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

Sweet

[danpsmith]

Let me be the first to say:

<borat>Nice</borat>

drives are like hybrid cars

[1u3hr]

NO, they're NOT "like hybrid cars". Stop it with the inane car analogies.

The word "hybrid" has a meaning outside automobiles. Originally it was a biological term.

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[Crazy Man on Fire]

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.

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[operagost]

Ooh! Let me try...

I upgraded to Vista, which is like kicking myself in the balls.
I started playing World of Warcraft, which is like smoking crack (but less socially acceptable).

Re:OK Sure

[tak amalak]

Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?

hybrid

[mastershake_phd]

The new drives are like hybrid cars

So they get 50mpg?

Question

[stratjakt]

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)?

Re:Question

[forkazoo]

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.

Read Cache is not the point!

[samael]

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.

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.

Re:OK Sure

[TheNetAvenger]

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.


I won't comment on OSX's paging, other than it needs a bit of refining as it tends to be over agressive.

However, I think Apple's initial plans are to use the Flash on these drives as more of a Read area for portions of OSX that are accessed at startup or frequently.

As for the lifespan of Flash, if the device or OS is smart enough to not use the same bits over and over and distributes the writes intelligently(Since areas of Flash are fairly equal in speed), then the lower end bits won't get any more use than the top end of the cache, and in theory the flash should last as long as the HD platters. There are also techniques to extend Flash usage by what bits are used and when, so the limited writes are extended beyond just linear write lifespans of the Flash.

Remember the HD Mfrs are not stupid about caching or Flash limits, so this is stuff that people a lot smarter than the average SlashDot reader has already considered and worked around.

Re:What "resume" time?

[GiovanniZero]

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.

Re:OK Sure

[FSWKU]

Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?

I think that term is reserved for the ones already using Sony batteries.

Re:OK Sure

[Trailer Trash]

....people a lot smarter than the average SlashDot reader....

I hear they're also taller than the average midget...

Re:We've already got one!

[the darn]

You have just missed a Monty Python reference. Please turn in your Slashdot card, as well as any and all other nerd paraphernalia.

Re:OK Sure

[drinkypoo]

Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?

No.

Re:Warranty?

[jusdisgi]

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...