Hitachi-LG Unveils SSD/Optical Drive Mashup | PCMag.com

Hey, you got your optical drive in my hard drive! No, you got your hard drive in my optical drive! Hitachi-LG actually has neither, as the company’s latest creation—a hybrid optical drive and physical storage device—is a unique mash-up of a spinning Blu-ray combination drive and a solid-state drive.

The goal of the product, suggests Hitachi-LG, is to offer netbook, tablet, and ultraportable manufacturers increased space-savings on the insides of their products. This extra room could, in theory, be used to pack a device with more features and/or reduce the size profile of a given product.

As for the drive, dubbed the, “HyDrive,” the first-generation iteration of the product will come with a 32 gigabyte or 64-gigabyte solid-state drive in addition to a slot-loading Blu-ray reader and DVD burner. The SSD part of the equation can deliver sequential writes of up to 60 Megabytes per second, with sequential reads topping out at 175 Megabytes per second.

via Hitachi-LG Unveils SSD/Optical Drive Mashup | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.