By With the world of cars rather well adjusted to hybrids, the dual powered idea is taking on a new sort of market in its sights. The world of hard drives is soon to enter the quieter, calmer and less environmentally damaging world of personal computing.
Don’t be frightened though, it’s not like you’ll have to fill up your hard drive with gas before downloading something. Hybrids are entering the world of hard disk drives on a conceptual level. 
It seems that the recent occurrences of laptop manufacturers using flash drive storage as opposed to traditional HDD units has led to the specialist storage manufacturers having another look at this technology.
Unlike the rare laptop only flash drives the PC variants will use both a traditional hard drive unit and a NAND flash drive. This leads to the hybrid part of the new storage unit’s name and at the same time offers advantages from both worlds.
A hybrid hard drive would have the same excellent storage capacity of a traditional HDD, but, thanks to use of a single level cell flash drive performance could be drastically improved when and where it matters.
So far, the only manufacturer to test waters again with hybrid hard disk drives is Seagate. Seagate is offering such a storage unit within their 500GB Momentus XT product. The Seagate Momentus XT boosts its performance by using a mere 4GB of flash memory. While the SSD drive used is small in capacity it makes important changes to the speed of the operations that would normally be slowed down by a HDD.
According to market experts, hybrid hard drives could have their rebirth spreading over most of next year as manufacturers come up with their own interpretations. For 2011, it is most likely that the hybrid hard drives available will only be stuck at the 4GB SSD memory but shortly after that things are expected to gain capacity exponentially.
According to a few storage market experts, the market of hybrid hard drive technology is showing great financial promise. Estimates place hybrid HDD/SSD units doubling market share for the next five years and by 2016 a turnover of 600 million units is expected to be achieved by the year 2016.
The biggest reason behind such a promising economic future is the fact that this technology will not add much to the price of a HDD unit. According to manufacturers and distributors, a hybrid hard drive unit could cost somewhere between 30-40 dollars for the end user. This is important as storage units that only use flash memory tend to add 300-500 dollars to the price tag.
Naturally, when speaking of a market in the hardware section that shows this much promise the software developers want a piece of that action. The first software company to create software destined to aid hybrid hard drives is NVELO.
NVELO came up with the Dataplex software which allegedly offers you the best of both worlds, as it offers up to 95% of the performance an SSD has to your typical PC configuration. The problem is that so far, the NVELO Dataplex software only offers this capability when given a 16 GB flash drive.
From what I gather, it’ll be a few years before all the kinks get worked out but when it happens hybrid hard drives could offer the sort of performance Mecca for the PC enthusiast.
