times.hankooki.com — Instant Booting Comes Close to a Reality! The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. The new product will be introduced along with Microsoft’s Windows ReadyDrive feature
May 7, 2006 View in Crawl 4
killa62May 8, 2006
if this is less than 200 dollars, it will definately be the most bang for the buck upgradei mean, think about it, almost instant opening of any app and it will increase a laptop's battery life too
soogyMay 8, 2006
Or get a RAM drive for a little over $100 plus DDR sticks.
scrabbydooMay 8, 2006
Has anyone solved the write limit problem with flash drives yet? With any OS writing continuously unto the disk for virtual memory or web cache, everytime I use the computer or surf a page, I'll be shortening the lifespan of the disc. It makes me uncomfortable with that thought always on my mind and always trying to avoid writing stuff to disc. 100,000 writes isn't that much when you consider everytime you minimize a program or go to another page on the web you're writing stuff into virtual memory or cache.A totally flash based drive probably isn't best, I'll definitely go for hybrids though, because you can choose to put only the write-a-few-times read-many type of information (such as boot up sequence) in the flash drive, and the write-many information (such as virtual memory and cache) in the magnetic drive.
zootmMay 8, 2006
(digg put this in the wrong place for some reason, bury)
jakegMay 8, 2006
why would there be god information in an article about hard drives?proofread much?
cquinndMay 8, 2006
It should look to the PC like a normal hard drive, with a very smart buffer. The OS (Windows Vista to start) will have control over the files that are placed in the flash portion, either frequently accessed system files or in a similar way to a SuperPrefecth cache.
geminitojanusMay 9, 2006
"Yeah, but a harddrive will write a whole lot more than 10^6 times in same location."First of all, newer Flash has at least a million write cycles, or 10 years life under ordinary use. New Flash is also engineered with ECC to protect against data errors, and write leveling has significantly spread out the amount of writes/reads a Flash NAND can take before failing. Second of all, a harddrive /will not/ write that many times to the same location for the same reason a Flash drive won't; the more times it writes to one location, the more likely that one location will fail. That's why modern HD controllers have their own logic for protecting disk surfaces and for leveling data onboard so that areas on the disk can fail, and be entirely transparent to the user that they have failed. "With a conventional Harddrive its a proven technology that is understood."Flash RAM is arguably an /older/ technology. It's more proven as early Flash-type devices were used by NASA all throughout the space age. The fact is, we've been using Non-volatile RAM for years and years in BIOS chips, for programmable ROMs and RAMs all throughout industry. All that's happening now is that devices are becoming more ubiquitous and simpler to manufacture, which is driving up capacity and down cost, and new technologies are making us able to manufacture them smaller.Flash is the future of computing devices. It's faster, it requires less power, it's more durable, there are zero moving parts, it's shock protected (throwing it on the ground doesn't affect the RAM), it's cooler, and it's far denser. But, I don't believe HDs will ever completely go away, simply because they're so far ahead in capacity that Flash will take years and years to catch up, and HDs are somewhat more "permanant", are fire resistant, and the physical data can be recovered from them in cases of extreme disaster.
zootmMay 9, 2006
"What Linux doesn't have as of now is a native driver that uses a Flash device as a relative cache, but it could be done."That's what I meant, yeah. Cheers for confirmation. :)"In fact, it'd be really nice if someone coded a pathway for the Linux Swapfile to be stored on a Flash device, so when the kernel pages, it pages to Flash RAM, and I think that would add the most you'd ever see as far as user speedups."Until we get flash devices without a limited number of writes, I don't think that will be practical. Would be awesome if it was, though.
hardballMay 18, 2006
"I like the idea, what I don't like is the location. With the Flash Cache integrated to a HD, you have absolutely zero upgrade path with your existing hardware (aka, when larger caches become available, you have to replace the drive to recieve the benefit). I personally believe Intel's Robson is a much better version of this technology, as the Flash would be located on the motherboard, and could be slotted/socketed to allow manufacturers freedom to market cache sizes to any size, and fit ordinary existing Flash formats such as CF and SM."I think that you are really missing the point; Hybrid HDD is part of a long term strategy up Samsung and MS's sleeve, where justing NV cache on HDD is just the first step to an entirely solid state drives on smaller devices such as Oragami and think-n-light laptops. Another part of MS tactic with the Vista release would be implementing tricks such as "ReadyBoost", and allowing more flexibility in using different types of flash devices to increase available physical address space, and the performance of the storage subsystem. And by using things such as USB pen drive and CF cards, there is actually vastly more flexibility in the use and upgrades of NV capacity. And the eventual goal would be moving to primarily relying on NV flash for large portions of the OS files, especially things like registries; and also most applications; and HDD being solely relegated to data storage (mostly large multimedia files), and recovery information for the OS; this would be for most systems. For the mobile systems and other small clients, eventually, there will no longer be any moving parts in the storage subsystem at all. And all of these would be able to be supplemented by future versions of removable flash storage; and "ReadyBoost" would just be the first generation of that technology. That would be infinitely more flexible than anything Robson would have to offer; and upgrading could simply mean popping in another CF card in an available slot on the exterior of the computer.