Hybrid flash-magnetic drive
MS and Samsung have jointly developed a hybrid hard drive (HHD) that uses a 1Gbit NAND flash memory as a read and write buffer. The drive caches data in the flash memory so that it can stop spinning for long periods of time, as the computer reads and writes to the flash instead of to the disk. When the drive isn't spinning, it uses less power, so this technology will be attractive for mobile hard drives. There's no word in any of the articles I've seen so far as to how flash memory's erasure endurance issues are addressed, if at all. From what I've read, NAND flash is good only for from 100,000 to 1 million writes, which doesn't seem like a lot to me if it's being used as a hard drive replacement.
I wonder about the possibility of making the flash buffer visible to applications, like Photoshop, for instance. It's possible that the OS could allow a certain amount of user-level and application-level management of the flash space, especially as that space grows bigger with drops in flash prices.