Whatever happened to hybrid hard drives?

[jaffy]

I was looking around for a drive replacement for my Sony laptop which has a hybrid hard drive (standard HDD w/256mb solid state "NV" cache" and noticed there haven't been any hybrid drives released in years. This tech seemed pretty cool, what happened? Extra buffer space is always a good thing! Already upgraded to a 500gb standard drive, just curious

What is a hybrid drive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

 

[InvisiBill]

My guess is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive#Claimed_drawbacks. With regular hard drives now having 1/4 the size of that mini-SSD just as regular cache memory, and full SSDs being available to average consumers (still more expensive, but not insanely expensive), I'm guessing the drawbacks are starting to outweigh the improvements. I don't know much about the hybrids, but based on that article it seems that they can be much better than a regular hard drive in some cases, or much worse in others. Simply making standard drives more efficient could give comparable power savings without having to use non-standard parts and special OS stuff. Depending on exactly how you're using it, the SSD cache might be used almost exclusively (leading to lots of improvement) or it might just add a lot of complication when the majority of your accesses go to the platters anyway. I'm guessing most people would rather give up a few minutes of laptop battery if it meant not having to deal with any "special" stuff. It doesn't seem like 256MB would really be enough to help Vista that much, for all the complexity it adds to the drive.