Hitachi LG Data Storage (HLDS) has created a new type of hard drive. It is a Blu-ray drive with internal solid state drive (SSD) technology. This drive is designed to provide the 30 to 60% faster booting speed possible with SSD devices. Each drive comes with either 32GB  or 64GB of SSD drive space.

The new drive can also be used as a pure storage device as an addition to the computer’s normal disk drive or , as it is being developed by both AMD and ASUS, as the primary hard drive with no need for flash memory on the mother board.

It is a standard form factor optical drive with either DVD or Blu-ray burning capabilities. The HyDrive has an integrated Defect Management technology that caches information from scratched discs so it can play the content back without jitters.

Of course this drive can provide flawless playback for CD, DVD and Blu-ray media and write CD and DVDs.

The HyDrive has a 3GB/s SATA interface and Hitachi is promising a 6GB/s SATA interface by March of 2011. They are also promising the ability to upgrade to 256GB of flash memory. The flash memory can write up to 175MB/sec and write up to 60MB/sec.

According to Niles Burbank, the senior product manager for AMD’s Platform Solutions, “AMD’s “8-series chipsets have both the required hardware and driver support for HyDrive, including SATA port multiplier support, which enables combined optical and solid state functionality”.

ASUSAMD and MONEUAL are collaborating on the product’s development and launch. The first versions of Hydrive will be available on MONEUAL’s Family PC MN 102-O and on ASUS Eee Tablet this summer.

Flash memory has finally become cheap enough to make hybrid drives a reality and a welcome one at that.