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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."
Will these qualify me for a tax deduction?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
> Seagate's pushbutton drive is capable of storing all of the following, combined: a 25-DVD movie collection, 15,000-song music collection, 15,00-photo image library, 50-hours worth of video, and 50 computer games, with 300GB left over
Bah, these measurements tell me nothing.
How many Libraries Of Congress can I store on this thing?! That's what I need to know!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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.
Philosophy.
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?
> How about Megabs?
Are those 6 minute MegaAbs?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
This brings back a memory of a very, very, very long time ago when I was fortunate enough to get to touch a computer that had its root filesystem on a 250mb solid state disk, so that it only had to touch the much slower mechanical drives infrequently. For it's day the thing was a monster with speed that made my own systems seem inadequate in every way. So what did we do with all of that raw, untamed power? Played nethack.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
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.
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.
Why stick up for big business?
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.
--
make install -not war
No, not six minutes, SEVEN! No one could get a good workout in just six minutes, duh!
Hmm... MegaBS = 1000^2 people bullshitted? Could come in handy with all these RIAA topics.
Flash is getting better at an amazing rate but it's got a looooong way to go to catch HDs. You need more capacity, much less cost, and also higher speeds. While flash has faster random access, it can't hit the sustained transfer rates of HDs, at least not the normal flash RAM you find for sale everywhere.
I imagine the hybrid HDs will be the first step. Try and get the best of both worlds. A small flash store for frequently accessed thigns to get lightning fast random access, a large magnetic disk so you don't compramise on storage. Windows Vista is apparantly going to be pushing this rather hard. MS notes support for it as one of the features, and even if you lack a hybrid HD, you can get something similar by giving it a USB flash drive and instructiong Vista to use it as an app cache. Parts of programs are then put on the flash to speed load times.
I think that's the kind of thing we'l see for a number of years here until flash gets cheaper.
Its true that there are a limited number of writes, but its also not necessarily a fatal probelm. As bits in the flash memory fail, you can mark them as unavailable. This will shrink your solid state cache over time, but it will allow you to keep working until the physical disk fails. Very graceful degredation.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
Considering that an adapter exists to connect CompactFlash media to an IDE interface cable, I'd say that you can get a flash drive to show up as a regular IDE drive. There are even existing products that do the same thing prepackaged as IDE devices. To save you some time, here is a link to the Google search: Keywords: Non-Volatile Solid State IDE Drive
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.
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
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.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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
Uh... Someone in Samsung's PR division does not realize that the typical laptop does not get 11 hours of battery life. There has got to be a way to hold PR folks accountable for the stupid and wrong things they say.