This article on DailyTech, looks particularly interesting. As hard drive speeds are possibly the biggest bottleneck for computers right now. The affordable hard drive has been stuck at 7200 rpm for some time now, and there has been little to improve this. NCQ, bigger caches, SATA, and SATA-300 (or whatever they want to call SATA-II these days), have really done little to improve speeds.

Samsung is offering a solution to some of our hard drive woes by putting its high-speed NAND flash memory into a 4GB solid state disk. This can then be integrated into hybrid hard drives, or added via a 2.5" slot.

When such a device in used in Windows Vista it is controlled by Microsoft's new Windows ReadyBoost technology, which should increase performance.

According to DailyTech's article:

"Windows ReadyBoost caches user data to the flash SSD in the background without any user intervention. When the user or an application then requests data, it is quickly retrieved much faster than with a traditional HDD. Whereas a HDD can perform 100-200 requests per second, Samsung's SSD can service up to 5,000 requests per second."

Now you may be wondering how this is different from using your RAM as cache. First, when you reboot your computer the RAM is reset and information is lost; however, with a SSD (Solid State Disk) this is not the case, so boot times for Windows could see an increase similar to that given by the iDrive. Second, when gaming your graphics card's memory handles textures, and when its capacity is not enough to handle the burden games use the hard drive. If you can remember with Doom 3 many let the game use up to 2GB of their hard drive for this. With your RAM preoccupied with other tasks it cannot be used to do this; however, a hybrid drive on Vista can cache the textures into its SSD. Thus reducing stutter tremendously when the game needs to load textures from the hard drive.