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Seagate Releases Hybrid Hard Drive
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Oct 08, 2007 03:07 PM
from the either-the-best-or-worst-of-both-worlds dept.
from the either-the-best-or-worst-of-both-worlds dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us Seagate has released a new hybrid hard drive. This new drive adds the speed of a solid state drive to the conventional hard drive. Originally designed for laptops this new drive comes in 80, 120, and 160 GB flavors and features 256MB of flash memory.
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Submission: Seagate releases their first hybrid hard drive by Anonymous Coward
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Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: Samsung not first to ship (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an alternate article for the slashdotted original:
Parent
Re: Samsung not first to ship (Score:4, Informative)
Recently, they even blamed Microsoft for the poor performance of hybrid hard disks on Windows Vista (in German, http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung/97021&words=Samsung%20Hybrid&T=samsung%20hybrid [heise.de])
Parent
Re: Samsung not first to ship (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA:
I am a bit surprised to find, that there is a market for exploding laptops..
Parent
These drives are great... but, (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You might want to check out your new drive out-- It seems to have some data loss.
This is Great (Score:3, Interesting)
However, why did they only include 256MB of flash storage instead of a larger quantity like 2 GB or so?
Many people who exercise smaller flash storage options get flash drives larger than 512MB, so was it really that much more expensive to bump up the available flash storage a little bit?
Regardless, I look forward to the performance benefits devices like these will provide.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I'd rather it allowed the drive to spin down. (Score:4, Interesting)
If these drives could fool Windows into letting them go to sleep we might be onto something.
Parent
Re:I'd rather it allowed the drive to spin down. (Score:4, Informative)
But I turn off indexing service, which doubtless makes a big difference.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you go back and (re)read Google's study, you'll find that Google has little to say about power cycling harddrives, as they let them run continously. While Google did note a weak correlation, they speculated that this might be caused by already problematic machines that needed to be powered down and repaired more often.
I agree that convential wisdom does say that lots of powe
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So here is what I would suggest... Put a card slot on there. Let me put in as much as I need. MicroSD cards are nice and small, but may be too slow, even the SDHC variety. I'm sure they could come up with something that would work well however.
Re:This is Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistically, 256MB of pending sectors is probably enough to get most of the potential benefits from reorganizing writes to the platter. And if you sell a gazillion of these, a buck saved on each unit is a gazillion dollars of profit.
Parent
Re:This is Great -- So what you are saying is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is Great (Score:4, Informative)
As for SATA drives they don't normally do 100MiB/s unless the information is already in cache on the driven. The flash memory is basically there to be a larger cache which is persistent across boots, allowing for the bootloader, kernel and a few essentials to be guaranteed a faster access time. Any additional items that go in there depend upon what the specific manufacturer specific algorithm does.
The size of the flash is like the size of cache on a harddisk, bigger isn't necessarily better. You could give a HD 30mb of cache, but if it is using a poorly designed caching algorithm, the difference can be nonexistent if the important stuff isn't in it.
In this case, 256 ought to be enough for present day computing. Even Linux is a fraction of that size, sure you could include a few utilities that regularly run during start up along with the kernel, but when you start to get beyond a quarter gig, you are beginning to get into things that run less predictably.
Parent
Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
I'm imagine they'd use this as a write-through cache. When you write data to the disk, it stores it in flash. Because a write-through cache can be quite effectively implemented in a ring-buffer (with reordering within a moving window for efficiency), you get perfect wear levelling without any complex controller logic. That means that it will work for writing 256MB times the number of rewrite cycles. Cheap flash has 10,000 rewrite cycles. My current laptop has been on for 30 days and has written 172.85GB to disk in this time. That gives 5.76GB/day of writing, or 23 complete write through the cache per day ignore, for now, that some of those were large linear writes, which would probably want to bypass the cache). For 10,000 rewrite cycles, with this usage pattern, it would take 435 day (1.2 years) to wear out the flash. This is, as I mentioned, assuming very cheap flash. Slightly more expensive stuff can get 100,000 rewrites, giving 12 years. If the mechanical parts of a laptop hard drive lasted 12 years, I would be very impressed. They should last longer with this kind of system, because it can batch writes a lot, and reduce the frequency of spinning the drive up and down. You also won't need to spin up the drive to read back data that you've only just written, which could help some poorly performing swapping algorithms (i.e. all of the ones used by 'modern' operating systems).
By the way, flash has a slight weird characteristic that you can write to it with a byte granularity, but only erase it with a block granularity, and it's the number of erases that cause the problems.
Parent
Ahem, wrong cache type... (Score:3, Interesting)
Brain fart? Or I misconstrued you?
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
Defragmenting the files themselves gives about 20% of the potential benefits of defragmentation.
Defragmenting the file allocation table (FAT on FAT/FAT32 file systems, or MFT on NTFS file systems) gives the remaining 80% of the performance boost potentially given by defragging.
In the big scheme of things, it honestly doesn't matter whether the most recently used files are at the beginning of the drive, next to each other, or on opposite sides of the drive - if the file allocation table (or MFT) is sufficiently fragmented. Frag out the FAT/MFT bad enough over time, and simply defragging the MFT/FAT will make your computer run an order of magnitude faster.
Want the bad news? Windows doesn't ship with a FAT/MFT defragger (well through XP. Not sure about Vista.)
Only way I know to do it is with aftermarket software like Diskeeper (excellent product, BTW, 99% of the time.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
You can also use fsutil utility to do the same thing: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/fsutil_behavior.mspx?mfr=true [microsoft.com]
Parent
Yeah except I prefer speed over power saving (Score:5, Informative)
Both hybrids, Samsung AND Seagate were not only more expensive, they were considerably slower in tests vs. a traditional harddrive. I understand the drive to be green, but I think I'm going to wait a few years before jumping on this bandwagon!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
--beckerist
This isn't about being green (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how much of a use these will be in desktops, but in laptops it seems like a really good idea. Also, Seagate drives normally perform slower than the competition. In basically all the tests I've seen, their drives are on the bottom. Of course we are talking a difference of a few percent at most, and perhaps that's also the reason their drives last longer. Maybe they don't push them so hard.
Parent
Re:Yeah except I prefer speed over power saving (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Needed for Vista? (Score:3, Funny)
Article is /.'ed (Score:3, Informative)
Since laptops can't support the faster speeds that their desktop brethren, any access time improvement is desirable. You can keep your most frequently used data on the Flash or as a buffer, such as during a movie. Another benefit is that flash takes less energy to read than a HDD.
Here's also a review of the drive itself [dailytech.com]
I'm still waiting... (Score:3, Informative)
Meh.
Go to Seagate's website (Score:3, Informative)
Hybrid Irony (Score:4, Funny)
Like the Transistorized Vacuum Tube Radios? (Score:5, Interesting)
From Emerson's adverts: "Transistors are so tiny they must be seen to be believed. Transistors are so sturdy they won't break... They will last for life!" and give "greater power without distortion - full reproduction of voice and instruments, balanced tone quality, and greater power output with less distortion, not to mention low battery drain"
What other mixed hybrids have came along? Was there ever a hybrid horse and car?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista requirement (Score:3, Interesting)
Made for Vista ReadyDrive - which is USELESS (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/performance.mspx [microsoft.com]
I'm summarizing what I learned from the German c't computer magazine, which has tested the various new technologies like ReadyDrive and others in Vista and also tested Flashdrives and Flash memory in general. Read the current issue of this magazine for in-depth analysis.
1) Pure Flash disks have only ONE advantage over harddisks: they are less sensitive to mechanical stress. In real-life scenarios, they don't safe power, and they are most definitely not faster than 2.5 inch drives. They ARE faster than 1.8 inch ones often used in ultra-mobile PCs, so there they indeed provide a benefit. For everyone else: especially write performance sucks compared to modern 2.5 inch disks, and read performance is at most en par. True, they don't need to position any heads so random access should save time - but according to the real-world tests made by c't that benefit isn't noticeable.
2) c't testers were very suspicious about how long Flash memory could survive as HD replacement where writing happens all the time, and yes, Flash cells have a limited lifetime, one cannot write too often. That's the theory. In practice c't testers were unable to make even the cheapest Flash USB stick show any sign of memory loss even after something like 16 million write cycles, when they gave up further testing because that's many many years of real-work usage. (pg. 104 of c't 21/2007)
3) Intel TurboMemory or MS Vista SuperFetch, ReadyBoost or ReadyDrive were shown to provide no measurable benefit AT ALL.
Suspicion of Hitachi and others seems to be that the current implementation in Vista isn't quite finished and SP1 should provide an update, and second the amount of Flash memory is waaaaaay too small.
Original article (German): http://www.heise.de/ct/07/21/100/ [heise.de]
Drives are out, no performance increase.... (Score:3, Insightful)
technology seems immature (Score:4, Insightful)
With my thinkpad there was an optional gig of flash that I ordered. After I downloaded the drivers and got it all set up, I found that there wasn't any noticiable difference in speed, or harddrive usage. However, I did notice that it interacted poorly with the "active protection" feature that stops the harddrive whenever the computer is in motion. Whenever the computer was unplugged, the flash cache was turned on, I could simply shake my computer (thus activating active protection) to get a blue screen.
Furthermore a little research showed that benchmarks on flash caches being sold right now offered no performance benefit whatsoever.
If there's no performance benefit, why are they trying to sell these things to people? I've seen some handwaving over the idea that flash *might* keep the harddrive from spinning most of the time and thus save battery life. However, when using the flash I saw no noticeable benefit.
Having an extra layer of cache in the system architecture seems like a good idea on paper, but in the real world the consumer is buying totally worthless pieces of hardware that do not improve performance one whit, and have never been proven to improve battery use.
Re:Couldn't this be done in software? (Score:4, Informative)
(see above).
AIK
Parent
Integrated - NOT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does any of this require OS hooks? If you're going to have OS hooks, you might as well glue a USB thumb drive to the hard drive and be done with it. (And in fact, an md-like linux driver to combine two block devices in a manner like the above would be a great hack.)
Parent
standard ATA but specific Windows ReadyDrive code (Score:3, Informative)
The ideas behind this are applicable to any O.S. and there are proposed standard ATA commands to manipulate the Non-Volatile cache, see http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D1699r4b-ATA8-ACS.pdf [t13.org]. I hope Linux and Mac hackers are working on it.
I'm not sure if the drive takes advantage of NV cache without specific O.S. support. Even without O.S. support, the drive could decide "You keep reading blocks X Y and Z, so I'll store them in NV cache" (drives already do this with their
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Most of us can be barely bothered to read the summary, let alone TFA... and you want us to google for a link?
Might as well ask for a never-ending supply of beer*, and 12 nekkid virgins to be awaiting your return home after work tonight to satisfy your every whim.
*or Mountain Dew, depending on your age/preference.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equations_of_motion#Linear_equations_of_motion [wikipedia.org]
In this particular case,
vf = vi + a * t
seems most appropriate (where vf is final velocity, vi is initial velocity, a is accelleration and t is duration of acceleration).
Assuming vf = 0 and solving for a, we get
a = vi/t (1)
Solving for t yields
t = vi/a (2)
"vi" after a 6-foot fall can be determined by using another of the equations:
vf^2 = vi^2 + 2ad
(where d is distance in meters, let's use 2 meters
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. So the 900g figure simply means it took 900 times as long time to accelrate during the fall than it took to slow down when it hit the floor. Let's assume a fall from that height took 9 seconds (I could have computed the exact value if the height had been given in standard units), then it means it must stop in just 0.01 seconds when it hits the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)