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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."
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...
I don't like that idea, since if a system failure occurs and I want to move my harddrive to another system, there is a chance that the harddrive is in a bad state. Where as if you have th flash integrated with the HDD, then the write buffer is with the disk (as it should be).