News Samsung releases hybrid HDD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/03/08/Samsung_releases_hybrid_HDD/

 

sounds good.

 

Looks wicked.
Looking forward to Raptor drives with this kinda tech.
Can you imaging a raptor for a couple of gigs of flash memory???
I'd buy that for a dollar (or more like $500 ).

Typo:-- Fixed, thanks! - Da Dego

 

Not just a raptor drive, a parallel perpendicular water holgraphic raptor drive

 

Awesome. Now I just need to sit back and wait until a 1 or 2 GB flash SATA 120 or 160gb one comes out.

 

i actually watched a long song and dance about flash drives, and they look pretty interesting, except vista has to tell the HDD what to put in the flash memory (otherwise it just acts like a HDD)

Although they did demo the fact, if your not working on it, those hundreds of tiny read/writes that happen can just be buffered in the flash memory, so you can actually get the HDD spun down for like 90% of the time if you aren't doing anything

It will become much more interesting when they are a couple of GB though, not that you want to store the OS in nand, but the combination of big enough flash and ram will probably allow the HDD to sit idle

Although i do wonder about HDD life - drives last longest when they are on for sustained periods, so constantly starting and stopping the drive seems like a bad idea

 

Sounds fantastic, and while the memory size is very small, this should start the ball rolling.

And an extra 30 minutes laptop power is always a good thing!

 

Nice.
I hope they're releasing a high performance one for us enthusiasts rather than a bunch of laptop drives.

 

I don't think i'm going to shell out on one of these for a while, not until I'm able to get the entire OS on the flash section, and all my data on the rotary.

Still, as said before, it's nice to see the ball is now rolling

 

let the ball roll...... and then buy a uber fast hard drive.

 

wow, that 128mb or 256mb of flash is pretty much worthless... why cant they just stick a 1gb stick or 2gb stick (like in thumb drives) in there and make it a awsome hdd, instead of a decent one.

 

The technology is a LOT more complicated than that...and actually 128-256MB is far from worthless, as I explained in the article? I'm just curious how the system will manage what's on that portion and what isn't.

 

My only question would be how this affects the overall drive lifespan - has flash memory progressed beyond the point where it's life under constant read/write is comparable to the rotary part of the drive it's a cruicial part of?

Cheers,
Paul

 

doesnt NAND have a finite amount of read/writes? if its continually cashing data it will surly hit this limit "quite" fast, in comparison to the life time of a standard hard drive -- can you replace the NAND in the disks ?

 

Flash life has gotten a lot better. The drive can also balance the load of where the reads and writes occur. Samsung has a 32 GB all flash drive with an MBTF of 228 years.

 

alot of the OS doesnt actually need to be used all the time, so you really dont need to put it all in NAND

Also, ontop of that the drive has to cache the files into nand memory anyway, so its just prefetching files better
Im wondering what the sweet spot will be where the drive doesnt have to spin up for long periods of time (assuming your not playing media) because the nand has all the data you need

 

With this drive in combination with a SD card or other flash memory storing any media I want to watch as well as offering ReadyBoost should increase the battery life on my laptop as it should allow the hdd to spin down.

 

I imagine having the swap file in the cache of the HDD would help?
You could in theory set a system managed swap file to be stored in the cache and it would only be filled if needed...

How would this work in raid?
As your PC 'sees' the disks as one drive, would it still be able to access the nand on the drives?
Would you simply double the nand size or lose it alltogether?

 

its possible it will do this, it caches data that your likely to need, and all the writes while the HDD is spun down

if you want to find out what actually happens youd need to talk to MS, beacause its their software behind the scenes making this happen, Its called ReadyDrive

Edit:
Btw its hardly amazing samsung did this, i mean they just followed MS's specs im guessing, they didnt even have to write any software for it - their just the first to get a product out there

 

Been waiting a long time to see one like this being released, It will improve battery life in laptops by a considerable amount, but if they put in a biggar Flash memory, the prospects for high performance machines, increase rapidly!

Imagine Playing a high intensity game (can't think of one just now), with little to no load times!!! Awosome!