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Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive
writertype writes "Today, Seagate announced about a dozen new products, including its first hybrid laptop hard drive that includes a 256-Mbyte flash chip to save power and speed up the time a notebook recovers from hibernation. Interestingly, the new Momentus 5400 PSD has also exceeded earlier estimates of hybrid hard-drive performance, which said that such drives would add an extra hour to the typical battery life of a notebook PC."
But if you have 512mb of RAM, and even if only half of that is in the flash memory after hibernation, you're still saving ~ half the ammount of data that would otherwise have to be written and read from the disk, which is more likely than not a very substantial speedup and power savings versus no flash memory at all.
thisnukes4u.net
don't some flash memories have limited read/writes far below platter hard drives? something like in the range of a couple thousand I thought... does this mean your hard drive will die even quicker, or will they make these drives eventually have removable and replacable flash cards, such as SD or something?
It's unlimited reads, but limited writes, so assuming you're using it to store OS code, the limited writes probably won't be a major problem. The limitation is usually in the low millions as well.
With defect management it shouldn't matter. There is no way the average number of writes per sector is going to get anywhere near the limit. If a particular sector is getting close, simply switch its address with one that isn't used very often.
Since Seagate is already defect managing the disk with their firmware, I don't see it being a big challange to have it defect manage the flash as well.