Conventional hard drives have some DRAM, it's not flash memory (e.g. it
forgets when the power is turned off). Hybrid drives have Flash, which
allows the hard drive to begin booting before the platters have finished
spinning up, and to reduce power consumption (and, perhaps, to increase
speed).

Allan wrote:
> On 29 Mar, 14:01, "Richard" <rfeir...@nycap.rr.com> wrote:
>> One of the alleged magic tricks you can do with a laptop and a high end
>> version of Vista is install a "Hybrid" Hard Drive or a second Hard Drive
>> consisting of one of all solid state memory instead of a rotating disk.
>>
>> Has anyone tried this yet? If so does it in fact speed up any process or
>> reduce power consumption, as alleged by Microsoft? I have yet to read any
>> reviews of this technology, but lots of news about the new drives hitting
>> the market.
>>
>> Richard.
>
> Conventional hard disks already have some flash memory, I believe, but
> the proposal with hybrid drives is to increase the flash component
> considerably, for faster booting and reduced power consumption.
> However, it looks as though Lenovo won't be rushing into this one:
>
> http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=46
>
> Meanwhile, entire flash drive replacements for hard drives are already
> in production, but not available to the likes of us. It strikes me
> that these disks, which typically have a capacity of 32 GB or 64 GB,
> might have been tolderable in the days of XP, but with Vista will
> probably soon fill. All the same, people say they bring significant
> performance benefits, and I'd love to get my hands on one.
>