Seagate's 2.5" SATA Momentus 5400 laptop drives, offered in 80-160GB sizes, come with 256MB of Flash to add some fast-as-all-hell precaching when needed — so long as the operating system remembers to get its digital ducks in a row, of course.
In practice, Seagate says, the hybrid drives will chop average boot times by about a quarter (40 to 32 seconds) and nearly halve the power consumption of the drive, compared to nonhybrid spinning disks. Getting Vista to get better results, however, is another matter entirely: ExtremeTech has Seagate's Melissa Johnson on record blaming the OS for "not getting the orders-of-magnitude experiences that Microsoft originally touted."
Hybrids won't deliver huge benefits, she said, until issues with the BIOS and device drivers are fixed by Redmond.
Seagate told us, however, that the hybrid tech was still a "sea change" that would ultimately spread across the entirety of its line. Volume shipments will hit the channel some time this month, and it'll be on Newegg well before Christmas.
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