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Apple and LG plan Flash Laptops

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the what-are-you-wearing-under-there dept.

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."

3 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Read Cache is not the point! by samael · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  2. Re:What "resume" time? by GiovanniZero · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Actually, OS X is superior when it comes to sleep. Because Mac's have a set amount of hardware so they can develop for their own platform and make sure everything is fine tuned and working well.


    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225106&cid=182 31650 ->This discussion talks about hardware differences and shows one of the reasons that Apple has superior stability.


    Windows and even linux machines can have such a wide variety of hardware and all it takes is one bad driver to make sleep or suspend not work. Furthermore suspend2 for x86-64 doesn't come compiled in most distros of linux and you have to recompile the kernel to get it to work.


    While your notebook may not have any problems with sleep it is probably the exception. Lots of windows boxes will sleep but when you bring them back up sound won't work or usb ports won't work. It's a pain.

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  3. Re:Question by forkazoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.


    Yes, they do eventually die. No, they won't die dramatically younger than a hard drive. Modern flash uses wear-levelling algorithms, so that no particular bad block will kill the whole flash drive. It'll just make a small block inaccessible when it finally dies, which won't happen very often. OTOH, when a head decides to dig into your constantly spinning mechanical platter and make a noise that makes you feel sick... Well, there just isn't any algorithm fix for that.