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Samsung HDD Merges Flash, Conventional Storage

Posted by timothy on from the layering-the-layers dept.

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."

2 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Déjà entendu ? by alexhs · · Score: 5, Funny
    "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...

    --
    I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
  2. Actually this story isn't entirely accurate by gru3hunt3r · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.