Hybrid Drives and Vista - I can’t wait

I saw this article tonight:

TechEd 2006: Hybrid hard drives to become Vista Premium requirement | TG Daily

- At a discussion of flash memory technologies to be included in Windows Vista and “Longhorn” here at TechEd 2006 this morning, Microsoft’s program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres confirmed to TG Daily that inclusion of hybrid hard drives will be a requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo, beginning in June 2007.

In the Windows Logo Device Program Requirements document, version 3.01, quietly released by Microsoft last Friday, storage requirement #0005, whose description has typically read, “Hybrid disk drives or systems that implement a hybrid disk drive must meet the requirements outlined here,” is now followed by this phrase: “This requirement will go into effect for premium mobile systems in June 1 2007.”

Not familiar with hybrid hard drives?

Hybrid drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A hybrid drive is a new type of large-buffer computer hard drive, currently in joint development by Samsung and Microsoft. It is different from standard hard drives in that it employs a large buffer (up to 1 GB) of nonvolatile flash memory to cache data during normal use. By using this large buffer for primary data storage, the platters of the hard drive are at rest almost all of the time, instead of constantly spinning as they are in modern-day hard drives. This offers numerous benefits, chief among them decreased power consumption, improved reliability, and a faster boot process.

I really can’t wait until these come out and become commonplace. When I boot up my work PC or my laptop, it honestly takes up to 5 minutes sometimes before I can start doing some serious email management, or web browsing. (Which, btw, is a phenomenon I don’t recall seeing on my Mac.) Hard disk speed could definitely use a boost on laptops - this should be super sweet.

Ship it!