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".

Nah...

[ArbiterOne]

It won't really take off unless they release an amusing Flash video involving dancing flash memory-HDD pairs singing about the joys of dual storage.

Hardvaporware ?

[alexhs]

> The Hybrid Hard Drive, developed by Samsung and Microsoft, is meant for mobile PCs running Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system.

So the other hard drive manufacturers will have a loooong time to do the same...

Re:Hardvaporware ?

[mp3phish]

You imply that a powerbook made by Apple Computer would somehow implement futuristic types of storage faster than other platforms. You might need a history lesson:

Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to implement USB2.0 into their systems for use with Hi Speed USB flash memory devices.

Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to install SATA drives into their systems.

Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to install DVD burners into their systems.

Apple was the last mainstream manufacturer in the industry to move from SCSI to IDE for consumer systems.

I highly doubt Apple will be the first manufacturer to implement holographic storage into their laptops. As they are usually the last manufacturer to move to new types of storage technology in their products.

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.

Déjà entendu ?

[alexhs]

"Let's suppose you had 10GB of primary memory--probably everything that you do could fit in memory," Allchin (Microsoft Windows chief) said.

10 GiB ought to be enough for everyone...

Actually this story isn't entirely accurate

[gru3hunt3r]

There have been several vendors of Flash Based hard disks for a while. This is the first hybrid flash+magnetic drive -- and even this isn't all that different of an idea than say a Compaq smart array controller with battery backed write cache which used NVRAM to store data. It's innovative and i'd definitely buy a laptop that had it.

I think many slashdotters will miss the big picture. This is mostly a power saving utility -- and it could offer performance gains assuming the files you use are available on the flash and the drive doesn't need to be spun up. (Of course when the drive DOES need to get spun up, plan on having a *really* long access time so I think this will be negligble). Buy basically it means you can leave auto-save on Microsoft Word enabled and not drain your battery.

BUT since we're on the subject i'm a huge fan of flash only drives, they have several special applications because of their access times (in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds), extremely reliable (no moving parts, read/write cycles in the billions + ECC checking) and high bandwith they are NOT ideal for situations such as swap (JUST BUY MORE RAM IT'S CHEAPER AND FASTER!!) but instead they are perfect for situations were you need persistent storage of highly accessible files e.g. binlogs on a database.

You can easily bump up the performance of MySQL or Oracle using one of these drives for A LOT less

There is a company called BitMicro http://www.bitmicro.com/ which produces ATA and SCSI, and Fibre Channel flash only hard disks.
Using a flash only drive you will get a dramatic performance bump in any transaction database by storing the transaction files on the database.

Flash and harddrives

[karvind]

CeBIT 2005 had demonstration of flash only hard drives. Since flash memory is considerably more expensive than magnetic mass storage - a hybrid approach is a better compromise.

Also from WinHEC, samsung is not the only player. The disk will be manufactured initially by Samsung, Hitachi and Seagate, and other manufacturers will be announced later.

More details on Samsung's OneNAND hybrid technology:

OneNAND Flash memory has been incorporated into the design of Microsoft Corp.'s prototype Hybrid Hard Drive (HHD), the first fully functional disk drive to combine NAND-based Flash with rotating storage media.

The hybrid hard drive prototype uses 1 Gigabit OneNAND(TM) Flash as both the write buffer and boot buffer. In the hybrid write mode, the mechanical drive is spun down for the majority of the time, while data is written to the Flash write buffer. When the write buffer is filled, the rotating drive spins and the data from the write buffer is written to the hard drive.

The hybrid drive saves power by keeping the spindle motor in idle mode almost all the time, while the operating system writes to the OneNAND write buffer. Moreover, by using OneNAND Flash with hard disk drive technology, disk drive performance is not compromised relative to conventional disk drives. This is due, in large part, to OneNAND's ultra-fast read speeds, which can be fully leveraged during the flushing of the contents of OneNAND's write buffer to the rotating drive. In addition, since the Samsung hybrid disk drive operates at a lower temperature than traditional rotating media, it greatly reduces the possibility of shock and impact damage, improving the overall reliability of the disk subsystem.

While the cost of hybrid disk drives may slightly increase with the addition of OneNAND, any increase will be mitigated by several factors, including lower maintenance costs, 95 percent power savings when the disk is not spinning, faster boot time and substantially increased reliability. All of these changes are crucial to the ever increasing needs of today's mobile customer, making it likely that hybrid hard drive technology will enjoy rapid market adoption.

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...

Can we please stop calling everything technology?

[cgenman]

They're using 64 bit technology. The other guys have dual-memory technology. I have technology on my wrist that allows me to tell time.

Can we please stop calling everything technology? At one point the word had meaning, but it's been so over used now that it means nothing. Now it's just a way to make something look more impressive than it actually is, a for-nerds buzzword. "Our emergent 64 bit technology allows for vertical integration along all of your supply-chain specifications." It's a painfully overused buzzword. 64 bit technology. Plastics technology. SUV technology. Technological technology.

Some things still deserve the term. Pretty much anything fusion-related can be given the term fusion technology. But the term technology is being applied to a lot of things that are just design choices. Win 3.1 could have had 64 bit memory addressing, they just didn't because it would have been a huge wasted of prescious resources. Calling it "64 bit technology" is like saying a car has 4-door technology: it's a design choice, not a radical piece of tech.

And these damn kids keep throwing their frisbies on my lawn.