Linux Support for Hybrid Hard Drives?

christoofar asks: "HHDD (Hybrid Hard Disk Drive) technology has been receiving some buzz lately. The concept is not new, but Samsung has been working on a consumer version of HHDD that everyone can use. HHDDs are disk drives that carry onboard RAM (in this case, NAND flash) which is non-volatile and offers to speed boot times and writes to the disk. This carries enormous benefit to laptop users who need to keep their disk activity to a minimum in order to preserve battery life. Given that Microsoft is adding support for Hybrid Hard Drives in their upcoming Windows Vista release, what efforts are being undertaken in the Linux realm to use this new storage technology?"

Comments

Re:It should just work

[AKAImBatman]

I'm guessing that it's not so much that it can't work that way, as it is that it would kill performance.

Today's operating systems try to do exactly what this drive is doing by pumping all reads and writes through the paging system. The problem is that the OS can't take a full performance boost from this or data will be lost in a crash or power loss. You may remember that EXT2FS could easily lose all the data you'd recently written if it wasn't unmounted properly. (It ticked me off when I tried to move RedHat 5.2 packages to a special partition, then found out that they had all disappeared on reboot because I hadn't explicitly unmounted the disk. *grumble*)

Since this technology has little to no chance of losing data in a power failure, the OS can be modified to write the blocks immediately. This could easily result in a performance increase of 2 to 3 times what you normally see today. The improvements in writing meta-data alone could easily provide this increase.

What to put in there?

[aspoon]

The question is not whether Linux will support the drive -- someone will eventually write one. The question is what files to put in there to make it boot faster. Perhaps should be done is to put the entire swap partition in there, and put those "hibernation" files in the swap. So it would resume fast, and would also make normal operations faster with the faster swap.

Why wait? Hack one up yourself!

[Myself]

You shouldn't have to wait for the drives to come out. Laptop drive controllers can address a master and a slave, they just don't have a slave drive connected in normal usage. I was just looking for an adapter to let me put a pair of CF cards in place of a 2.5" hard drive. (I can only find the single-card version in a 2.5" form factor, all the dual-card ones are for 3.5" mounting.) I figure, put a solid-state card in one slot and a microdrive in the other, and I've got a hybrid-drive laptop, right?

I just got rid of an old toughbook cf-25 that would've been perfect for this, as the drive mounting is gel and would easily accomodate an oddly shaped adapter instead of a regular drive. Or for the truly insane, a CF card piggybacked on a regular 2.5" drive! All I need is the ability to home-brew those little flex cables, and I'd be in business.

Other good uses for this

[nial-in-a-box]

I think the real demand for flash-cache hard drives should be in the area of data loss prevention. Anyone who has any doubts about the fact that laptop hard drives are still way too fragile for the job needs to work at a help desk for a week. Any way to keep those drives spun down as much as possible should be seen as a good idea, since speed does not really matter much if you lose your data and/or need a new drive every three months simply because you like to move your laptop while it is running.

I know this just adds another point of failure to the mix with the addition of flash memory. However, with the apparent improvements in the quality of flash memory, I would expect one of these drives to outlast a current laptop drive by at least 50%. (Note: this is just idle speculation, but I don't know of any solid real-world statistics on laptop hard drive lifespan. I'm guessing laptop makers don't want us to know, either.)

I think that the point of drivers is, therefore, valid. There needs to be some sort of intelligence behind this system to allow frequently needed files to be held in cache in order for this to work effectively. Sure, you could build a drive that could try this on its own, but odds are you would totally throw out any performance or power advantage by doing so.