Did you know you can cook bread with steam?
© 2026 Appliancenews. All Rights Reserved.
Seagate and Samsung have revealed a new geration of hard drives using ReadyFirst technology.
At this year’s WinHEC conference, Samsung and Seagate were showing prototypes of ReadyDrive capable hard drives.
Both companies plan to ship laptop hard drives using ReadyDrive first. Samsung is talking about the technology also moving into large scale data centers, due to the power and thermal output reductions possible by keeping drives spun down for substantial periods of time.
ReadyDrive is a Windows Vista technology that takes advantage of 128MB of more of high speed flash memory embedded directly on the hard drive itself. The flash memory can be used as both a read and write cache. Mobile PCs can realize substantial power savings by using ReadyDrive capable hard drives in mobile PCs.
 Click to enlarge |
Think this is interesting? Click to find out how Samsung’s PC division plans to replace the entire hard drive with flash memory, in two computers due this summer.
 Click to enlarge |
In one demo, which showed a constantly running script of office applications, the hard drive only spun up every three or four minutes. Samsung Associate Director of Flash Marketing Don Barnetson noted that laptops can see system power consumption decrease by up to 40% using ReadyDrive.
ReadyDrive is a Windows Vista only technology. Drives with the ReadyDrive flash cache can work in non-Vista systems, but with few of the advantages of ReadyDrive. ReadyDrive also requires updated ATA command sets in the driver, which won’t be back-ported to Windows XP.
