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Samsung Ships Hybrid Hard Drives
writertype writes "ExtremeTech reports that Samsung has become the first company to begin shipping hybrid hard drives as discussed last fall on Slashdot. (Some photos here.) Unfortunately, there's no word yet (beyond 'soon') on when retail shipments will begin, or when (or if) 3.5-inch models will be available. Note that these hybrid drives are different than the ReadyBoost USB flash drives optimized for Vista; hybrid drives contain a smaller amount of flash, and work as a write cache for your notebook drive, extending battery life."
But, really, can they run Linux? Are the drives supported in the kernel?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
A new kind of flash was developed last year that had much faster read/write (closer to RAM) and didn't deteriorate. I suspect that kind is what these will use. (Unfortunately I don't remember the name...)
The government can't save you.
BSFlash
It's more like 1,000,000 writes, but your point is taken. Perhaps the driver takes this into account--store many small and frequent temporary files such as browser cache files into RAM rather than flash, then dump them all to flash or disk rarely, but this implies a lot of intelligence on the part of the driver.
;)
According to PC Mag link from the article, only Vista has the correct driver to use this drive.
It sounds like a nice innovation. Now to get from hybrid drives to biofuel laptops that run 8 hours on a thimble of ethanol
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
As someone else has already stated, yes flash is still limited but not as much as it used to be. These hard drives are aimed at laptops and I believe Vista requires them to be considered as "Designed for Vista" rather than Vista Ready.
The point of the flash is to provide a nonvolatile write cache which will then spin up the drive to write a queued data after the cache is filled. This is supposed to have a significant effect on the battery life of laptops.
I'm certain that hard drives will slowly go away to be replaced with Flash ram devices. As the price drops it will happen.
Reasons?
1. Hard Drive reliability - See the security now podcast or read google's paper about hard drive reliability. The manufacturers are lying BIG time about how bad it's gotten. And SMART is a steaming pile of nothingness that can and is wildly inaccurate.
2. Latency (not speed) is so much better than hard drives.
3. Power and heat - Flash memory does not generate near as much heat or draw as much power. Plus we can expect densities to get higher so the footprint probably will be smaller than hard drives
We've already seen it in handhelds. It's moving to laptops (Toshiba and Fujitsu already are selling laptops)
If it has a mechanical action to it, it can fail horribly.
just my 2 cents.
The have limited cycles per sector, but the drives automagically allocate writes over the least-used sectors. In practice, a modern flash drive should have at least the same lifespan as a spinning disk if not longer.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
can the user control what is cached and what isn't?
For example, I could care less if a config file I will likely never edit again is cached, but I want my database to be cached for higher performance.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I suspect that the intelligence built into the drive has the capability of detecting flash sectors that have gone bad, much like an ordinary hard drive can detect bad magnetic sectors. So, I think that over time one will see that the flash's capacity decreases, but is mostly still available during the life of the drive.
PRAM has the properties you describe. Although it isn't a type of Flash memory so I doubt it's the one present in hybrid drives.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
The average human is good for 10,000 to 1,000,000 hours. That's surprisingly accurate:
10,000 hours = Roughly 1 year, 50 days
1,000,000 hours = Roughly 114 years
Most people do die in that timespan, even if it is a little broad.
Anyway, back to flash: Those numbers aren't from the same variety of flash, they might be using one that averages say 800,000 erase/write cycles, with 99.999% of devices being within 50,000 of the average. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing how long I was going to live that precisely, and I definitely wouldn't mind living 800,000 hours (I'd be 91!).
The press release from Samsung is dated April 2005. You can read more technical details there without all the annoying popups on ExtremeTech. Looks like the drivers which give the power savings were written by Microsoft. Planned ship date was late 2006, so they didn't fall too far behind.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I would like to see a battery-backed RAM drive with FLASH as well. I think that for journaling filesystems it would be great for performance since the journal could be written into RAM and then later written to disk. The drawback of the RAM based drives I saw was that the battery is only good for a limited amount of time. The way to fix it is to provide less battery time but use that time to write the RAM out to FLASH when the power is cut. The advantage of combining RAM and FLASH is that RAM is very fast to write to and has an unlimited number of write cycles. Of course, I'd really like to see one of these new memory technologies come out that combines the best of DRAM and FLASH.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
When I saw this, I thought, "Cool, now I can finally get my kids a dog and me some additional storage space, all with one purchase."
And to celebrate your new found good fortune, you decided to take yet another bong hit. Peace out, man.
And I've seen more X brand drives. (No, I'm not even going to bother naming them, but it's not Samsung.)
As they say, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Superfetch will shut itself down if it fails. It couldn't possibly cause a FS crash/corruption like you complain.
OTOH these drives could fail since they're not superfetch and they're potentially caching writes.
Amen! I have ntfs-3g on my Ubuntu (Edgy) partition. So long as I do a safe shutdown, and the filesystem is marked clean, everything works wonderfully and very quickly (not that I had serious speed problems with captive-ntfs, but I seldom deal with very large files.)
It's quite amusing that Linux is the only OS that can natively (as in, as a filesystem, not just in some ftp-like application) handle basically every major filesystem in existence today, what with the addition of NTFS support.
Linux is the only convenient way for me to transfer files from a HFS+ volume to a NTFS volume or vice versa. You can do it on Windows by using macdrive, but that is like using winzip or something. And it's damned slow. You can't do it on macos AFAIK, at least I haven't seen working NTFS R/W on macos yet.
And of course linux also supports a shitload of BSD formats, XFS, JFS, ZFS...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NAND and NOR flash are completely different types of flash chips.
NOR flash is good for holding code - it's basically nonvolatile RAM. You can execute code straight out of NOR flash easily by hooking it up to a memory bus.
NAND flash is good for holding bulk data. It's interface is strictly I/O based (like a hard drive) - you cannot directly execute code from NAND flash without copying it to RAM first. Some NAND-based devices have fancy tricks (Like samsung's ONENAND and M-System's DiskOnChip) where they put in some SRAM so you can execute, but they basically have to copy it from the array into the SRAM. (NAND flash also has stuff like "bit flips" where read data does not exactly match written data - and reading data can change it, but this is compensated for by using ECC codes in the "spare area").
All NAND-flash handling code has to handle bad blocks as a typical chip can have up to 2% bad from the factory.
The reason we use NAND flash is because it's extremely dense. While flash gets increasingly expensive as you go larger (32-64MiB is the "sweet spot" in price/storage for NOR flash), NAND flash achieves really dense storage. For the price of a 32MiB NOR flash, you'd get 1GiB NAND flash chip easily. So for things like memory cards and stuff which use I/O interfaces, the flash is exclusively NAND. NOR is used for stuff like BIOS code which doesn't change very often anyhow, and often just enough of it to have code where we can pull out data from cheaper storage devices (NAND flash and hard disk, for example).
So yes, it'll be the "good stuff".
Rather than ship hybrid drives now with flash chips good for a few thousand cycles, why not wait until the end of this year and ship them with Intel PRAM or equivalent. PRAM is expected to be faster, non-volatile, and handle many times more R/W cycles. Or is the lifetime of the rest of the drive no longer than for the flash itself? This seems to be to be just a bit ahead of its time, and has the potential for either problems, or performance degradation, over a relatively short timespan.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm not sure what is more screwed up the article linked to about the drives or the Slashdot comment.
v ista/features/details/performance.mspx
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p s+Worlds+First+Hybrid+HDD151or+Is+It/202621_1.aspx
ReadyDrive is NOT ReadyBoost, but it IS STILL a MS Technology and is designed to work directly with Vista.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windows
Also why does the linked article and Slashdot dismiss these drives as having nothing to do with Vista, when in fact they were DESIGNED Specifically to be used with Vista and employ MS Vista technology in the hardware?
Is Slashdot trying to become the misinformation site of the Internet?
http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20070307PR201.h
http://www.channelinsider.com/article/Samsung+Shi
"Optimized to work in Windows Vista-capable notebook PCs, Samsung's MH80 is a 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive with 128 or 256MB of flash memory. It combines a hard disk drive with a OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software, offering faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology, the spokesperson claimed. "
Sorry slashdot, but these drives are designed for Vista. Sure they may offer performance improvements in other OSes, but will see the majority of performance gains in Vista. Also even when used with other OSes, the way the Drives internally manage the Flash caching is from MS, so thank them the next time you boot your Linux laptop with one of these drives.
As for the other questions people have about the limited write times of Flash RAM, etc, go lookup MS Superfetch technology which specifically addresses these issues by writing to various locations in the Flash space, since this this is also how these drives work to ensure the same bits don't always get used, giving the flash cache the equivalent or greater lifetime than the HD platters.
I know this is SlashDot, but someone could get the fact right once, right?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
They really cut back on emissions by only using the gasoline engine while they're spinning up, and then switching over to cleaner battery power while slowing back down.
Life needs more saving throws.
Why say "last fall"? I realise that Slashdot is mostly full of yanks, but why not try to be a bit more cosmopolitan?
Graham