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FlashMate turns hard drives into hybrids

FlashMate turns hard drives into hybrids

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott
SST, Inc.

A hybrid hard drive can help a laptop boot faster, operate more effectively and quietly, and run longer on a single battery charge. Flash memory maker SST and firmware/BIOS company Insyde Software announced earlier this week a technology they're calling FlashMate that gives standard hard drives hybridlike functionality. Actually, it does more. Whereas hybrid hard drives use flash memory as a data cache when a system is running, FlashMate will let you access the full contents of your hard drive without needing to power on your laptop. Using a combination of hardware, software, and firmware, FlashMate creates an application subsystem that's separate from Windows so you can, for instance, delve into your MP3 or photo libraries and check e-mail (send e-mail, too?) without waiting for Vista to boot. And with Vista's ReadyDrive feature, FlashMate can bestow hybrid functionality on plain, old hard drives. FlashMate will also work with Vista's SideShow feature, presumably letting you access more data and applications than you can now should your laptop include a small, secondary screen on its lid. SST expects to begin selling FlashMate products in Q2 of next year; it remains to be seen how quickly laptop manufacturers may adopt the technology.