WD showcases their hybrid SSHD at CES 2013

WD has been showing off their hybrid solid state drives which they call “SSHD”. The drive combines the speed of an SSD with the mechanical drive, something that Seagate has been doing with the Momentus XT Series which uses the NAND flash as a read-only Cache.

According to WD, the SSD will continue to be much more expensive in comparison to mechanical drive even in the future, so working on a hybrid drive would make more sense according to them till the prices of NAND become more competitive.

WD did put on a demo which showed the speed of loading a suite of applications. According to what the Tech Report said, a standard mechanical drive takes about 81 seconds, whereas an SSD was able to load in 51 seconds. The SSHD took 55 seconds.

WD’s SSHD is a 2.5″ drive with a 7mm thickness footprint which will allow it to be installed in a system thatcan accommodate thinner than 9.5mm drive caddies. It is also said that it “looks” even smaller than the 5mm-thick versions of storage drives.