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Apple and LG plan Flash Laptops
Lucas123 writes "An article in Computerworld
states that Apple and LG each plan to launch new laptops — one that's supposed to ship this month — with hybrid disk drives. The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk, kicking in data that can be cached like portions of the operating system, which can make for much faster boot up and resume times."
I wonder if the hybrid drive warranty in Apple's laptop will conveniently last about as long as the iPod's? Just enough time for the product to break so you have get a new one.
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There has been so much speculation, but where's the proof? It'll have to run a slim OS like the iPhone to work well on flash due to the high rate of paging MacOS does.
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http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=1
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The word "hybrid" has a meaning outside automobiles. Originally it was a biological term.
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Either it's a Windows thing I don't understand, or "resume" means something that is not obvious. When I open my MacBook (and any PowerBook I've ever owned), it's usable almost instantaneously (within a second or two).
Do Windows laptops not work this way (I've never used one)?
like a hybrid car? It's nothing like a hybrid car. And I would think the average slashdot reader is technically inclined enough to understand what it really is, without the retarded analogy.
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Adding more ram for a disk cache is a simpler (and often lower power) solution to speed up disk activity. Writing to flash takes power, leaving the flash on [so you can access it] takes power. But you can't use flash as random access memory.
Putting the laptop in suspend mode throughout the day (instead of hibernate or off) can also lighten the load on the disk/battery. Bonus points would be for flushing the read cache, compressing the in use memory and turning off as many memory banks as possible during suspend. (I know that's not trivial hence the bonus points).
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The new drives are like hybrid cars
So they get 50mpg?
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Does the flash inside these things die after however-many thousands of writes?
It sounds to me like the life expentancy of one of these would be greatly diminished over a conventional HDD.
Has flash technology advanced to the point that the limited write cycle thing isn't an issue, or do they just expect you to replace it every few months to a year (depending on how much you use it)?
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The article speculates that there would be a miniature version of Mac OS X in these units. I'm not sure what the reasoning for that is.
If these disks make a MacBook use less battery power, great. But I don't see why the world needs a miniature version of MacOS X.
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The point is that it can turn off the hard drive while you're working away, until the flash cache is full, and then turn it on long enough to dump the contents. This should save a lot of battery power.
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Related story from last month: Apple May Be Re-entering the Sub-Notebook Market.
Makes good sense, sub-notebooks have a premium on low power consumption / long battery life (more so than ordinary laptops).
FTFA:
Wu, who was among the first analysts to forecast the unveiling of Apple's iPhone music player/phone earlier this year, cited unnamed industry sources as the basis for his report.
"The time is right for the flash makers to make a move" as flash memory prices decline, Wu said by telephone. "Apple, from what we understand, is pretty much ready. The ball is in the flash vendors' court."
What do you mean Apple is pretty much ready? To replace a rotating disk with a SSD? I have news for you, that doesn't take much.
But seriously, I think that this is precisely the WRONG time to do this. Intel's PRAM is on its way. MRAM has finally seen some commercial use (in smaller quantities) and may be more available soon. Flash RAM is crap by comparison to either technology except for its availability and the wait for one or the other to actually become available should not be very long.
Such a device will be markedly expensive, so adopters will be few. It's an expensive way to get practice working in a particular market segment.
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So now the OS will go in a big flash drive as if it was some kind of firmware (you don't change the os very often, so flash life is not a problem) and leave the spinning disk to what really matters: pr0n!
"The new drives are like hybrid cars"
w00t! Petrol fueled hard drives! but ecologically sound!
oh. you didn't mean that. You just meant that you wanted people who didn't know what "hybrid" meant to have point of reference.
Actually you meant "They are a bit like Pear Trees". As in, a hybrid...
hmmm...
The drives in question have only 256MB Flash or so, far too little for any reasonable boot-/resume caching effect with todays OS sizes. Also, reading large amounts of data from flash tends to be slower than sequential reads from the disk anyway.
It's much more likely that the main use will be as a write-cache to allow to permanently and safely store smaller amounts of data on the drive without having to spin the drive up and thus saving power and reducing noise. A boost in performance in writing randomly distributed small blocks and/or mixed read-/write workloads might be possible as well, as the flash-cache will allow writes to the platter to be reordered for less head-movements/and to interfere less with reading from the disk.
You are right about the speculation part, however, you misinterpret the disk type - not flash, but flash/platter hybrid .
They keep talking about quick boot times. Is this an issue for anyone? I boot my Mac about twice a month anyway, so boot times are a non-issue. And wake from sleep times in OSX have been consistently quick for years. I understand the other benefits, but these points seem moot.
If I could replace my OS drive with one of these really large flash drives to cut down on heat/noise, but I know there's a limited # of writes you can do with these drives...
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First, rumor has it is all this is. An analyst put it in a report and everyone is passing it on a valid. Especially with Apple folks should know that rumors & speculation are just that.
Next it was widely reported a few years ago when Apple made a huuuge futures purchase on flash memory getting an excellent price and assuring their supply. Someone more motivated then I can crunch the numbers but even with however many million iPods sold I'm guessing Apple still has flash memory to play with and a decent price.
Then there's the non-US market. Yes, Americans want 21" screens, 6 speakers, 200 GB hard drives, and accept 30 minute battery life from their portables (oftentimes too big even for American laps). The rest of the world typically wants really small, really light, just enough computing enough power for on-the-road use, and 12 hour battery life. Thus an ultraportable will fill a huge hole in the Apple product line, one many posters to /. may not even be fully aware of.
With all of that in mind do I expect Apple will come out with some sort of clever new device that is small, robust, and runs for longer then others on the market? I wouldn't be surprised. Apple has innovated time & time again, particularly on laptops, and part of their market is remarkably price-insensitive (I've rarely heard "Get me the best Dell, whatever the price!", I've heard that regularly about Macs.) What starts at the top often soon moves down.
Finally, Apple still does largely design their own motherboards, owns their own OS, can implement a new technology without needing to coordinate it among many parties. But do I think J. Random Analyst is going to be all that insightful about Apple's hardware future? Not particularly, he's just an excuse to post another story about everyone's favorite conundrum.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually it kind of is like a hybrid car. A hybrid car is a mix of a heavy gas engine and a lighter electric engine that allows the gas engine to run less often.
The combination of a disk drive with a flash backup does exactly the same thing.
I'm kind of surprised you didn't notice that yourself--it's pretty obvious.
the battery power issue has been mentioned, but also keep in mind laptop hard drives tend to either be A. - lower RPM than desktop drives or B. - switched off for power conservation.
this means much higher response lag whenever laptops have to page in/out (and the reason i opted to upgrade the ram on the laptop to as much as the desktop).
apply this to the entire apple line and you suddenly have a considerable performance edge over competitors (using the same software configurations).
apply it to desktops as well for extra power conservation and performance per watt as well (and with desktops you have a larger case to include more flash into the drive).
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OLPC. I would buy a consumer version of one of those in an instant.
No- Flasthtops are on their way out Pramtops are the N.B.T. Ok Actually flashtops are a pretty good idea (are you listening Apple). It would be sweet to have a 12 or 13 inch laptop with a midgrade processor, a real graphics chip and a solid state drive. Oh and one more thing- get rid of the stupid waste of space optical drive. Give me a bigger battery or something.
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Am I the only one that initially read that as laptops powered by an all Macromedia Flash UI? Must be me dreaming about a carputer with a Flash UI running on BSD again.
Back on topic: I wonder if Apple plans on bringing any other changes for the new laptops besides hybrid HDDs and OS X.V. I'm still holding out for them to do a docking station and maybe a proper Delete key (no I don't think I should hit two keys to get the Delete function).
flash is slower than hard drives for writing data, even the worlds fastest product on sale now.
Though preposterous to imagine, a hard drive MOVING its head between thousands of 512 byte block accesses in a random write benchmarks is faster than a solid state high end flash drive.
read sandisks own benchmark white paper if you do not believe me
basically 512 byte writes to random locations are KILLERS for flash
amusingly a LAPTOP hard drive using the same range of motion covering the same storage amount (32 gigabytes or less) is faster
Hilarious but true
flash parts also degrade and truthfully cannot be fully written to more than 100,000 times generally.
I see cantbuyityet in the tags list, but this article isn't tagged. It should be.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Putting swap on a RAM disk, eh...? That totally isn't totally redundant!
try looking up word in a dictionary some time.
hybrid:
3 a: something heterogeneous in origin or composition
in this case, it's composition consists of two different methods of storage.
try to get it into your head that words can have various methods of use.
It's also a lot like old-fashioned drum memory.
Wow - get over-sensitive much?
Bashing is having four guys come after you as you walk out a door. Bashing is having a board used as a baseball bat on your skull. Bashing is waking up in a hospital covered in cuts & bruises with broken ribs, arm, and a skull fracture. Bashing is an eye that will never again focus properly, becoming deaf in one ear, and most importantly, permanently losing short-term memory.
That's "Bashing"
Pointing out that the US portable market is skewed towards desktop replacements and "the rest of the world typically wants..." smaller/lighter machines is just market analysis and easily confirmed when you look at portable offerings broken down by manufacturer & region sold in. Asia & Europe love ultraportables, the US market is largely indifferent.
You however, wow, "asshole", "bashing", - get help. Out of proportion, needlessly aggressive, confusing your purchasing desires with the aggregate buying habits of a nation, that's real 'alarm bell' stuff.
Oh, and the bashing? I've several friends who've been bashed & twice been in situations where I coulda been. The description I used was specifically of my buddy Doug. What I didn't note that when he came to he was also informed that as he'd been gay-bashed while unconscious his evangelical christian family had disowned him and the US Military, of which he was on active duty with, had begun the process of issuing him dishonorable discharge.
That you confuse something like that with my post can only be described as ill.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I wonder if Apple plans on bringing any other changes for the new laptops besides hybrid HDDs and OS X.V. I'm still holding out for them to do a docking station and maybe a proper Delete key (no I don't think I should hit two keys to get the Delete function).
A decent keyboard[1] and two mouse/trackpad buttons[2] are at the top of my list.
But a docking station would be nice.
[1] I'm sure IBM Japan or Lenovo Japan or whoever it is this week would be more than happy to get together with them and put a Thinkpad-quality keyboard in a sexy-looking box.
[2] No, double-tap and other passive-aggressive tricks to keep from backing down on the one-button-mouse farce don't count.
Doesn't this question about flash die after however-many thousands of asks?
It sounds to me like the relevancy of this question would be greatly diminished over a conventional question.
Has Slashdot commenting advanced to the point where the redundancy thing isn't an issue, or do they just expect you to answer the question every few minutes to an hour (depending on how much you read Slashdot)?