solid state hybrid drive (SSHD)
Hybrid technologies are a combination of two or more different technologies. This also applies to hybrid hard disks, which consist of a hard disk drive( HDD) combined with a solid state drive( SSD) and are also called hybrid flash arrays. Such hybrid hard disks are available in 3.5" and increasingly also in 2.5" designs.
Hybrid hard disk drives, Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD), also known as Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHDD), exploited the advantages of both storage technologies: on the one hand, the large storage capacities of hard disks, and on the other hand, the extremely short access times, low power requirements and data retention when the supply voltage of flash memories is switched off.
The hard drive 's flash memory is used for data buffering and minimizes the drive's power consumption. Data is written to the flash memory until its storage capacity can hold no more data. Only then are the contents of the flash memory read to the hard disk. This technology is particularly interesting for laptops and notebooks because of its low energy consumption. This hybrid technology was used in Windows Vista, among others, where the flash memory was used as an accelerator for the hard disks.
Hybrid hard disks already exist with several hundred gigabytes( GB) of disk storage and several gigabytes of flash memory.