Slashdot Mirror
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."
Let me be the first to say:
<borat>Nice</borat>
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
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.
7 434
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=1
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
The word "hybrid" has a meaning outside automobiles. Originally it was a biological term.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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).
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The new drives are like hybrid cars
So they get 50mpg?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
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)?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
My Journal
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225106&cid=18
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.
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
Back in the day, Apple used to ship Macs with a copy of pre-OS X, Mac OS on a ROM. It was basically unused, but it did have the advantage that if your hard drive went down or an extension to the OS was making your system unbootable, you could always boot from the ROM and at least do a hardware check to see if your problem was hardware or software related. Apple could re-introduce this feature using Flash memory, although I'm not convinced it is really worth their time.
Which macs are these?
I've never seen one.
The only Apple systems I've ever known to include an operating system (such as it was) in ROM were the Apple ][ series. Macintoshes include functions in ROM, but it's not a complete OS. Amiga used the same approach, only moreso - to the point where an OS upgrade mandated a ROM upgrade.
I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I've never even heard of such a thing and every Mac I've ever powered up without a valid boot volume just showed me a disk with a question mark on it - and that includes Macintoshes of literally every generation but G5, including the XL (Lisa), doorstop, Macintosh II, Quadra, G3 and G4.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
You have just missed a Monty Python reference. Please turn in your Slashdot card, as well as any and all other nerd paraphernalia.
Ceci n'est pas un post.
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).
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Sounds to me like your Dell is set to "hibernate" (which actually powers off your computer after saving its "state") and not "standby" (Windows 2000's term for "sleep").
Hibernate saves the computer's state (including open programs) and memory contents to the hard drive, then powers off the computer. Coming out of hibernation powers on the computer, loads back the saved memory contents from the hard drive, and returns the computer to its previous state. The notebook's battery is not being drained at all while in hibernation because the notebook is actually turned off, not "sleeping."
"Stand by" in Windows 2000 is like "sleep" in Mac OS. It should take a few seconds, at most, to go into and out of "stand by." I have a Toshiba notebook (Pentium 3) that's much older than your Dell D600 (Centrino era), and it "sleeps" (goes into stand by) and "wakes up" in seconds. Since your Dell uses an Intel Centrino chipset and Pentium M, it should have no problem going into and out of stand by.
I read about this from Mac users all the time in Slashdot, but I'm certain that almost all of them are confusing "hibernate" and "sleep".
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk...
Oh...so that's how hybrid cars work...
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Putting swap on a RAM disk, eh...? That totally isn't totally redundant!