decryption are performed (in hardware) on the drive behind the SCSI or ATA read/write interface, transparent to the user. In other words, when implemented, the encrypt/decrypt function is always on.

Prima tehnologie se refera la o memorie aditionala asemanatoare cu cache-ul actual dar mult mai mare (256 Mb) si cu functii diferite (cache-ul normal va ramane acelasi) iar in cea de’a doua este vorba despre implementarea posibilitatii de criptare a informatie pe HDD direct in componenta hardware …