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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."

3 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  3. 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...