SoC enhances 'disk spindle down' in Samsung's hyrbid drive

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd has announced the development of a new SoC solution for its hybrid drive. In the hybrid drive, the company said this new device supports up to 4Gbit flash memory as a data buffer. It maximizes the "disk spindle down" mode, said the company, and reduces power consumption levels by up to 80 percent compared with conventional HDD and improves drive reliability. It also supports the initial boot from the OneNAND, reducing the overall boot time by over 10s, the company said.

The SoC solution for the hybrid drive incorporates a high-speed serial ATA interface with native command queuing, an HDD controller, a SDRAM controller, a OneNAND controller and Agere read channel into a single piece of silicon. It also includes a dual CPU core (ARM7 and ARM9) embedded to enable independent operation of the memory, HDD and motor.

Samsung plans to mass produce the SoC this November.