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."

Comments

Re:Add more ram and make smarter bootup sequences

[Maddog Batty]

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.