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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 word "hybrid" has a meaning outside automobiles. Originally it was a biological term.
Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
The new drives are like hybrid cars
So they get 50mpg?
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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)?
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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.
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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.
I hear they're also taller than the average midget...
Do you have ESP?
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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...
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