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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."
The disk dive is a hybrid. It combines a standard platter-based drive with flash memory to hold the stuff used to boot up. This is supposed to improve boot speed.
Adding more ram for a disk cache is a simpler (and often lower power) solution to speed up disk activity.
Not if your hard drive is switched off (remember this is laptops we are talking about). It takes quite a while and a lot of power for a hard drive to spin up. You can get data from a flash chip within micro secs of switching it on.
Writing to flash takes power, leaving the flash on [so you can access it] takes power.
The whole point with flash is that you do not need to leave it on. Once the data is written to it, you can switch it off until the data is needed. RAM needs to have some power (though not much when in standby) to keep the data in it active.
wot no sig
I agree that car analogies often are incomplete, but this is hardly a bad one. You take an electric car and a gasoline-powered car and do an engineering mash-up and you get a car with many of the advantages of a gasoline car (capacity, cost) and many of the advantages of an electric (power consumption, throttle response). You take a platter-based hard drive and a flash-based drive and do an engineering mash-up and you get a drive with many of the advantages of a platter-based hard drive (capacity, cost) and many of the advantages of a flash-based drive (power consumption, latency).
It's actually not a bad analogy.
The only thing stranger than all of the car analogies is the impassioned resistance that they invoke.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"