Weren't hybrid hard drives (you know normal hard disk, but with 1GB etc of flash onboard also) supposed to be out like..last year or more ago? I was looking forward to my instant bootup times for my desktop :( (also: completely solid state drives dont count here)

What is the point? I see drive cache rising nicely, but I don't really see the point in hybrid drives, it just needlessly increases the cost of the drives by requiring extra drive controllers as they would basically need to act as two independent drives anyway. Why not just encourage cheaper low capacity SSDs to be plugged in alongside your standard platter based hard drive?

Aren't there fairly cheap Compact Flash to ATA connector on the markets? I'm sure a handfull of 2GB CF cards set up in a customized RAID could be rather interesting.

Quote: Original post by elis-cool
I was looking forward to my instant bootup times for my desktop :(

Use S3 suspend (Suspend to RAM). Startup time is approx. 2 seconds.

I don't see hybrid drives as much of a benefit to be honest. They buffer the hard disk with flash, which really isn't so smart, I think. Having bigger caches (and battery buffered caches) would hit much better in the average case.

Don't get me wrong. Flash rocks when used correctly, but unluckily it sucks otherwise. A solid state disk that is rarely written to but read many times is lightning fast. I have most of my programs as well as compiler and development headers on a solid state disk. Compared to hard disk, it's easily twice as fast (or more) in throughput, and access time is almost not noticeable at all. However, this is an extreme.

The other extreme would be, for example, to put Windows onto a solid state disk. While this is certainly possible, registry and the swap file are SSD nightmares. Flash can only erase whole blocks, and there is a limited lifetime too. Whenever Windows writes some 20 bytes to the registry (or to a log) or pages out a memory page, the SSD has to read a 512k block into temporary storage, erase a block, modify the copy, and write it back, usually with some kind of write-levelling algorithm. Erasing a block takes a fixed time (not sure how long exactly, but several milliseconds), so this is pretty much... nightmare.

Now, a hybrid drive obviously can't know in advance what a block of data you send it is supposed to be. Is it write-once, read many? Or is it volatile data? So, either way, it will have a hard time doing things right, and simply writing data to the hard disk might indeed be the best strategy.

The way I remember hybrid drives being hyped was as a power saving feature for laptops. As long as you were working within the subset of the storage mirrored on the flash memory, the drive didn't need to spin up.

I wonder if there could be possible some day to only have RAM? I mean, lots of RAM that can be sustained by some sort of rechargable (ridiculously durable) battery or something.

Quote: Original post by owl
I wonder if there could be possible some day to only have RAM? I mean, lots of RAM that can be sustained by some sort of rechargable (ridiculously durable) battery or something.

Behold The Future!

Quote: Original post by grekster

Quote: Original post by owl
I wonder if there could be possible some day to only have RAM? I mean, lots of RAM that can be sustained by some sort of rechargable (ridiculously durable) battery or something.

Behold The Future!

hello! That's seems to need a bit of work yet tough..

For windows, do the registry and swap NEED to be on the same drive as the main files? I know the swap file can be moved off the main hard drive, but what else needs fairly constant writing in windows? Is there anything that can't be moved off the main drive easily?

I've got a 160GB (256MB flash) hybrid hdd in my Sony laptop and I can't tell the difference between this and the hard drive in my Asus laptop. To be fair, the Sony runs at 5400RPM and the Asus at 7200.