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Samsung Ships Hybrid Hard Drives
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 08, 2007 11:07 AM
from the not-for-you-yet-binky dept.
from the not-for-you-yet-binky dept.
writertype writes "ExtremeTech reports that Samsung has become the first company to begin shipping hybrid hard drives as discussed last fall on Slashdot. (Some photos here.) Unfortunately, there's no word yet (beyond 'soon') on when retail shipments will begin, or when (or if) 3.5-inch models will be available. Note that these hybrid drives are different than the ReadyBoost USB flash drives optimized for Vista; hybrid drives contain a smaller amount of flash, and work as a write cache for your notebook drive, extending battery life."
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Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed 255 comments
Erica Campbell writes "Samsung is preparing to release a new
Flash memory-assisted computer hard drive
that boasts improved performance, reduced energy consumption, a faster boot time, and better reliability. The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it."
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Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
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You'd just assign the controller another LUN and document the commands it accepts. You could then make the flash disk part of the address space of the primary disk or you could assign each their own LUN for use as two separate disks, with the third "control" LUN accepting commands to copy betw
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And to celebrate your new found good fortune, you decided to take yet another bong hit. Peace out, man.
hard drives are going away (Score:5, Insightful)
Reasons?
1. Hard Drive reliability - See the security now podcast or read google's paper about hard drive reliability. The manufacturers are lying BIG time about how bad it's gotten. And SMART is a steaming pile of nothingness that can and is wildly inaccurate.
2. Latency (not speed) is so much better than hard drives.
3. Power and heat - Flash memory does not generate near as much heat or draw as much power. Plus we can expect densities to get higher so the footprint probably will be smaller than hard drives
We've already seen it in handhelds. It's moving to laptops (Toshiba and Fujitsu already are selling laptops)
If it has a mechanical action to it, it can fail horribly.
just my 2 cents.
Re:hard drives are going away (Score:4, Informative)
Well yes, IF flash ram can overcome it's shortcomings AND cost which is extreme.
you can get 750 gig of HD for $350, probably less now, how much would that cost in flash?
And unfortuantely flash is about as reliable as HDs right now for long term use. Even though it is not mechanical, it still wears out and is subject to out of box failures. (Memory manufacturing is about as poor as HD manufactuing is these days based on the number opf bad flash mosdules I've run into.)
And... it is so very very slow.
So yes, it woulf be GREAT to get rid of the bulky, loud, power hungry, slow access, mechanical HD of the last century, but... there is really nothing even close on the horizon right now
Parent
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In a couple of Gig you can easily store an operating system, many applications and many documents. For company PC's it would make sense to just load the OS and app
Imagine 20 miniSD cards in a RAID-5 (Score:3, Insightful)
you can get 750 gig of HD for $350, probably less now, how much would that cost in flash?
For desktop-replacement applications that need more than half a terabyte, such as video editing, hard drives are probably the best option. But with fully-packaged flash retailing near $10 per GB, a laptop with a flash drive (imagine an enclosure the size of a 2.5" hard drive containing 20 miniSD cards in a RAID 5) can do a lot of things surprisingly well.
Sadly, flash just isn't practical at all in it's current form for anythig OTHER than small devices that only need a small number of gig in a tiny form factor.
Define "small number of gig" in terms of applications that laptop owners would want to run and which wouldn't work with a "small number of gig".
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Let me correct the mistakes in your statement up there:
I [want] that hard drives [to] slowly go away to be replaced with Flash ram devices. Price drops [should] happen.
Just because Flash is better in your opinion than hard drives doesn't meant that prices will magically drop (a hundred times?) to replace hard drives.
Flying cars are also much better and have much lower latency but alas: i
What I really want to know is... (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I could care less if a config file I will likely never edit again is cached, but I want my database to be cached for higher performance.
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cached database...? (Score:2)
Re:What I really want to know is... (Score:5, Informative)
This flash will be a write cache for the hard drive so that the hard drive doesn't need to spin up as often (this will potentially enhance your battery life). As you make changes to your data, it will be written to the cache and then flushed to the drive (a) when the cache is full or (b) when the drive is spun up for some other reason (a read, for example). Presumably, if the drive is already spun up, the flash won't be used at all and data will go straight to the disk.
Parent
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Correct, this is not Vista ReadyBoost technology, it is Vista ReadyDrive technology.
Somehow people keep skipping the fact the write caching technology these drives are using is a MS designed technology, even though it is not ReadyBoost.
More info, try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyDrive [wikipedia.org]
Or even www.microsoft.com
Old news (Score:3, Informative)
Combine RAM with FLASH to store fs journal (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also, if the flash were removable (i.e. SD card, compact flash) then it could be possible to move to another machine.
Wait for Intel PRAM (Score:5, Interesting)
Different than the drives designed for Vista? Not. (Score:5, Interesting)
ReadyDrive is NOT ReadyBoost, but it IS STILL a MS Technology and is designed to work directly with Vista.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windows
Also why does the linked article and Slashdot dismiss these drives as having nothing to do with Vista, when in fact they were DESIGNED Specifically to be used with Vista and employ MS Vista technology in the hardware?
Is Slashdot trying to become the misinformation site of the Internet?
http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20070307PR201.h
http://www.channelinsider.com/article/Samsung+Shi
"Optimized to work in Windows Vista-capable notebook PCs, Samsung's MH80 is a 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive with 128 or 256MB of flash memory. It combines a hard disk drive with a OneNAND Flash cache and Microsoft's ReadyDrive software, offering faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology, the spokesperson claimed. "
Sorry slashdot, but these drives are designed for Vista. Sure they may offer performance improvements in other OSes, but will see the majority of performance gains in Vista. Also even when used with other OSes, the way the Drives internally manage the Flash caching is from MS, so thank them the next time you boot your Linux laptop with one of these drives.
As for the other questions people have about the limited write times of Flash RAM, etc, go lookup MS Superfetch technology which specifically addresses these issues by writing to various locations in the Flash space, since this this is also how these drives work to ensure the same bits don't always get used, giving the flash cache the equivalent or greater lifetime than the HD platters.
I know this is SlashDot, but someone could get the fact right once, right?
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Re:well (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:well (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen! I have ntfs-3g on my Ubuntu (Edgy) partition. So long as I do a safe shutdown, and the filesystem is marked clean, everything works wonderfully and very quickly (not that I had serious speed problems with captive-ntfs, but I seldom deal with very large files.)
It's quite amusing that Linux is the only OS that can natively (as in, as a filesystem, not just in some ftp-like application) handle basically every major filesystem in existence today, what with the addition of NTFS support.
Linux is the only convenient way for me to transfer files from a HFS+ volume to a NTFS volume or vice versa. You can do it on Windows by using macdrive, but that is like using winzip or something. And it's damned slow. You can't do it on macos AFAIK, at least I haven't seen working NTFS R/W on macos yet.
And of course linux also supports a shitload of BSD formats, XFS, JFS, ZFS...
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The average human is good for 10,000 to 1,000,000 hours.
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Who would be reassured by the following:
The average human is good for 10,000 to 1,000,000 hours.
That's surprisingly accurate:
10,000 hours = Roughly 1 year, 50 days
1,000,000 hours = Roughly 114 years
Most people do die in that timespan, even if it is a little broad.
Anyway, back to flash: Those numbers aren't from the same variety of flash, they might be using one that averages say 800,000 erase/write cycles, with 99.999% of devices being within 50,000 of the average. I certainly wouldn't mind knowing how long I was going to live that precisely, and I definitely wouldn't mind living 800,000 hours (I'd b
Re:well (Score:4, Informative)
NAND and NOR flash are completely different types of flash chips.
NOR flash is good for holding code - it's basically nonvolatile RAM. You can execute code straight out of NOR flash easily by hooking it up to a memory bus.
NAND flash is good for holding bulk data. It's interface is strictly I/O based (like a hard drive) - you cannot directly execute code from NAND flash without copying it to RAM first. Some NAND-based devices have fancy tricks (Like samsung's ONENAND and M-System's DiskOnChip) where they put in some SRAM so you can execute, but they basically have to copy it from the array into the SRAM. (NAND flash also has stuff like "bit flips" where read data does not exactly match written data - and reading data can change it, but this is compensated for by using ECC codes in the "spare area").
All NAND-flash handling code has to handle bad blocks as a typical chip can have up to 2% bad from the factory.
The reason we use NAND flash is because it's extremely dense. While flash gets increasingly expensive as you go larger (32-64MiB is the "sweet spot" in price/storage for NOR flash), NAND flash achieves really dense storage. For the price of a 32MiB NOR flash, you'd get 1GiB NAND flash chip easily. So for things like memory cards and stuff which use I/O interfaces, the flash is exclusively NAND. NOR is used for stuff like BIOS code which doesn't change very often anyhow, and often just enough of it to have code where we can pull out data from cheaper storage devices (NAND flash and hard disk, for example).
So yes, it'll be the "good stuff".
Parent
Re:well (Score:4, Informative)
According to PC Mag link from the article, only Vista has the correct driver to use this drive.
It sounds like a nice innovation. Now to get from hybrid drives to biofuel laptops that run 8 hours on a thimble of ethanol
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I'd also hope that in heavy usage it disables writing to the flash and behaves like a normal disk to avoid wearing the flash out.
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The point of the flash is to provide a nonvolatile write cache which will then spin up the drive to write a queued data after the cache is filled. This is supposed to have a significant effect on the battery life of laptops.
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
The have limited cycles per sector, but the drives automagically allocate writes over the least-used sectors. In practice, a modern flash drive should have at least the same lifespan as a spinning disk if not longer.
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MTBF in NAND flash is between 1M hrs and 3M hrs. They don't even use write cycles any more.
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It's also possible that they put some extra flash on there with some backup blocks, just as hard drive capacity is actually greater than what is reported, but some of that space is saved over for bad block relocation (in addition to simply being able to lock out bad blocks, which is what happens when you run out of relocation blocks.)
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Flash is typically *rated* for 10^5 writes.
I worked at trimble navigation, radio group in sunnyvale, ca in the summer of 2000. One of my projects was stressing flash eeprom in the embedded systems we were developing, using rapid thermal cycling, and finding ways to exceed and recover flash beyond manufacturer's rated duty-cycle spec. Yes, we all know this is similar to MTBF calcs and not the same as real world failure modes (*cough* google's hard drive paper). The funny thing was, flash rated at 10^5
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Your average chip (like the 16F88) has a 100,000 write cycle for its internal Flash. The SPI Flash chip M25P*0 has the same - 1,000,000 write lifetime. (By memory - I could be off by 10x on the `88)
Now, since this has come up before, that doesn't mean that your drive will work perfectly until it hits 1,000,000 writes and then mysteriously stop working with a blinking red LED on the top. What that means is that statistically speaking, there's a good chance that most of your chip will s
Re:Samsung drive reliability (Score:5, Insightful)
As they say, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Parent
I smell BS (Score:3, Informative)
OTOH these drives could fail since they're not superfetch and they're potentially caching writes.
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Famous last words: "What could possibly go wrong?"