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Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Oct 19, 2006 10:11 PM
from the under-the-hood dept.
from the under-the-hood dept.
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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Samsung Ships Hybrid Hard Drives 118 comments
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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So awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
This was in the news a year ago (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/new
It was on display at WinHEC in April 2005.
TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung's HHD prototype
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.
Samsung's HHD - faster boot and resume on Vista
In mid-May 2006, Samsung unveiled a prototype hybrid hard drive (HHD) at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Samsung's prototype HHDs have a buffer of 128 or 256 MB, much larger than the 8-16 MB of cache in current hard drives. This new buffer differs from the existing cache buffer on hard drives not only in size but also in structure, composition, and qualities. Conventional cache is made out of volatile memory that is erased when the drive is powered down. HHDs add another layer of cache consisting of Flash memory that is non-volatile and can be accessed quickly when the drive is powered on. Adding a large buffer to a hard drive can also reduce the drive's power consumption, thereby increasing the battery life, and reducing the time required for the system to resume its operation after suspension. Indeed, boot or resume time will occur about twice as fast as conventional hard disk drives, saving 8-25 seconds, and laptop batteries will provide 20 - 30 minutes more power. Another added bonus of the HHD is the improved reliability due to less mechanical wear and tear.
Samsung and other manufacturers are currently pursuing Solid State Drive (SSD) technology (to be covered in an upcoming TFOT article). Currently Flash prices are too high to allow SSDs to replace standard hard drives of any reasonable size and, although Flash prices are continually falling, it will be several years until such a drive will become affordable to most users. Here enters the near-term solution for enjoying improved performance at a reasonable price - the hybrid hard drive, combining the low cost and large storage capacity of conventional hard drive technology with quick and low-power Flash memory.
Apart from the reduction in Flash memory prices, hard drive manufacturers such as Samsung believe that we are about to undergo a major storage revolution in the next few years due to the upcoming release of Windows Vista. This new operating system from Microsoft will introduce three new performance-enhancing technologies: SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, and ReadyDrive. According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive". Windows ReadyBoost allows users to use a removable Flash memory device such as a USB thumb drive to improve system performance. ReadyBoost retrieves data stored on the Flash memory more quickly than data stored on the hard disk, decreasing the interval until the PC responds. Windows ReadyDrive enables Vista-based PCs equipped with an HHD to boot up faster, resume from hibernate in less time, preserve battery power, and improve hard disk reliability.
Hard drive platters won't have to spin as much
Hard disk platters are components of hard disk drives that consist of circular rigid disks that store magnetic data. While the platters in conventional hard drives rotate most of the time, thereby consuming a great deal of power, the platters in HHDs are usually at rest, as if they were off. In HHDs, incoming data is generally written to the Flash buffer and any saved documents are saved to the buffer, instead of being written to the hard drive each time. Only when the Flash buffer is almost full or when the user accesses a new file that is not stored on the buffer, will the HHD platter rotate or "spin up". Thus, the battery power of laptops with HHDs is preserved, extending battery life.
To learn more about Samsung's hybrid hard drive technology, TF
What's so special about Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's so special about Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What's so special about Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:What's so special about Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait...
Parent
Re:What's so special about Vista? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, it's spelled 'collusion'.
Parent
Apple? (Score:5, Interesting)
Given Apple's strong relationship with Samsung (iPod shuffle+nano memory both come from Samsung, I believe- and I'm almost positive Samsung has supplied RAM to apple on+off since the golden olden days), what do others think about the possibility of this ending up in a Powerbook, er, Macbook Pro- and 10.5 being designed to take advantage of it?
Apple can be hit or miss with the latest and greatest- they took forever with USB2 (yeah yeah, firewire blah blah) and lagged behind a lot of the smaller laptop mafacturers with Expresscard (given there's next to nothing for expresscard, who can blame them?)...it'll be interesting to see if Apple thinks this is a win or lose technology...
Investing in flash technology (Score:5, Insightful)
tricky marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't they just flat out say they don't know when it's going to be released?
Why does the CF have to go on the disk? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why does the CF have to go on the disk? (Score:5, Informative)
Who knows how much benefit it really provides, but it sets the direction. Nice for the software to be ahead of the hardware.
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Re:Ship time (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Ship time (Score:5, Informative)
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Has it changed in 3 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Flash parts die in 3 weeks of solid write tests (Score:5, Informative)
The flash fanatics keep modding down these facts to -1 for some insane reason here.
Flash has LIMITED write life.
The devices spread the data around to hide the limited write cycle life, and uses error correction to hide the limited write cycle life.
At some point its worthless.
Flash is idiotic for a backing store (virtual memory) based hard drive. And atomic-commit algorithms and other safety mechanisms for structure preservation and corruption avoidance such as "Journaling" only make the chatter worse.
All the disk chatter destroys the lifespan of the flash part.
Worse... flash is SLOW for lots of non-paralell-capable individual 512 byte requests, which typically are not spread across multiple flash parts.
True, a megabyte read can be fast in flash, but lots of random 512 byte reads or writes are far slower than a modern hard drive STILL in 2006. (15,000 rpm scsi from 7 diff manufacturers for example).
But the article is about hard drives... still.. its hopeless and foolish.
people who use their computers a lot will have data corruption earlier... all due to flash problems
Parent
Re:Ship time (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Ship time (Score:5, Informative)
Well then, good news for you: Vista supports a feature called ReadyBoost [microsoft.com], which can use just about any flash memory device (e.g. a cheap USB thumb drive) as a cache to improve performance.
Parent
Re:Ship time (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, do you honestly think any company (Intel, Microsoft, Samsung) would back this technology if it was limited to R/W cycles in thousands?
Last but not least, such hard drives will also store data which stays more consistent than regular data. It could store vital boot files, files to your most common applications, etcetera. In other words, files that do not change much over time. It's not like you're going to save your most frequently used documents to this section of the drive.
So to sum things up, you will not have to worry about the SSD part of the drive. It will probably even outlast the mechanical part of the drive.
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Re:This site could benefit (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Linux Next? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Linux Next? (Score:5, Funny)
Forever, then?
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Re:SuperFetch uncool... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that Vista is smart enough to free up the RAM that SuperFetch is using if it could be better used for something else. It's really nothing more than a more pro-active version of the disc-cacheing that every operating system already uses.
Parent
Re:Flash (Score:5, Funny)
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