'Hybrid' HDD Technology To Allow Data Access Without Booting

jfruhlinger writes "You've got a file on your laptop that you need to access — but you don't want to wait for your laptop to boot up to get at it. New technology from the company Silicon Storage Technology will make the contents of a hard drive accessible via a computer's USB port even when the computer is powered down. 'FlashMate combines hardware, firmware and software in a system application subsystem that manages a notebook computer's hard drive. It is based on SST's expertise in NAND flash controllers and memory subsystem design with Insyde Software's expertise in PC BIOS, system software and power management. FlashMate can work in conjunction with features such as Windows Vista ReadyDrive and serve as nonvolatile cache for the hard disk drive, thus enabling a standard hard disk drive to function as a hybrid drive.'"

Comments

Hey, what a great idea!

[Megane]

Too bad that Apple has supported HD access without booting for years. Firewire target mode, and SCSI target mode before that.

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[Tobenisstinky]

I think what megane was trying to point out was that this was being touted as "new and revolutionary" while Apple has been doing it for years. As for why we do it, it's great for data recovery if the OS goes bye-bye or a laptop screen gets smashed, we can copy the drive over to another laptop and contiue working. Because Apple builds the OS and hardware, it all plays nice together, and you can boot a desktop with a laptop in target disk mode. (Provided you have your architectures in sync - or have built a "universal" system. It's great for diagnosing hardware vs software problems.

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[peragrin]

Why it's cool that's easy

my powerbook died. the graphics chip stopped working, so the display was all screwed up. I bought a new Mac Mini, plugged in my firewire cable into both computers. I booted the bad powerbook into target disk mode, and turned on the mac mini for the first time.

As OS X initaized it gave me the option of importing settings and applications from another computer. It mounted my poor powerbook as a fire wire drive, copied everything over including passwords and user settings. two hours(20 gigs of stuff to copy) I had a nearly identical system up and running. I had to change things like the computers network name, change the resolution, but I was up and running fully. No reinstalling software for a day. it just worked.

I took the powerbook back to apple for repairs. when i got it back I repeated the process in reverse restoring the powerbook to what I had before in just a couple of hours, not days of reinstalling software like windows requires.

Yes I said days as windows software installs don't like being transfered in such ways.

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[demon]

Mostly because you'd need a dedicated USB port - FireWire/i.Link/IEEE 1394 is a *peer to peer* bus, so all ports work the same, whereas USB ports have *host* ports and *device* ports. It makes it much more difficult to implement. On the older NewWorld PPC systems, FireWire target mode was simply implemented by a little bit of Forth that talked on the FireWire bus, accepted commands, and read from/wrote to the system's internal disk as directed - it's so dirt simple. (I understand the Intel based systems have it as well, and I'm sure it's implemented similarly, with a small EFI program.)

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[dgatwood]

To be fair, software-copy-protected apps on the Mac don't like being transferred that way, either, but at least for most of them, you just have to reauthorize them. There are a few, however, that are poorly written and break completely (you have zero days to register this software before saving and printing are disabled), requiring reinstallation of the app after a transfer. (Finale, I'm looking at you.) Fortunately, such problems are rare in my experience.

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[dgatwood]

Mostly correct.

IIRC, software-switchable USB silicon does exist, though it isn't all that common. Of course, if you switch one of the standard USB connectors over into device mode, you'd still need a highly nonstandard USB cable with two "type A" connectors on it instead of a "type A" and a "type B"---a specialized cable that almost nobody actually owns. By contrast, FireWire requires only a standard cable that anyone who has any (non-camcorder) FireWire peripherals should already own. Thus, unless you waste a whole lot of space on the back of the case for a connector that is used exclusively for this, USB won't be even remotely as convenient as FireWire in spite of the ubiquity of USB.

USB really sucks for this sort of thing. I'd imagine that's why Apple didn't choose to do USB target disk mode when they dropped SCSI despite the fact that all Macs had USB by that time. USB just isn't suited to the task (not to mention that it is slower in practice, hogs the CPU, etc., thus making it a really bad choice for booting off another machine's hard drive).

Besides, who waits for a computer to boot these days? Haven't people heard of sleep or hibernation? It takes maybe five seconds from opening my laptop to actually getting work done, including the time spent typing in my login password....

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[kf6auf]

Also, USB2 wasn't finalized until 2000. Firewire was around when USB was painfully slow.

Re:Hey, what a great idea!

[v1]

I'd imagine that's why Apple didn't choose to do USB target disk mode when they dropped SCSI despite the fact that all Macs had USB by that time

More likely this was due to USB at the time being 1.1 at 12mbps. Firewire at 400mbps gave it a good whupping until the advent of USB 1.2/2.0HS years later. Until only recently, USB was not much better than ADB at doing data transfers.

The fact that they used the same connector on both ends was icing on the cake. USB target disk mode would probably require puting a "B" connector on the back that would have target mode as its only use. (waste of money)

Another thing is firewire is chainable, though not particularly useful for this.

Wow.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

You've got a file on your laptop that you need to access -- but you don't want to wait for your laptop to boot up to get at it. Damn... and I thought I was fucking lazy.

alright!

[snark23]

Now I don't even have to boot to steal sensitive information. This will save so much time!

Macs

[MBCook]

That's odd, all the Macs I've owned in the last 7+ years have done that though FireWire Disk Mode. Boot, hold a key down, in 5 seconds or so you have a oversized, way overpowered, external FireWire disk. It's about time the rest of the computer world started getting this ability.

Of course, since I just put my computers to sleep I don't have to worry about boot time.

It's a useful ability though. I've used it a few times on my Macs. Plus, it makes getting a new Mac and transferring things over (using the installer's transfer wizard) trivial.

Re:Macs

[clickclickdrone]

Now why the hell don't reviews ever mention stuff like that? I'd have bought a Mac for that feature alone.

Re:Macs

[gEvil (beta)]

What's even more fun is connecting two Macs together using firewire, setting the first one to boot into target disk mode, and then having the other one boot off the first machine's hard disk. Great way to diagnose disk problems without ever opening a case.

Re:Macs

[dctoastman]

TFA says while the computer is powered off. Not partially booted, not on, off. This is an evolutionary step from Apple's Disk Mode.

So, while Disk Mode is cool, it is still not the same. Because with this, you could transfer files from a desktop to a laptop during a power outage.

Re:Macs

[quanticle]

Now why the hell don't reviews ever mention stuff like that? I'd have bought a Mac for that feature alone.

Perhaps because Apple doesn't publicize the feature either. There are many cool things that the Mac OS can do that aren't well publicized. Another example is universal spell checking, which I also never hear mentioned.

Re:Macs

[tlhIngan]

That's odd, all the Macs I've owned in the last 7+ years have done that though FireWire Disk Mode. Boot, hold a key down, in 5 seconds or so you have a oversized, way overpowered, external FireWire disk. It's about time the rest of the computer world started getting this ability.

Actually, the feature is much older - dates back to the early 90's on the 68k Macs as well. Though, they didn't have Firewire ports, they did have SCSI ports. You could set them into "SCSI Disk Mode", and they'd appear on the SCSI bus as a disk (with the SCSI ID you set).

Heck, the SCSI logo that bounced around the screen while this went on even displayed the SCSI ID in case you forgot to set it properly (and thus can do some black magic to get your SCSI bus working again).

Was a great way of transferring files from my old Macs (one of which didn't have Ethernet!) to my new Powerbook about 4 years ago. (Admittedly, another neat thing was the fact that the old Mac with Ethernet didn't do AppleTalk over IP (which unfortunately, is all OS X supported natively). But OS X Classic could be booted and Chooser (remember that?) could find it, and it still magically appears as a mounted disk in OS X. I don't think I want to know how many layers of software was used for that to happen.

USB is much harder though - you can't just plug a USB Host port into another USB Host port - that's an illegal USB topology. (There can only be one host on a USB bus since it's a master-slave bus, unlike Firewire/SCSI which are peer-to-peer).

Re:Macs

[0100010001010011]

Because the feature first showed up in 1991. Starting first with SCSI Disk Mode and evolving into Firewire Disk Mode in 2000. Here are a list of other features that I wish my XP laptop had that Mac has had as long as I've run them (Since system 7.1).

You can rename a file while it's open.
You can move a file while it's open. (Mac programs track it accurately, stuff like jEdit doesn't).
You can rename a program while it's running.
You can open a folder that is in the trash and move a file out of it without having to restore the folder, get the file and then delete the folder again.

Re:Macs

[Corporate Troll]

You do realise that all the "features" you list are a direct result of having a sane filesystem? (Apart from the last one, not sure about that) Most, if not all Unix operating systems can that and did that for ages.

Re:Macs

[tengwar]

One they really should mention because it usually catches new Mac users out: how to de-install an application. I spent some time looking for the Add/Remove Programs equivalent before I found that you just drop the application in the Trash.

It's a trap!

[n1hilist]

I hear these hybrids cause a log of smug!

Best tag ever

[Jesterboy]

I don't really even care about the article, but I have to say, "flashyourcache" is the best tag I've ever seen.

Who cares?

[goodmanj]

Who boots a laptop? I just close the lid on my Mac, and it goes to sleep. I open it up and there's my stuff, in less time than it takes to plug in a cable. It'll sleep happily for weeks without running out of juice. The only time I ever reboot it is when it needs a software update.

TFA is an elaborate solution to the wrong problem. The right problem is, "how can we make laptops that don't need to be booted every time they're used?"

Just borrow not steal the laptop data you need?

[Herschel Cohen]

Does data become just a bit too accessible? Just asking, what are the built in safe guards. None were noted in the article, but I may have missed its being mentioned.

A bit underwhelmed

[LarrySDonald]

Ok, they jammed a USB frontend on the drive system. Good thinking, but not exactly revolutionary thinking - every cheapo device in the toy section seem to have a USB drive interface anymore (I'm only waiting for the first Happy Meal toy with a USB plug - "Experience vast adventures on your computer with the latest bid from Disney/Nick"). Should have always been that way, but good that it's getting that way now at least.

So OS security be damned, eh?

[mr_mischief]

TFA doesn't say a thing about authentication, authorization, or accounting. How does this know who's checking the data? How does it decide to allow them? Where and how does it store the facts about who accessed what and when? The AAA process is a cornerstone of security -- computer or otherwise.

Yes, I know physical security is paramount. A building needs more than one cornerstone, obviously. ;-) But other systems require the drive to be taken out or the machine to be booted at least. It's a lot easier to make sure no one can boot your machine (startup password, bootloader password, no booting from CD etc.) than to make sure they can't hook up a USB cable to it. It's also a lot harder to catch someone hooking up a cable for a couple of minutes than tearing down your laptop and taking the drive (or sliding the drive out if it's easily removable like some are -- taking it to another system and hooking it up are still time-consuming and conspicuous).

BTW, the other cornerstones are secure design (again, in software/hardware or outside computers altogether) and data hiding (encryption, shredding paper, window shades, closed doors, setting proper permissions so that AAA actually matters, etc).

Avoiding the problem

[jolyonr]

This seems like an excellent way of avoiding attention to the real problem - why a modern OS takes so long to boot.

Jolyon