Samsung Ships Hybrid Hard Drives

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."

Linux

But, really, can they run Linux? Are the drives supported in the kernel?

Re:Linux

They probaby use a SATA interface so no driver other than one for you SATA controler will be needed.

Re:

If they use a standard interface like SATA, IDE, or even USB storage, then no special driver is required in the kernel.

hard drives are going away

I'm certain that hard drives will slowly go away to be replaced with Flash ram devices. As the price drops it will happen.

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

I don't see HD's going anywhere for the forseeable future.

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 :( 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.

What I really want to know is...

can the user control what is cached and what isn't?

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.

Re:

The idea is that the OS handles this and automatically caches frequently-used files. But it's also used as a delayed write cache to keep you from having to spin up your hard drive due to infrequent writes (like log entries.)

Re:What I really want to know is...

The flash in the hybrid drives won't be used as that kind of cache (you're thinking of the Vista's ReadyBoost).

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.

Old news

The press release [samsung.com] from Samsung is dated April 2005. You can read more technical details there without all the annoying popups on ExtremeTech. Looks like the drivers which give the power savings were written by Microsoft. Planned ship date was late 2006, so they didn't fall too far behind.

Combine RAM with FLASH to store fs journal

I would like to see a battery-backed RAM drive with FLASH as well. I think that for journaling filesystems it would be great for performance since the journal could be written into RAM and then later written to disk. The drawback of the RAM based drives I saw was that the battery is only good for a limited amount of time. The way to fix it is to provide less battery time but use that time to write the RAM out to FLASH when the power is cut. The advantage of combining RAM and FLASH is that RAM is very fast to write to and has an unlimited number of write cycles. Of course, I'd really like to see one of these new memory technologies come out that combines the best of DRAM and FLASH.

Wait for Intel PRAM

Rather than ship hybrid drives now with flash chips good for a few thousand cycles, why not wait until the end of this year and ship them with Intel PRAM or equivalent. PRAM is expected to be faster, non-volatile, and handle many times more R/W cycles. Or is the lifetime of the rest of the drive no longer than for the flash itself? This seems to be to be just a bit ahead of its time, and has the potential for either problems, or performance degradation, over a relatively short timespan.

Different than the drives designed for Vista? Not.

I'm not sure what is more screwed up the article linked to about the drives or the Slashdot comment.

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/windowsv ista/features/details/performance.mspx [microsoft.com]

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.ht ml [digitimes.com]

http://www.channelinsider.com/article/Samsung+Ship s+Worlds+First+Hybrid+HDD151or+Is+It/202621_1.aspx [channelinsider.com]

"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?

Re:

A new kind of flash was developed last year that had much faster read/write (closer to RAM) and didn't deteriorate. I suspect that kind is what these will use. (Unfortunately I don't remember the name...)

Re:well

BSFlash

Re:well

PRAM [wikipedia.org] has the properties you describe. Although it isn't a type of Flash memory so I doubt it's the one present in hybrid drives.

Re:well

Linux must get full support for NTFS.

*tap tap* ntfs-3g [ntfs-3g.org] -- I'm using it now, and it's performing nicely even under pretty heavy BitTorrent load. ntfs.fsck still needs to be written, but the situation is now vastly better than it was less than a year ago.

Re:well

ntfs.fsck still needs to be written, but the situation is now vastly better than it was less than a year ago.

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...

Re:well

It's more like 1,000,000 writes, but your point is taken. Perhaps the driver takes this into account--store many small and frequent temporary files such as browser cache files into RAM rather than flash, then dump them all to flash or disk rarely, but this implies a lot of intelligence on the part of the driver.

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 ;)

Re:

As someone else has already stated, yes flash is still limited but not as much as it used to be. These hard drives are aimed at laptops and I believe Vista requires them to be considered as "Designed for Vista" rather than Vista Ready.

The point of the fla

Re:well

Isnt flash only good for ~30,000 writes?

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.

Re:

I suspect that the intelligence built into the drive has the capability of detecting flash sectors that have gone bad, much like an ordinary hard drive can detect bad magnetic sectors. So, I think that over time one will see that the flash's capacity decr

Re:well

Wikipedia says that NOR flash is good for "10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles" and NAND flash has "ten times the endurance". Lets hope they've used the good stuff.

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".

Re:

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

Re:Samsung drive reliability

And I've seen more X brand drives. (No, I'm not even going to bother naming them, but it's not Samsung.)

As they say, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

I smell BS

Superfetch will shut itself down if it fails. It couldn't possibly cause a FS crash/corruption like you complain.

OTOH these drives could fail since they're not superfetch and they're potentially caching writes.