Samsung HDD Merges Flash, Conventional Storage

geekboxjockey points "This is a link to a story about a hybrid hard-drive technology from Samsung that involves the use of flash memory and conventional storage. A very interesting idea that could provide noticeable energy useage/speed improvements for HDD-based portable devices."

Comments

A gimmick

[Saven Marek]

flash memory like this in a hard drive is a gimmick, I think samsung are hoping nobody realises how few the write times are on flash memory, so you'll need to regularly replace the limited write time flash memory when it's worn out fairly often

So what happens when trying to detect when the flash memory has been written to too many times? afaik this isn't easily done, so you end up dumping broken data to the disk until you notice "whooops my spreadsheet suddenly doesn't work that I need in 30 minutes or the boss will have my ass".

FROM Here to Eternity

[Doc Ruby]

How about booting from the HD, then "caching" the computed startup image in the FROM? At shutdown, store kernel/OS variables in a table. At next boot, just suck in the image from FROM, and update runtime changes (clocks, counters, etc) from the table. Corrupt images get dropped by rebooting from HD when necessary. It's like notebook "hibernate", but stores the "clean" initial boot state instead of the (possibly corrupt) final OS state. Linux's initrd boot ramdisk phase offers a golden opportunity to just restart from the image cached in quick FROM. If Samsung patched the bootloader, it could sell a lot of these drives. I'd pay as much for a 100GB platter-only drive as I would for a 40GB boot hybrid drive.

Re:Swap File

[MSZ]

For Linux, sure.
For Windows, not unless they replace the memory management. It normally uses swap even when there's plenty of free memory and this is supposed to be a feature, not a design bug...