A Singapore Institute announced the development of the most advanced in the world 2.5-inch drive - hybrid hard disk thickness of 5 mm and a capacity of up to 1 TB.
Hybrid drive A * STAR armed impressive buffer of non-volatile flash memory 32 GB. Hybrid drives normally use much less capacious flash buffer. In the latest models - there is no more than 8 GB of NAND SLC. We can assume that in the case of a hybrid disc A * STAR it comes to flash memory type NAND MLC, for the cost of the one-bit memory seriously increase the cost of hybrid drives. Such drives on MLC-memory, is going to produce Western Digital company, Seagate company while continuing to create hybrid discs with SLC-flash.
WD has officially announced that the massive supply of 5-mm hybrids will start in autumn next year, capacity 2.5-inch 5 mm in size HDD up to 1 terabyte does not seem to be something fantastic. The theoretical possibility of mass production of 1-Tb platters already exists. Manufacturers still use the drives in 500 Gb plate, even though they have in reserve 667-and 750-Gb 2.5-inch plate.
Separately, A * STAR Institute shared plans to promote hybrid drives in enterprise. Toshiba company , for example, has no plans to produce hybrid data center, considering the brake in this case the lack of programs for sharing. In terms of A * STAR, the presence of a fairly capacious nonvolatile buffer of 50% will reduce the storage consumption, which is a compelling reason to switch to hybrid hard drives. The plan is interesting to note the initiative of Apple. Instead of writing to the buffer SSD frequently accessed data in the new iMac will be using a different technology.
The same technology is similar to today's prototype A * STAR, which means that its appearance in the asset WD and (or) Seagate. This caching can reassign the driver, bypassing the operating system.