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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."
This is not a new idea, nor is it new technology... This has been a long time coming.
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Hackers don't abuse this because it is such a narrow target, every motherboard is different.
exactly, every mobo is different.. this sounds like something which could make its way in as a standard part of windows computers.. much less narrow a target.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
What about increased reliability? I realize a lot of this might depend on how the flash memory is interfaced, but it would be awesome to have a small built in flash chip capable of live backups of critical data. With say a spare gig of memory on the hard drive, it should be more than feasible to have data of certain folders (e.g. My Documents and system folders) in the off chance that your hard drive actually does fail. Being able to boot directly to the flash chip would be great in emergencies, and a copy of DSL/Puppy Linux/*Your favorite recovery tool* would be perfect to store there. Bonus points if you can easily (i.e. without a soldering iron) swap the flash chip to a fresh drive and do a Stage 1 Gentoo reinstall from scratch.
Come to think of it, the possiblities of RAIDing these things together could be interesting as well. With a RAID 1, all but the most paranoid wouldn't need to include the flash memory in the mirror. Or, should the flash memory get sufficiently large (say, 20-25% of the hard drive size), you could use the flash memory as dedicated parity in a RAID 4 array. Obviously this means squat if you can't interface the flash memory properly, but hey, at least the possibilities are there.
I only mod funny =D
The technical specifications of the flash memory in my USB drive says that it is guaranteed to work for, at most, 100000 (i.e., one followed by 5 zeros) writes. People do not talk about this limitation, but I have seen this limitation written into the technical specifications of the flash memory in many devices
But, on the other hand, how often do you write to your windows folder? There's the monthly update, the occassional reg hack, but all in all, once it's established, that's a pretty static area of your drive. I could see this as an incredible benefit to system files, which, as has been discussed oft here before, the big reason for this.
Loading your PPT file in flash won't help bootup. Loading that fuster-cluck of the system32 folder, though, would.
Someone will be awfully upset when she makes a final save of her million-dollar PowerPoint presentation for the CEO and discovers that the save is the 100001st write to the hybrid drive.
Backups? Alternate locations? If this is what it takes for them to learn the necessity of redundant copies, it's even better.
There should be some level of safeguard built in that anything user created should be stored to the magnetic part of the drive, my documents, program files, but they should have this anyway. I mean, nothing like the last save and then having to call Dell because your drive is spitting out an Error Code 7...
Actually the saving power hype quite stunned me :)
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The article said that it will be integrated into windows server architecture, so that your servers will power down the hdd's to save power. but this idea has flaws
* first of all, who the hell wants to spin down server hdd-s ? you can't cache hudred of gigabytes, and servers that would save any noticeable amount of power from that can't cache all the necessary data to the tiny dram or flash.
* second, there is no real "mega power save" here, intel makes cpu's that still float near 100W while they are at fullspeed, whereas a modern hdd goes under 10W in normal conditions while spinning normally.
* third, if it's mainly used as booting speedup, how many times do you really want to start your server (yeah ok, on windows, the update cycle needs you to boot once per month, but still
* fourth, spinning any physical item down and up again will reduce it's lifetime, temperature changes in the oil and materials make it less resistable to damages.
* fifth, spinning up the hdd requires a lot more power than keeping it spinning.
* sixth, unless this works transparently (emulating some 'natural' disk operations will certainly make it slower than just disk access), who the hell is going to rework all the raid software that you have enhanced your boxes with ?
* seventh, add all the things up from here, and althrough you find the disks inexpensive, the total cost will be expensive, may not save you a dime.
To save power i currently look at amd geode and laptop cpu's (from both, intel and amd). if i stack up my machines with those i will save more power per work unit than any flash trick.
For a desktop or notebook that you boot once per day, this ofcourse seems like a nice idea, way to go.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.