Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed

Erica Campbell writes "Samsung is preparing to release a new Flash memory-assisted computer hard drive that boasts improved performance, reduced energy consumption, a faster boot time, and better reliability. The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it."

Comments

So awesome

[Warbringer87]

that buffer is fucking huge. Laptops awesome, wonder when they'll actually work on a regular size one though. Then again, seeing as it's gonna be the first batch out the door, potential issues from what is practically a new drive type will scare me, and my wallet away.

Re:Ship time

[VitrosChemistryAnaly]

Wonderful idea for the manufacturers, flash drives only get so many [wikipedia.org] read/write cycles before they go T.U. Not so good for the consumers.

What would be neat is if you could swap out flash drives in the event of a failure. Or upgrade the flash drive capacity. I'd be more interested in that than a permanently integrated flash drive. You're correct to be skeptical of its lifespan.

Re:Ship time

[eebra82]

You're mentioning aged technology. Flash mems have improved since then, plus, it's slightly different technology.

Additionally, do you honestly think any company (Intel, Microsoft, Samsung) would back this technology if it was limited to R/W cycles in thousands?

Last but not least, such hard drives will also store data which stays more consistent than regular data. It could store vital boot files, files to your most common applications, etcetera. In other words, files that do not change much over time. It's not like you're going to save your most frequently used documents to this section of the drive.

So to sum things up, you will not have to worry about the SSD part of the drive. It will probably even outlast the mechanical part of the drive.

Investing in flash technology

[kingkade]

Flash technology seems promising and looks poised to take over devices that would be better off using solid state components (laptops, etc) that traditionally don't. I've wanted to invest in Samsung and flash technology in general. Samsung seems to only be on the Asian markets, is this so? Does anyone know of and good mutual funds/ETFs that allows one to invest in this specific tech sector?

Re:SuperFetch uncool...

[realmolo]

Why would you want your RAM to be unused? Unused RAM is useless RAM. Seriously.

I'm sure that Vista is smart enough to free up the RAM that SuperFetch is using if it could be better used for something else. It's really nothing more than a more pro-active version of the disc-cacheing that every operating system already uses.

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[soupforare]

Just because flash doesn't move doesn't mean flash doesn't fail.

Re:Has it changed in 3 years?

[Dun Malg]

We wrote a driver to read and write fat 16 flash drives for an embeded system. The testing for it wrote and read full speed 24/7 for two weeks before they died. I assumed that was because of the limited read write settings. Or is it possible the low quality connection was to blame?

Since not even you seem to have any specs on the flash drives you were using, what sort of answer are you expecting? Maybe the drives were new but used old memory. Maybe the internal voltage regulators that drop it from 5v to 3.3v were crappy. With no more info than "they were flash drives" and the post-mortem consisting of "they died", any conclusion would be idle speculation.

Re:Ship time

[Tim C]

Heck, MS says XP is "more secure". More secure than what?

Than previous editions of Windows, of course, and they're right.

I just had to clean my wife's laptop that is SP2 and fully patched with MS Windows Defender, MS Windows firewall and AVG anti virus and the thing has spyware crap on it that was bringing it to its knees.

And are Defender and AVG kept up to date? Is she running as an admin and installing any old crap she comes across? Is the firewall actually running?

A single anecdote proves nothing; I can attest to three XP machines that I personally use that are perfectly clean and have been for serveral years. Before blaming the OS, I'd check with your wife about how she was actually using the machine.

Yes, I do think any one of those companies would back any technology if that technology would make them a profit.

I can see that from Samsung, but neither Intel nor MS are going to be producing or selling these things, nor any hardware or software that relies on them. They're not going to stand to make any money on them, but will take a knock to their reputations if they back them and they're crap. Perhaps MS won't care, but Intel has serious competition from AMD, and can't be quite that cavalier.