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."

Comments

Re:Catastrophic Failure of Flash Memory

[Osty]

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.

Depends on what you're doing. For example, if you run IIS, your log files (by default; you can change this) are in %WINDIR%\Sytem32\LogFiles. That's going to have a lot of writes. Any new hardware or software installation may cause writes to %WINDIR%. There's a lot of other stuff that legitimately writes to %WINDIR% like installing a new printer (think roaming -- you may print to a different printer every day), the .NET Global Assembly Cache, Visual Styles and themes, and a whole lot more. Whether these things should be in %WINDIR% or not is a different question. The point is that using flash for %WINDIR% under the assumption that you'll not write there very often is a little naive. Perhaps Vista reorganizes %WINDIR% somewhat so that fewer processes need to write there.

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...

All of this is a moot point anyway, because this use of flash is only as cache. Anything written to the flash drive should eventually be flushed to the hard drive. Similarly, if you've exhausted your write cycles and try to write to the cache, it should seamlessly catch the fault and go directly to hard drive. In that case it would be nice to give an occasional notice that your flash chip is exhausted and you need to replace it, but you should not risk losing any data. I'm not a big fan of on-board flash simply because it may be unreplaceable. Any onboard flash chips should not be surface-mounted, but socketed like RAM, CPU, or the clock battery. That will require some standardization on sockets, but as long as there are only two or three different options and the designers of said options let others build chips using that interface (*cough*Sony*cough*) it shouldn't be a problem.

In the long run, I think computer manufacturers will love this. How likely do you think your parents will be to replace their onboard flash when they run out of write cycles? The average consumer will just buy another PC for a couple hundred dollars rather than buying a new flash chip and installing it (or paying someone to install it).

How soon do you think the conspiracy theories will start up that manufacturers like Dell are intentionally shortening the life of onboard flash through factory "testing"?