Hybrid HDs in March 2007

Seagate announced to have started mass production of hybrid HDs featuring flash memory. Availability is expected in March 2007. First HDs will have 256MB of NAND memory, and in H2 2007 new HD models with 512MB or 1GB NAND will be launched.
In such Hybrid HDs, flash memory will not be used as the current cache memory, it will rather behave like a standard HD with a NAND USB key.
Samsung is also following the same strategy with its FlashON technology, a hybrid HD featuring 2GB of NAND flash memory, allowing faster boot times, faster resume from sleep mode, power saving and reliability; features quite similar to Intel Robson technology.
Microsoft and Intel are also pushing for such NAND-enable hardware. For Redmond it is mostly to speed up Windows booting process and common tasks, while Intel expect that such HDs will save energy for future mobile architecture.
However, it remains unclear if such hybrid HDs will require external drivers, or if internal firmware will be able to manage this integrated NAND memory.