Seagate believes that the right approach for the future is to go for the so called Hybrid drives. These drives come equipped with up to4 GB flash memory while the rest of the drive will be made of hard disk plates.
Such a drive would cost a bit more than the usual “mechanica” hard drive but the indstry sources claims that such a mixture of two technolgoies could save up to 50 percent power which we believe is a bit too optimistic. It should offer some performance increase as believe that hybrid drive would be able to boot Vista or XP from Hybernate in a matter of seconds.
These drives should be available by the end of the year and they should be the real alternative to a standard rotating plate drives.