Seagate finally joins the Hybrid Storage Alliance announcing their first hybrid hard drive (HHD) to OEMs manufacturers. The 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 PSD ships in 80, 120, and 160GB capacities with a SATA 1.5 interface, 8MB of cache, and 256MB of flash memory to buffer cached write requests to disk. Seagate HHDs sports a fairly reduced bootup time of 32 secs rather then the previous 40 secs while cutting from 0.78 to 0.45 watts power consumption. But nothing sort of spectacular as previously projected by the Alliance.

While the gains are noteworthy, hybrid drive technology is nevertheless not delivering the “order of magnitude” improvement it originally promised, due to first-generation, non-tuned drivers for the Vista operating system. “It’s just not getting the orders of magnitude experiences that Microsoft originally touted… there are issues both with the BIOS and devices drivers; they don’t know how to utilize the flash,” Johnson said.

Via Engadet and ExtremeTech