Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital recently formed a group called “Hybrid Storage Alliance” to promote the diffusion of hybrid hard disks that incorporate flash memories into the traditional architecture.

Those companies are investing into one of the fastest growing segments of the PC industry, and some market research firms estimate that by 2010 35% of the hard drives will be hybrid ones. The incorporation of the flash memory technology should improve the system response of computers using hybrid drives, also reducing the loading time of certain applications.

The Hybrid Storage Alliance is also claiming that the hybrid drives should operate very efficiently under the Vista operating system: “When combined with Microsoft Vista, hybrid hard drives boost the performance and power efficiency of the host system by allowing the hybrid drive to complete read and write requests without requiring the drive to process every seek operation. In some cases, hybrid technology alleviates the need for the drive to even spin up. This is accomplished through the complimentary integration of Flash with traditional hard disk drive technology, enabling the hybrid drive to retain or “pin” a copy of the most critical data in its on-board Flash memory.”

It looks like Microsoft played its cards smartly when negotiating with the hard drive manufacturers. In the near future the most efficient and reliable notebooks will probably feature hybrid disk drives, and if such drives are suited for the Vista people will think twice before running Linux or other alternative operating systems.

Reference: Il Sole 24 Ore and Hybrid Storage Alliance