Toshiba has announced two new hybrid drives in the 2.5-inch form factor. The MQ01ABFH series of SSHDs will be just 7mm thick and available in capacities of 320GB or 500GB. The solid-state flash NAND portion of the drives will be 8GB in size. Toshiba claims these drives significantly outperform “standard HDDs” in application benchmarks.
Toshiba says the MQ01ABFH series of SSHDs will bring improved “response time and performance in ultra-thin notebooks PCs”. These are the first 7mm members of Toshiba’s hybrid drive family and complement a range that includes 9.5mm 1TB and 9.5mm 750GB model.
Self-learning caching algorithms
The MQ01ABFH series requires no external drivers or operating system assistance to function and were fully compatible with 175 PC systems in which they were tested by Toshiba. Toshiba says the drive’s internal processing improves “its self-learning, caching algorithms which manages data stored in the NAND flash storage for the fastest responsiveness”.
Speed gains
The MQ01ABFH drives were tested by Toshiba to gather the headline performance data used in the press release. Using popular benchmarking suite PCMark Vantage the new SSHDs managed to score of “approximately 20,000, against a typical score of 5,000 for standard HDDs”. Toshiba’s quoted comparison “standard HDD” was its own MQ01ABD series of 2.5-inch 5,400 RPM SATA drives (here’s a review of one of these standard drives from 2012).
Competitor products
In April we saw the news about Western Digital launching a 5mm thick SSHD drive equipped with a more generous 24GB of NAND supplied by partner Sandisk. The WD drives were slated as only available to system builders at that time. Toshiba will be sampling its new MQ01ABFH series to PC makers at the end of this month. We have no indication of the pricing of these SSHD ranges.
