Hybrid hard drives (like Samsung 160GB) useful?

[Steve06]

Hi,
I wonder if one of the new so-called hybrid hard drives, like the Samsung SpinPoint MH80 160GB/256MB Flash SATA (HM16HJI) would be of any use as a replacement of one of the standard hard drives the T61 ships with.
1. Do you think it speeds up the loading of applications?
2. Do you think the flash saves battery life?
3. Is the T61's Active Protection System part of the hard drive? So does the Samsung offer similar protection?

As a con I read that the hard drive's life could be limited due to flash memory, since flash memory chips only allow for a certain number of writes.

Thank you for any comments.

Steve

[erik]

from my limited homework a 7200 rpm drive is still markedly faster than a hybrid.

active protection is compatible with any rotating hard drive.   the computer's gyroscope senses excess movement and sends a call to the HDD to unmount, regardless of brand/size drive installed (except SSDs).

[SHoTTa35]

well compared to the benchmarks it seems to load stuff faster. The flash RAM is good especially in Vista. Windows XP i don't think will take much advantage of it but with Vista and ReadyDrive you can shut down and boot up much faster and Vista (or the drive - not sure which) loads lots of data into the HD NAND Flash so that when the user requests it the data is loaded up without any delay

The other benefit is that they have the fast access time (loading like before) but they allow the mechanical portion of the drive to shut down therefore saving power. The laptop should run longer as the platters only spin up to get new data not already in the cache then shuts back down after a while. With Vista's learning habbits all your frequently used stuff will probably get loaded so it wont use the platters that much.

[DAH]

Seems to me that people are forgetting, we are only talking about 256MB not even half a GB of flash. My T60p has two GB of memory that is going to be way faster than the 256 MB of flash. Vista, the OS would not even fit on the first hard drive that I own. That 256 MB of flash will need to be loaded and read 8 times to fill my memory. Seems to me that all that will happen for most users is a lot more power up and power down of the hard drive. And powering up the hard drive and bringing it to 7200 rpm will involve a lot more power consumption than maintain the drive at 7200 rpm.

Give it say 10 GB of flash ram and I would be interested, with only 256 MB, I'd want some one else to work the bugs out.