Samsung launches R55, the first laptop with hybrid hard drive

Do you remember hybrid hard-drives? If you don’t get a quick look here, it about those special hard disks Microsoft promised a few years ago to increase performance and lower consumption in Windows Vista. Time passed, Vista saw the light of day, but no hybrids in sight. That changed today, when Samsung (today’s pioneer in IT industry) launched the R55 laptop, the first production model fitted with a hybrid hard drive.

Samsung promises bit thing with the 80 GB hybrid hard drive under the hood: 26% improvement on data reading and 71% improvement of data writing speed, 32% lower power consumption and increased HDD longevity by 10% (that’s when you use small blocks of data, under 10 MB). The rest of the specs are pretty non important, as you get the same Core2Duo treatment, 15.4 ” wide screen, multistandard optical drive and Windows Vista Premium.

Samsung R55 is just like a Hybrid Car, unspectacular and ordinary

What’s different is the price: 1923 $, pretty steep for 80 gigs storage space (the 256 MB OneNAND flash is for buffer purposes only, so you won’t touch it).

Source: Gizmodo (via PC Joint)