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The 2.5-inch MH80 Series, combining advanced NAND flash memory with a magnetic hard disk, became available Wednesday in sizes of 80 GB, 120 GB, and 160 GB. With either 128 MB or 256 MB of flash memory and Microsoft 's ReadyDrive software, the drive uses flash memory to reduce disk accesses.

The new drive is optimized for notebook  PCs running Windows Vista, where battery life and start-up or resume times are important. Only Vista supports ReadyDrive, so only Vista users will benefit from the drive's advantages.

Available to OEMs

The unit is now available to computer manufacturers to include in their products, and Samsung says it will soon be offered through retail outlets. While prices have not been announced for consumers, Joseph Unsworth, a Gartner analyst, said the raw costs to Samsung of the additional flash memory and controller should be under $5, possibly indicating that the drive might not cost much more than traditional notebook PC drives.

What is especially notable about the new device is that, according to Samsung, it offers as much as a 50 percent reduction in boot or resume times, and consumes 70 percent to 90 percent less power than a standard hard drive. For battery-life-conscious laptop users, these figures could mean as much as 30 minutes more of battery life.

In addition, Samsung claims, because the hard drive part of the device spends as much as 99 percent of its time doing very little, it will be less vulnerable to shocks and more reliable.

But it will be difficult for Samsung to explain the benefits to customers, Unsworth said. "And it will be difficult for PC OEMs -- Dell, HP , and the others -- to maintain the inventory of regular hard drives, hybrid disk drives, and the various versions of each," he noted. "That's a lot of product to manage. If it's much more difficult for Dell to manage, Dell simply won't carry it."

Intel's Alternative

Unsworth added that Intel's upcoming Robson technology, with assisting flash memory on the motherboard, could be a lot simpler for PC companies to handle because standard hard drives will be used and there could be a development kit or module for the new motherboard component, making it easy to implement.

"Microsoft was going to include hybrid disk drive as part of its premium Vista recommendation," he said, "but that's now been delayed until 2008." In the long run, he said, the opportunity for hybrid drives might lie more in gaming and GPS navigation systems than in business laptops.