Seagate Releases Hybrid Hard Drive 218
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.
Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Samsung not first to ship (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an alternate article for the slashdotted original:
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])
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..
These drives are great... but, (Score:2, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
Re:This is Great -- So what you are saying is... (Score:3, Funny)
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I see your point about not really needing flash for a read cache, since you don't need t
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That seems fast to me (copying one drive to another maxed out at about 40 MB/s, but I had an older SATA drive so maybe newer ones are faster), but that's for sustained transfer. If you're doing stuff like metadata operations, which are all journaled, it looks more like "write a journal block saying you're updating this bit of metadata, seek to the inode or indirect block you're modifying and write it, seek back to the journal and write a
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.
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They figured that very few would be intrested to buy the product if it costed whatever amount if would cost more than a regular drive if it has 2GB of flash memory.
That was the first thing which springed into my mind and I thought 2GB of regular flash memory would add to much on the price, but it seems like it doesn't use the kind of flash memory we are used to but a more reliable one which cost more, see beneath:
"These first-generation hybrid drives incorporate only 256MB of NAND flash, a pit
Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
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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]
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.
Ahem, wrong cache type... (Score:3, Interesting)
Brain fart? Or I misconstrued you?
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"Have 'they' solved the problem of the limited number of writes a flash device device can handle. If it's only going to last a few months and then wear out I won't consider it! Pity the poor fool that forgets to turn off atime updates. "
First, let them solve the number of writes their regular hard disks can handle - 4 drives, bought at 2 different retailers, all dead within 24 hours [slashdot.org]. It appears that the old Maxtor plant in China that Seagate acquired has some quality-control issues. Best to avoid any 320
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Its not the power supply - the Western Digital on the same bus is still working fine, and its got 9,900 hours on it. How do you think I'm posting?
The drives all have an enormous amount of read/write errors (verified using smartclt to read the SMART data) after a days' operation, and two of them now make that "zing zing zing" noise that heads make when they repeatedly fail during a seek and reset themselves. These drives - ST3320620A - 320 gig, 16 meg cache - are absolutely awful in quality. The two pairs
Slashdotted... (Score:2, Funny)
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Um, no, that's not pretty safe to say. Thing is that the hybrid drives have not shown any speed benefits in real world usage tests, and have often been slower than comparable sized drives.
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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.
Re:Yeah except I prefer speed over power saving (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, laptop HDDs don't consume that much (Score:2)
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As for the power savings, I imagine the bulk of the savings comes from using non-volatile RAM, so constant power isn't required for the cache. A few extraneous spin-ups *might* be avoided, but you don't really want to keep writes cache
Needed for Vista? (Score:3, Funny)
Pointlessly small... (Score:2)
I'd be happy pay another $10 for a decent amount.
Half a Solution (Score:2)
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I mean seriously, if the OS knows that there are a few hundred GB of data to which it regularly needs access, why not cache them in regular system memory?
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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.
I'm not an expert on flash media (Score:2)
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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.
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Go to Seagate's website (Score:3, Informative)
Hybrid Irony (Score:4, Funny)
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In short: What are you talking about?
Even shorter: Are you high?
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He's thinking of flywheels as platters.
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?
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There's a hybrid horse on the market; -it's called a mule..
(The Amish, if noone else, are probably reluctant to make use of them, along the same lines as slashdotters despise Vista, I'd imagine.)
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Side note: a buddy of mine owns the second Oldsmobile ever made. It actually has the first Oldsmobile engine (the guys used engine #1 when they built car #2). Anyway, this car is almost identical looking to a horse buggy, with just a few modifications. The wheels are driven by a belt from the engine hidden in the back. So in effect you had a hybrid horse-buggy/automobile (ok, with no horse)
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You bet. [phlap.net]
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Vista requirement (Score:3, Interesting)
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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]
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I'm somewhat skeptical about that one - is there a non-German source for those tests?
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Yes of course they safe some, but not enough to matter in a notebook. Especially when you have a notebook with a graphics card instead of chipset graphics the difference is negligible.
Facts from the c't article (great, I get mod points but all I do is translate from German
- The Seagate hybrid disk uses 1.1W when doing nothing
- it uses 3.5W when reading/writing
- spikes of >5W can be seen when starting the disk platters
- The tested SSD uses 0.6W when doing n
Drives are out, no performance increase.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Advantage Over RAM Cache? (Score:2)
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"and protect writes (write in to this, power goes out, data still safe... RAM wouldn't do that)."
flash memory doesn't do that, either. Ask anyone whose flash drive has died because they removed it prematurely. Abrupt power-down can kill flash dead. Heck, one guy at the office killed 2 flash drives in one day, simply because his install of XP is screwed up (so what else is new?) and even after the drives were supposedly safe to remove, they weren't. One I could believe as coincidence - 2 is a pattern.
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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.
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Re:Couldn't this be done in software? (Score:4, Informative)
(see above).
AIK
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.)
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
You mean like ... (Score:2, Informative)
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When you're not actively using your computer, background tasks--including automatic backup programs and antivirus scans--run when they will least disturb you. These background tasks can take up system memory space that your programs had been using. On Windows XP-based PCs, this can slow progress to a crawl when you attempt to resume work.
Low priority background processes are flushing pages needed by foreground processes which leads to a lengthy series of page loads when you resume work with those processes. Solution: hide some memory on the storage device where the pager can't screw it up. Brilliant.
Disclaimer: this problem is most emphatically NOT unique to Microsoft platforms.
The grandparent's question is a good one. I think the answer is 'yes', but it would require virtual memory managem
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Easy.
Say you have a memory stick installed and recognized as /dev/sda. Use cfdisk to create partition 1, type 82. mkswap /dev/sda1, then swapon -p 100 /dev/sda1.
You could also use a file within a file system on the memory stick, with mkfile and mkswap followed by swapon, but that would have higher overhead so lower performance.
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I guess I must be unclear on what ReadyBoost is, then. From MS's page it sure sounds like "priority swap to USB", only they try to couche the whole thing in ambiguity. What is it, then, if not this?
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The AC response isn't very clear (Score:2)
Of course the deceleration depends on many factors, including the surface. In the days of metal case germanium transistors, it was well known that dropping a transistor three feet onto concrete could break an internal wire bond, while f
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Just like going from 0 to 60 in a car in a mile or so
For modern people using modern measurement units that's just below 100 km/h [google.se].
going from 60 to 0 in two feet, by hitting a brick wall
Those two so-called "feet" are actually 60 cm [google.se].
Sheesh, I can't believe we're already well into the Internet age and still people keep insisting on using those antiquated units. "Feet". Why not "toes" and "noses"?
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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
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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
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