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Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the closer-to-instant-gratification dept.

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."

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Will it work? by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
    http://blog.nexusuk.org
  2. How to do this with Linux by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
  3. Here's the math... by codemaster2b · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    And over there we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask t