The environmentally conscious now have another tool to aid in their personal quest to stem the draining our earth’s resources.

Samsung has announced what they are calling the “first ever” hybrid notebook.

The new Hybrid HDD Samsung R55 will cost 1.8M Won ($1923) and will come with:

–Intel Core2Duo T5600 (1.83GHz) CPU
–15.4″ WXGA LCD
–80GB Hybrid HDD (5400rpm + 256Mb OneNAND Flash)
–nVidia GeForce 7400 Graphics card
–Super Multi DL Optical Drive
–Windows Vista Premium OS

Hybrid HDD is a technology that ads a flash RAM chip to the standard HDD. This way most frequently used data can be stored and read from flash memory, reducing the usage (spin) of HDD itself.

According to Samsung, when used for small chunks (up to 10Mb) of data in R55, Hybrid Hard Drive had 26% improvement on data reading and 71% improvement of datawriting speed, 32% lower power consumption and increased HDD longevity by 10%.

More commentary…

Hyrbid laptops have officially arrived, and Samsung’s R55 is the company’s first to feature both an 80GB 5,400rpm drive alongside an additional 256MB flash drive. Samsung claims the hybrid hard drive consumes 32% less power, offers a 26% increase in data reading and boosts data-writing speed by 71%. That kinda talk makes the 15.4-inch notebook worth the $1,923 splurge.

Other hybrid laptops had been around for nearly a year, but they were referred to as “luggable” instead of portable. From Dell in June 2006…

Dell’s new XPS M2010, which starts at $1,999, includes two hard drives with up to 120GB capacity each, a Core Duo processor and 4GB of dual-channel (667MHz) memory.