Some combinations like chocolate with peanut butter, ice cream with peanuts and chocolate sauce, and HDDs with NAND Flash caching make obvious sense. Other combinations don’t make such an obvious match. In these cases, people need extra convincing. LG and Hitachi are suggesting just such a non-obvious combo as a concept: an optical drive and NAND Flash. Optical drives? Aren’t they on the way out, like floppy disks? Not really. We still use them to play Blu-Ray and DVD videos, right? And we’ve all experienced the problems associated with scratched or defective video discs, right? So the two backers of the HyDrive optical disc/NAND Flash combo put this extremely short, extremely effective video together to prove the utility of fortifying an optical disc with NAND Flash:

That’s enough to make a believer out of me.

Oh yes, once it’s in the system, the NAND Flash in the optical drive is also available to help accelerate the HDD as well, with the appropriate drivers. The HyDrive concept demonstrates once more that getting NAND Flash into a PC, in some way, can be a real performance booster for a wide variety of applications. Perhaps even wider than is intuitively obvious.