May 17th, 2006
Hybrid Hard Drives to Debut at WinHEC
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Samsung today announced that next week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) it will demonstrate the first commercially available hybrid hard drive. What is a hybrid hard drive? It’s a drive that combines flash memory with a standard hard drive, to speed up booting, improve drive life and reduce the chances of a problem due to dropping the laptop or PC.
The benefits, especially in the mobile space, are numerous. HHDs will be able to boot or resume operation up to twice as fast as a traditional hard drive, and are five times as reliable. Additionally, the drives provide an extra 20-30 minutes of battery life over their predecessors.
Either a 128MB or 256MB cache would act as the first step in storing data. The hard disk would only need to spin to save data when this cache is filled, roughly once every 10 to 20 minutes. The cache could also assist in allowing a PC to boot quicker. Source: BetaNews
We Say: Show me the price first … if it’s reasonable, I’d be interested in taking a look at one of these for my PC (well, once I see a review, anyway). I would assume you should just be able to plug an IDE version or SATA version into a PC. Samsung says the first HHDs will ship next quarter.
Alice Adds: I thought the main reason we don’t have all-Flash hard drives is their read/write limitation. Wouldn’t this mean a shoter life cycle for the drive?
“When compared to a hard disk drive, a further limitation is the fact that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles) so that care has to be taken when moving hard-drive based applications, such as operating systems, to flash-memory based devices such as CompactFlash. This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or filesystem drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors, or by write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure.” More on Flash memory Here
More on NAND Flash Here < --Interesting
Mike says:
Why not make it upgradable flash, or just let us put a flash card in it? Sounds like a great idea, but throw a nice 1gb or so on there!
Mike
May 18th, 2006 at 2:24 am
Perros says:
The flash memory you generally get in flash cards isn’t as fast as a hard drive. The type of cache they are using will probably be more expensive but faster.
But yeah, 1GB would be a good amount.
-Perros-
May 18th, 2006 at 2:46 am
Snopesman says:
This kind if scheme has been used for a while in NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices — data is written to NVRAM then sent to the disk array, and also data can be retrieved from cache then given up to the network users.
To put it into perspective, one NAS device may have 2 GB - 32 GB of RAM and be able to effectively support thousands of users. So for a single drive, 256 MB may be very reasonable. I’m wondering if this data will be backed and written to disk in the event of a power failure. I’m guessing not.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:03 am
David Johnston says:
If it’s using flash memory which is nonvolatile, then a power outage wouldn’t affect it. That would be how it would boot faster. Most likely, the files needed for booting would be written to the flash memory during shutdown and remain there until the computer is booted again. It sounds really nice to me, so hopefully the price won’t be too high
May 18th, 2006 at 6:08 am
John B says:
Sounds great on paper but the devil is in the details. OK, frequently accessed files such as all the operating system files are in flash so you boot faster. Now, what about the swap file? Lots of action there. So the gizillion write cycle flash sure gets used up fast. Even if some intelligence is applied to detect wearout. I guess if all you are worried about is making it through the first couple of years of use before the machine winds up in the trash then it may be a cool technology.
Given how often Windows likes doing disk i/o I am surprised my HDD indicator LED still lights! Somehow I just don’t buy 10-20 minutes between disk accesses, unless of course the machine is hibernating.
May 18th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Smitty says:
Think of the viruses! A whole new world to propergate in…
May 18th, 2006 at 11:32 am
GreNME says:
This is an interesting technology, but I also hold reservations on the supposed benefits touted by the makers. The flash memory cache will be great if it is implemented in a similar fashion to NAS devices, though 128-256 MB is not a great deal of space with today’s software. A typical Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (with GUI and default settings) install are going to exceed that space by far. While it is highly likely that the flash memory is going to be of a better grade than our current USB flash drives, there are still limits to the read/write capabilities that disk-based storage has thus far mitigated (which is why it is still in use).
This is an interesting product to look into, but I wonder if the promises are going to create too many expectations to begin with, and if the drives will even meet the basic promises of better performance and increased battery life. If it happens, then sign me up for a case of the drives. If not, I can’t say I’ll be too surprised.
May 18th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Terard says:
I eat my own hair
May 18th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
D man says:
Let’s see… where to begin….
This is Samsung not some little company. I am sure that the many engineers they employ have considered the finite read/write lifespan of normal flash memory. The article actually states that the reliability will be 5 times greater on the new Hybrid Hard Drives, so it seems as though the issue has been throughly addressed. don’t you think? (Normal hard drives have a mean time before failure too.)
Sooner or later we will use all flash based hard disks I’m sure. Look how big, fast, and cheap USB drives are now. It’s just a function of Moores law.
Also this device appears to be targeted at notebooks according to the article. It will probably really not need to access the disk much if you are just on the desktop messing around or web surfin. Games will be a different story as always.
Glad to see them make a breakthrough and get this out to the market. It REALLY is about time we got some improvements to the standard way hard drives are made. They have been the main bottleneck of a PC for years and years.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
jimmy says:
I’ve heard claims that the Mean Time Between Failures for flash drives is now comperable, if not better than that for consumer hard drives.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Bill Gates says:
D man - Hard drives haven’t been the main bottleneck for PC’s - “Windows” has been!
May 18th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Gumpokc says:
It’s about time they brought the technology from the Commodore 64/128 into the home PC once again.
May 18th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Bill says:
the c64 was released in 1982, flash memory was invented in 1984
May 18th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
GalFisk says:
Sounds interesting if the price is okay. And if it’s designed to let the disk take over transparently as the flash memory decays, old drives will still be usable and no worse than disks without this technology.
May 19th, 2006 at 12:57 am
Rhalin says:
Regarding the message about this being similar to NVRAM in NAS, this is not the case at all. The way this system works is vastly different from that. The flash actually takes the place of frequently cached sectors of drive, and does -not- act as a cache itself, except in that the data will eventually be written to the drive. But this write is not neccisary for the drive to work properly. The flash is basically supposed to be used as direct access for things like parts of the system page file, having sectors of the drive mapped directly to it.
May 19th, 2006 at 4:40 am
shoemoney says:
shoemoney
nice shoemoney site at shoemoney http://www.imyourhuckleberry.info/ 36
June 1st, 2006 at 11:36 am