Toshiba anticipates 2.5" hard drives with NAND flash memory, aka hybrid HDDs, will become commonplace in the notebook market over the next two years. The firm expects half of all mobile HDDs will feature NAND flash in 2015.
Hybrid hard disk drives have been on the market since Seagate Technology and Samsung Electronics introduced their versions in 2006 and 2007, respectively. The popularity of such drives has so far been pretty low and hard drive makers Toshiba Corp. and Western Digital Corp. only recently started to develop hybrid storage solutions. Nonetheless, manufacturers and analysts are optimistic about hybrid storage. Toshiba expects half of mobile hard drives to feature NAND flash cache in just two years of time.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week Toshiba said that it had already started developing next generation hybrid drives and will continue to promote advances in its storage products business, pursuing development of solutions offering higher capacities and performance. The company also said that it expects hybrid drives to account for about half of all 2.5” storage products shipped for the notebook PC market in fiscal year 2015.
