Hybrid hard drives soon to become commonplace?

[Rob Williams]

At a discussion of flash memory technologies to be included in Windows Vista and "Longhorn" here at TechEd 2006 this morning, Microsoft's program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres confirmed to TG Daily that inclusion of hybrid hard drives will be a requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo, beginning in June 2007.

I'm not against this idea, but as we seen recently, a laptop that carried one of these drives was valued over $4000. Considering it was only a Celeron, it makes you wonder just how much these drives will cost.

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/06/12/hybrid_hard_disks_again_vista_premium/

 

[RazorBack]

Love the idea, would the flash act as a buffer? I guess it would. Only thing, the Samsung drive they link to only has 256kb of flash memory, is that really useful at all??

Now what I would like to see is a ~200gb HD with an 8gb flash drive on which the OS could be loaded and everything else would be on the HD. That's bound to bring some serious performance increases.

On another note, I'm not too well versed on hybrid drives so I might be barking up the wrong tree!

 

[T-Shirt]

the reason for the realitively small amount of flash and the high price is the cost of the highspeed flash.
As the production ramps up the cost of the flash will drop 10-100 fold, making these drives competive with other high performance drives.
100% solid state drives (diskless hard drives?) are in use by NASA and the military, custom built and really , really expensive. but when you need fast access in a high G enviroment mechanical drives just don't work.

 

[dloneranger]

Wouldn't it be better to make the drives with a socket for a flash card?
Geez - I can pick up a 1Gb flash card for £23 at the moment and an entire 8-in-one card reader is only £15
Take away all the plastic parts and you're going to knock off quite a bit
At the most it should cost about £20 more than a standard drive + the card you add
Even over a usb2 connector the read speed for normal flash kills the hard drive for random access and is pretty good in burst mode
And at boot up, random access is the key thing
Write speed is pretty lousy, but that wouldn't matter in this scenario

 

[dloneranger]

Love the idea, would the flash act as a buffer? I guess it would. Only thing, the Samsung drive they link to only has 256kb of flash

No, the idea is that as many startup files as can fit are copied to the flash memory to speed up the boot time

For real data buffering you need a lot more than that, you're talking in the Gb range now and if you want to get serious about it, you need to get a PCI/PCI-E hard drive card that has ram sockets
(This is where the hybrid drives have an advantage - their memory is non-volatile so they dont need the files to be read in order to cache them)
Even then this will only help if you reuse the same files over and over, you're still limited to the speed of your hard drive for anything new
If you want real speed you're better off adding more ram to your system - just going from 1Gb to 2Gb has increased the performance of my pc a lot after the first time I start a program

If you're fed up of waiting for your pc to be more responsive a dual-cpu is the best bet
I've been using them since the P3 came out and when I use a single cpu system at someone else's home it's like a nightmare