Comeback of Seagate in Hybrid HDD?

From a reliable source, we learned that Seagate Technology could announce this year a new hybrid disk drive, a device with a small flash memory being used as a cache for the magnetic device.

The company – with the Momentus 5400 PSD -, as well as Samsung – Spinpoint MH80 -, launched this kind of hybrid units in 2007. But there was finally no market for them, notably because Windows Vista was unable to manage properly the two memories.

The other HDD makers didn’t follow their two competitors in this field.

Apparently, it’s better now with Windows 7, at least for SSDs with TRIM, but we have understood that Seagate could probably include into its controller the functionality to optimize the transfer of data between flash and disk platters.

It remains to be seen if this hybrid device will stop the momentum of SSDs. Maybe for a while and for high-capacity units.