by , 5:10 PM EST, January 4th, 2007

Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu, Samsung and Toshiba will work together in the newly formed Hybrid Storage Alliance to promote a new technology that adds Flash memory to their hard drives according to a story at Infoworld published Thursday.

The story explained that "Hybrid disks include flash memory that works like a buffer between the computer system and the disk. The memory will be used for short-term storage heading both to and from the disk and will mean an overall reduction in the amount of time the disk spins."

These hybrid drives are expected to become available later in 1Q, 2007. However, they face competition from an Intel technology. The article quoted Marc Noblitt with Seagate: "Hybrid drives face competition from an Intel-backed technology called Robson, which seeks to achieve the same benefits by placing a flash memory cache in the computer. It has the advantage of working with any current hard-disk but requires a new interface card..."

With either of these technologies, computer users in the future can expect faster hard disks and longer battery life in notebooks.