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."

Comments

Will it work?

[Umbral Blot]

Hibernation works by writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, so this would only work if you had = 256 MB RAM. I don't think too many new systems meet that requirement, and even less will after Vista comes out. Similarly if you want to save time on boot-up you would need to store all the necessary system files in that space, and few modern operating systems can cram themselves into that space.

Re:Will it work?

[FireFury03]

When you hibernate, much of the stuff in memory can be dumped to the swap partition rather than to the "hibernate file". This means that on resume it can be swapped back in at a later time when it's actually needed rather than swapping it all in at once. So it's very likley that all the stuff that actually needs to be loaded immediately at resume time can fit into the flash memory.

What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?

Re:Will it work?

[Stellian]

Also, the best part of the memory of a 512MB OR 1GB Laptop is free under light usage like a word processor and Winamp. Well, not actually free, any free memory is used as disk cache for reading, but that can be discarded.
Also, many of the memory pages are mapped as "read-only", for example all executable files running. Those do not need to be swapped out or written to the hibernate file - they can be discarded and read back again from the hard-drive when the thread executing them becomes active.

As an extra idea to speed up hibernation - what about compressing the read/write pages with a fast algorithm like lzop prior to writing them to disk? I regularly work with core dumps and they are usually compressible with gzip at a ratio of 15:1 or better. Here's what the homepage for lzop claims:

On modern systems, when making backups of terrabyte of data, lzop is usually IO-bound and not CPU-bound, which means that you can both decrease storage requirements and effectively reduce backup time by quite an amount.

Any benefit to existing laptops?

[WoTG]

The PR blurb is a little light on the details. Does anyone know if there will be speed benefits (or, IMHO, less likely power benefits) for existing laptops? I.e. should I look forward to giving my laptop a bit of a boost with one of these drives? I know that Vista is supposed to have a lot of code to really benefit from hybrid drives... but I imagine that at least some benefits might be available to XP or Linux.

Does anyone smarter than me know more about these drives?

Call me a cretin, but...

[one-eye-johnson]

What's the difference between a 'hybrid' drive and a drive with a really big cache?

Death of Harddrives?

[Billosaur]

The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.

Given the rapid pace of development of flash memory, how long until hard drives are gone altogether? It would seem the breakout of flash memory in the marketplace is bringing us one step closer to relaible instant-on systems, with none of the tedious waiting for drives to spin up.

I'm not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been playing with Damn Small Linux using a 633 MHz pentium motherboard (attic-ware) with a 12 volt power supply and a 256 MB flash card. It uses an average of 1.5 amps. (monitor not included) When my ancient Thinkpad is accessing the hard drive, it draws about 4 amps. Some of the current is driving the LCD but my guess is that when the hard drive is being used, it soaks up about half the power. If you could avoid using the hard drive, you could just about double your battery life compared to what you would get if you were using it all the time.

Having said the above, it occurs to me that you could use some of the techniques on a regular laptop that Damn Small Linux (DSL) uses. Flash memory can only be written to a finite number of times. In order not to kill the flash memory, DSL runs entirely in memory. (If you want to write to the flash memory, you have to explicitly mount it.) So, if you were to tailor your operating system to avoid using the hard drive the same way DSL avoids using the flash, you should be able to significantly increase your battery life without special hardware.

flash memory lifetime?

[techmuse]

It used to be that flash memory only worked reliably for a limited number of write cycles. Is this still the case. If not, will this greatly limit the life span of these drives?

Re:flash memory lifetime?

[swv3752]

Old flash like that in my Zaurus SL550 PDA and older Compact Flash cards have ~100,000 writes. Newer Flash has something on the order of ~1,000,000 writes. As it is used to cache seldom updated things like OS files or hibernate files, it shouldn't be an issue. Mind you, it should have been 1-4Gb instead of 256mb, so that the OS and other useful things could be cached entirely.

Does this matter when you have a smart OS?

[mary_will_grow]

If you look at "top" closely, you'll see even if only half of your ram is stuffed with porn and chat programs, the kernel is still making use of that remaining RAM. It would be moronic to just leave RAM sitting unoccupied. A lot of it is used for IO buffering, including your hard drive. So why not just use this mechanism? Why is it, from an IO-buffering-OS-user's perspectiive, any different having that info sitting in flash on the hard drive, instead of in your ram?

OK I guess I can think of a few reasons...

The flash wont need refresh cycles to keep its data intact, so that gives you a power reduction...
The flash can still retain its state even when you shut down, so "wakeups" should be faster..
The hard drive is in charge of the caching, taking some thinky think load off of the CPU.

but from a performance perspective, it seems that Linux would do better with 256MB of faster, closer, shinier RAM instead of a wad of flash.. Plus your caching mechanism can be improved without having to buy a new hard drive.

Re:Yes, but how many LOC?

[Pantero Blanco]

Seriously. 15,000 songs in midi format, 15,000 50x50 photos, 50 hours of low-bitrate video, and 50 text adventures don't take up much space at all.

I always wonder how they're counting the "DVD movies"...Raw and untranscoded? Transcoded to a 700MB avi? A direct copy of the DVD to your hard drive?

Regarding the other announcement, DB35 series...

[Anonymous Coward]

They also launched the DB35 series, supposed to be optimised for DVRs - quiet acoustics, capacities from 80GB-750GB, optimised for sequential streaming (and apparently up to ten simultaneous streams), long-haul reliability.

I might want to check those out for personal storage too. It sounds like they might make a nice, quiet, fileserver for my home, with the right case (I was thinking P180) and components.

There's this interesting snippet, though, which concerns me, in the DB35 series' product datasheet (PDF, 2 pages, 122KB):

"Drive security tools enhance fair use of digital programming by helping manufacturers implement appropriate digital rights management technologies."

(To give context, the `manufacturers' it is referring to are DVR manufacturers, which in my case, would of course be me. Maybe I should try MythTV.)

I am, of course, one of those people that feels the only appropriate Digital Restriction Mechanism is none at all... does anyone, anywhere have the faintest idea what they're going on about with that? What on earth has a hard disk got to do with DRM? (In the Vista Home Premium/Media Center/East Fork/"ViiV" stuff they might mean when they say that stuff, it'll all be encrypted before hitting the hard disk anyway, because it's a form of the WM-DRM, and wouldn't be allowed unencrypted across the SATA/PATA bus, so it's none of the hard disk's business there either...)

Is that, perhaps, pure marketing fluff that means "You can password-lock or encrypt the drive", or something more sinister? Anyone know? (And you've gotta love the way they justify it by using the phrase "enhance fair use", which is of course, the exact opposite of what any DRM is designed to allow.)

Flashy Mobiles

[Doc Ruby]

I've got an Dell notebook with only 10GB (IDE) HD. I'd love to replace it with Flash cards. They're about $45:2GB up to 4GB, in multiple formats. A bank of CF/SDIO/USB slots, or just an IDE/whatever adapter, plus the cards, would fit inside the current drive's slot. And offer much better power, weight and heat loads. With hotswappable filesystems, upgradeable in small chunks and pluggable into other devices, carryable in pockets.

I don't see how <20GB HDs have any place in the portable market anymore (outside of tiny niche multimedia producers), as even $35 80GB HDs are overkill for most people who network, as most everyone does. If every notebook, handheld, iPod, phone and other mobile device used Flash instead of HDs, Flash prices at that industry scale would drop, capacities would multiply, and $5:GB up to 32 or 64GB would be common. While much of the rest of the cost of the device would be lower without extreme measures to accommodate the hungry, inefficient HD.

Re:Flashy Mobiles

[Doc Ruby]

Now that is just what the Doctor ordered!

Since it was so easy to ask & get, I'm upping the ante, with a better order ;). The board looks like a direct mapping of traces from the IDE to the CF connector, with a few caps and a transistor. How come the many connector/formfactor flavors of Flash don't include native IDE? Then I could just plug multiple cards right into my machine, without $32 extra per card, without the extra space and weight of the PCB adapter?

And for dessert, how about a fanless PIII/1GHz/SVGA or better notebook without a HD, into which to plug those puppies?

Re:Flashy Mobiles

[Doc Ruby]

Those look good, especially the cheap PCMCIA/CF adapters. With a $175 8GB card, I'm probably done.

I think there is a demand for the benefits. But I also think notebook dealers don't market them (educate the market) because margins are still higher on 2.5" HDs, especially the ones bundled with new notebooks. Just unbundling those HDs opens competition from other HD vendors. And without market education, the unfamiliar products will find only niche markets, which also decreases dealers' economy of monolithic scale.

Then there's the recent cheapness of the new high-density CF technology. Dealers are squeezing the most they still can out of the already-amortized investments in small 2.5" HDs. They'll taper that pipeline as they increase the CF stream.

Sooner than later CF will offer the same superiority to dealers as to consumers. Especially the power/heat benefits will allow dealers to keep using cheaper, older CPUs for a few more cycles.

When all these cycles line up, in 5 years we'll have the equivalent of 2Kg P4/10GHz/128GB-CF running 24h on a fuelcell. Just in time to be obsoleted by a mobile "phone" making it look like a "portable mainframe" :).

Re:software side

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know of any that will work on existing system; however, Windows Vista is supported to allow this with thumbdrives.

drives are faster, too

[SuperBanana]

Hibernation works by writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, so this would only work if you had = 256 MB RAM. I don't think too many new systems meet that requirement, and even less will after Vista comes out

Not to mention your average notebook hard drive these days is fully capable of pushing 20+MB/sec for the linear read a "resume" requires, unless the hibernation file is fragmented. Even fairly expensive media like Sandisk Compact Flash "Extreme III" cards for digital cameras can't hit that, and one of those (1GB) costs about the same as a 100GB hard drive. Silly.

My Macbook by default hibernates, but I found a setting to flip that off so that it "sleeps" like it should (involve the 'defaults' command, I forget exactly.) Now it takes about 2 seconds to 'wake up'. Ironically enough, hibernation takes longer than it takes to boot (about 25-30 seconds) and the scale has probably been tipped even further in favor of "booting" with another GB of ram I just added; by my rough calculation it'd take well over a minute if most memory was in use at time of hybernation (maybe the OS clears out all disk cache before doing it- you'd hope so.)

Hibernation is for when your battery is pretty much dead and the laptop wakes up to hibernate before it looses the contents of RAM due to battery failure...and can people REALLY not wait the time it takes to boot or wake up from hibernation and copy the data back into RAM? Yeesh.

This seems like an attempt to save themselves in a market they're just not competitive in. From all accounts I've seen (and personal experience), Seagate's ATA-drive reliability is in the trashcan these days; the 7200.8 was a fiasco, and the 7200.9 doesn't seem much better. IBM sold off their drive business (which was a market leader in almost all segments) after the Deskstar/Deathstar fiasco, but Hitachi seems to be doing fabulously. I had a 7200.9 300GB drive that died within 12 hours of operation. It's been RMA'd, and the replacement will be sold on Craigslist or similar. In the meantime, a shiny new, cheaper, cooler-running, quieter Samsung Spinpoint is sitting in its place.

I think Seagate has seen the writing on the wall- hence the merger with Maxtor. I would imagine you'll see them merge Seagate/Maxtor technology in their ATA line and sell exclusively under Maxtor, and Seagate will go back to being a mostly SCSI brand, as their reputation there seems intact.

Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash?

[TheRaven64]

I would use this space as a write cache. When the hard drive is spun down, you write the data to the flash instead of to the disk. When the flash is full, you spin up the drive, do a 256MB write, and spin it down again. Operating systems tend to be quite good at read caching, but spinning up the drive for small writes really hurts battery life a lot.

How to do this with Linux

[WhiteWolf666]

1. Acquire Flash memory. USB or whatever, it doesn't matter.
2. Insure you have the correct interface connections to the computer (USB port, USB cable, CF/SD drive, weird built-in hybrid device).
3. Boot Linux
4. Find location of Flash device. A modern distro will point this out to you on the desktop.
5. Use your GUI partitioner to define the flash device as your swap space. Be sure you purchased a flash device with size > system ram.
6. Suspend2Disk really, really fast.

Also, given a reasonably long up-time, enjoy the perks of a system with high-speed swap space. Applications, data, kernel; whatever! It all gets faster! Be sure to crank up your swappiness value for maximum effect; this'll have Linux swapping out just about everything it can get its hands on.

Given a modern flash device, with 1 million or so read/write cycles, and defect balancing, even under very high-usage you should get years of use.

Here's the math...

[codemaster2b]

These were their working definitions:
- 4 games/8GB or 2GB/game
- 8hrs video/8GB or 1GB/hr video
- 133 hrs music/8GB or 60MB/hr or 128kbit
- 2560 photos/8GB or 3.2MB/photo


Thus here is the math: - 750GB HDD - 300 GB left over
- 450 GB HDD = 15000 songs + 1500 photo + 50hrs video + 50 games + 25 DVDs
- 450 GB HDD = 60GB songs + 5GB photo + 50GB video + 100GB games + 25 DVDs
- 235 GB HDD = 25 DVDs
- 1 DVD = 9.4 GB

I guess they really mean it. Of course, the only way you're going to get a DVD onto your hard drive is through... um... antiquated software.