Samsung R55 Notebook Features Hybrid Hard Drive

Samsung has announced today the R55, the first laptop featuring hybrid hard drive, which combines a standard hard drive with built-in flash memory.

Along with 80GB hybrid drive at 5400rpm with 256Mb of OneNAND Flash memory, the 15.4-inch widescreen Samsung R55 incorporates Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 CPU at 1.83GHz, nVidia GeForce 7400 graphics card, Super Multi DL optical drive and Windows Vista Premium operating system.

When used for small chunks (up to 10Mb) of data in R55, Samsung claims hybrid hard drive had 26% improvement on data reading and 71% improvement of data writing speed, 32% lower power consumption and increased HDD longevity by 10%.

Samsung R55 is made for Korean market and is priced at around $1923. Currently, there is no information on its availability in the United States. Select Samsung laptops are available in U.S. via importers such as Dynamism.com.

Engadget | PC Joint