Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux Support for Hybrid Hard Drives?

Posted by Cliff on from the better-storage-tech dept.

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?"

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. It should just work by saskboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why aren't the drives designed in a way that the drive technology worries about the details of retrieving and writing files, and sends them the way USB, IDE, SATA, or SCSI drives already do? Why would these drives need special drivers?

    --
    Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
    1. Re:It should just work by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would guess that it's because having a software-based queuing and caching system is more flexible. For example, if you want to optimize operating system startup, then you need some way to specify that the operating system is what you want in the flash memory, instead of some other data.

      Or if you've got a laptop, you maybe want to cache writes to the flash if you're using the battery, but write directly to the disk if you're hooked up to the mains. Since the operating system knows about this but the drive doesn't, the operating system needs to control the drive.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  2. What to put in there? by aspoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Why wait? Hack one up yourself! by Myself · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Write caching in flash... by greg1104 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Samsung's OneNAND design uses some interesting implementation details to run faster than is normally expected with flash. Their specs at http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/OneN AND/index.htm suggest writes at 9.3MB/s and reads at 108MB/s; plenty fast for many applications even without running multiples in parallel. It's certainly much slower than writing directly to the drive if the drive is active. However, if the drive isn't spun up at the moment and the amount of data to be written fits in the NAND flash cache, I could see this being a net performance boost over the spinup/seek time combination of the hard drive.

    They also spec 100,000 erase cycles before it's worn out. As was noted by an underrated poster the last time this came up, intelligent flash controller designs like this can cope with bad bits and assuring level usage of the memory much better than what you normally see in random hunk of flash.
    An analysis at http://www.sudhian.com/printdocs.cfm?aid=686 suggests 33 years of usage for a typical worker. When you run the numbers it doesn't sound that difficult to create a design that would likely outlast the mechanical parts of a standard hard drive.