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Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the under-the-hood dept.

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."

12 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. What's so special about Vista? by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's so different about Vista that makes this drive benefit from Vista. Will the drive not work in Windows XP, Linux or Mac OSX machines?

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    1. Re:What's so special about Vista? by MindStalker · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Vista is designed to be bootable from flash memory. Significant changes to the bootcode of XP would be nessesary for the instant on features. The other features could possibly be incorperated with drivers.

    2. Re:What's so special about Vista? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As a Linux laptop user (yes, there are a few of us) super-fast bootup would be a very attractive feature, and an advantage now falling to XP. I'm curious how the boot time will compare to a resume from "suspend to disk" (though the attractiveness of suspend to disk / suspend to ram are limited by the fact that they're often a nightmare to set up anyways).

    3. Re:What's so special about Vista? by NineNine · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That is actually reason enough for me to re-think that whole Vista thing. With partial flash drives and eventually 100% flash drives, the last major component of computer hardware failure, namely, all of those closely moving parts in a hard drive, will be wiped out. Wow. That sounds pretty cool.

      Oh yeah, and it'll be fast as hell, too.

    4. Re:What's so special about Vista? by anethema · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, but flash DOES fail fairly predictibly and in certain ways. You get a certain amount of write cycles per sector, etc. You implement a write spreading alg on the drive and increase its life dramatically. You can easily start marking sectors as bad and have VERY early warning on drive failure. You can extend life dramatically by having extra sectors on the drive for write spreading (more benifet the more full the drive is). Also with current write lives, we can have drives you can write to 24/7 for years without that sector failing. With the write-spreading the drive lifetime would vastly outstrip a normal hdd on average.

      The access time is also VERY low compared to a HDD, and unless the controller itself fries, its almost impossible to have catastrophic data loss.

      Basically, we cant switch fast enough, there are no downsides but price.

      --


      It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
  2. Apple? by SuperBanana · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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."

    Given Apple's strong relationship with Samsung (iPod shuffle+nano memory both come from Samsung, I believe- and I'm almost positive Samsung has supplied RAM to apple on+off since the golden olden days), what do others think about the possibility of this ending up in a Powerbook, er, Macbook Pro- and 10.5 being designed to take advantage of it?

    Apple can be hit or miss with the latest and greatest- they took forever with USB2 (yeah yeah, firewire blah blah) and lagged behind a lot of the smaller laptop mafacturers with Expresscard (given there's next to nothing for expresscard, who can blame them?)...it'll be interesting to see if Apple thinks this is a win or lose technology...

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
  3. Re:How long until failure? by bcat24 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the cache is designed to help with booting and suspend/restore, so it shouldn't be written too much. With a large enough flash buffer, it should be able to least for the normal life of the drive.

  4. Re:Linux Next? by JimXugle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can have a similar effect now by using a flash drive as your root partition, or as a swap partition. Keep in mind that using it as a swap partition would make the drive age faster.

    --
    -jX

    Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
  5. Why does the CF have to go on the disk? by pensivepuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If Vista knows about the CF, why does it need to be on the hard disk itself? It sounds like all the heavy lifting is being done by Vista anyways. WOuldn't it make more sense just to use any CF attached to the system for this caching, etc, and use normal hard disks instead? That way adding CF to a PC would improve its performance, no matter what type of hard disks you have attached.

  6. Has it changed in 3 years? by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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? Doesn't really matter they were only used to transfer settings. As any one whos had to support them knows, they often just die for no apparent reason. I'm not convinced that this is a system I'd want my data on.

    --
    Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
  7. Re:Linux Next? by keesh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Except that Linux does preemptive swapping long before you run out of RAM, so that if something suddenly needs it, there's no huge delay whilst things get swapped out.

  8. Use Flash for directory structure not cache! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We did some basic research with Flash / HDD hybrids two years ago. As such disks weren't available, yet, we were using a real (Notebook)HDD and a IDE-Flash-HDD in parallel.
    Our goal was to minimize energy consumption for mobile devices (i.e. not a lot of ram available for caching and the device is switched off repeatedly to save energy).

    Using a very sensitive (time resolution wise) energy measurement device, we determined, that most energy was consumed by moving the heads into position. The difference was substancial: Around 0.63W for the HDD spinning idle and about 5.3W during heavy seeking (e.g. trigered by a "find ." in the root of a freshly booted system).

    We decided to not use the flash as cache (flash is quick to read, but slow to write) and just put the relatively static metadata (directory structure, inode tables...) onto the Flash drive, but keep there files and data on the HDD, as each directory access triggered a expensive seek, but delivered very few data, compared to reading a file.

    To simulate our mobile device we used a Linux-System limited to 32 ram to prevent the system from excessive caching.
    We observed up to a factor 8 reduced energy consumption and as a surprising side effect a factor 6 increase in speed!

    When increasing the available Ram, this advantage quickly vanished on repated benchmark runs, as the System appearently cached the directory structure very effectively. The first run after booting however still performed substancially better with our system, no matter the amout of ram. (And this was our target useage profile: Power on, search something, Power off).

    As the code was an embarrassingly ugly hack to the ext2 driver and we envisioned trouble keeping the hdd with the data and the flash-hdd in sync, it was not persued further.
    However with hybrid drives becoming available, it might be worth a more detailed analysis...