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The Benefits of Hybrid Drives
feminazi writes "Flash memory is being integrated with the hard disk by Seagate and Samsung and onto the motherboard by Intel. Potential benefits: faster read/write performance; fewer crashes; improved battery life; faster boot time; lower heat generation; decreased energy-consumption. Vista's ReadyDrive will use the hybrid system first for laptops and probably for desktops down the road. The heat and power issues may also make it attractive in server environments."
Windows creates an immense swapfile anyway - why not just get the system to do it on either a designated part of the hard drive, or on a USB 2.0 flash drive?
Actually, has anyone tried that? I expect you could see a decent increase in performance that way.
Windows' swapfile usage is pretty similar to the way Linux does swap, except that Windows uses a file instead of a partition. By default it's 1.5 times the amount of RAM installed in the system and is made all at once to ensure a contiguous file. On systems with plenty of RAM it's still good to have because it means the OS can commit to having plenty of memory for applications which request a lot, most of which they might never use. Without a page file 10-20% of physical memory is wasted because the OS has committed to having it (think Photoshop, etc).
I don't know how well the pagefile would work on a USB drive since if you're using much swap you're already seeing serious degradation. Besides, flash drives still suck at write speeds, being many times worse than even an old IDE drive. That's the biggest problem with integrating the two technologies I would think--making sure that you don't introduce bottlenecks due to stuff like that.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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An age old method called write leveling. In practice it usualy doesn't work since most people do it with USB thumb drives and/or flash memorycards which are all removed on a regular basis so the reader/writer of the media gets changed allot or the controler doesn't impliment write leveling. As such the write leveling never really gets done very well. With a system like this the write leveling would be exact and the flash memory would end up outlasting the moveing parts of the hard-disk. Also as parts of the card went bad the controler would skip over those sectors in the future which would lead to it working even longer. Even one part of a regular hard disk goes bad and your boned completely.