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Windows 7 apparently won’t resuscitate the market for hybrid hard drives, which flickered out around the end of 2007.

At the end of a meeting with Jon van Bronkhorst, executive director of product marketing for the consumer solutions business at Seagate, I asked whether or not hybrid hard drives stood a chance of coming back. The short answer? No.

Hybrid hard drives, as you may know, merge the solid-state-disc (SSD) and the rotating hard drive together, with a bit of flash serving as a cache. In concept, it’s not a bad idea: while the performance gains have been on the order of 10 percent or more, the real bonus was supposed to be in the battery life, which would reduce the need to spin the disk, and “squirt” the data to the disk in one big spurt once the flash cache was full.

In reality, however, the first hybrid hard drives required even more power than a conventional drive, to power both the flash memory as well as rotate the disk.

According to van Bronkhorst, Microsoft was supposed to assist with some of these problems. Remember that flash memory (known as “ReadyBoost”) was also seen as a way to assist Vista with reducing boot and shutdown times, as well.

Windows 7, however, is supposed to be the version of Vista that works. So does that mean hybrid hard drives will work, too? Doesn’t look that way. I didn’t nail down why, exactly, but the bottom line is that Microsoft just isn’t interested in supporting the technology. And if Microsoft isn’t backing it, there’s no reason for Seagate to develop products based on the technology. QED: RIP.