Hard Drives Go Hybrid

Question - i often hear that flash memory has a limited number of writes. Im assuming this won't have that problem?

Why not just put a gig o 2.3ns ram in there?

This is a pretty good idea. 1gb of buffer would be sweet.

Looks from reading the article like the enlarged buffer size is going to be used to provide enough time to spin the drive up when needed, so that it can be spun down all the time instead of just "when you haven't used it for 5 minutes" or "never". Thus the overall performance effect is fairly minimal, but the power savings are noticeable.

TLDR: This drive isn't about having massively better performance, it's about power savings without compromising performance.

I have a hard time buying into any performance claims. Sure, more cache is generally better, but they're talking about memory performance as if it were significant, when there's still the bottleneck of the host interface keeping a lid on maximum transfer speeds. I am making the (reasonable) assumption that cache memory on your average conventional HD has better bandwidth than, say, the 150 MB/sec of a typical SATA interface.

There's the question of how this could affect gaming performance, which I assume most readers of Shacknews prioritize. The datasets of modern games don't often fit in 128MB of space, and they tend to read their data in scattered chunks from a variety of files. Disk loading hitches are bad enough already, but when you add in things like frequent drive spinup latency it gets ugly.

At best I could see a drive with very good sequential read performance, but mediocre to downright lousy random access speeds. Maybe we could have a real winner if the powersaving spindown could be disabled.

Give me a large capacity hard drive that lasts longer than six months and I'll give you my first born child, left nut, etc.

would this be faster than a SATA 74GB Raptor?

Anybody have any idea why they're measuring this new buffer size in megabits instead of megabytes?

It just seems contrary. Perhaps they're doing it so people are like OMGWTF 1GB MEMORY!!!1!

Next up: 2 Terabit drives!

ok, this is a good thing, ala the mac back in the old days.. they used to have part of the OS loaded in rom. Reading from rom was pretty quick. If they can forcibly tell the hard disk to load the most frequently utilized programs, indexes, and the core parts of the OS into the flash memory section, I would imagine that boot times would increase, and searches would be much faster...

But, the 100k writes scares me...

Couple that with SCSI I/O performance and you might have something worth buying.

I'll look for some reviews before I buy into this.

Okay.. we are the experts here.

Is it really GIGABIT we are talking about here?

I see no reason - especially when flash memory today are kinda cheap.
But then again, those are quite slow too.

I thought flash memory could only take a set amound of read/writes before it starts to get corrupt... granted, it was a fairly large number I recollect, something in the tens of thousands, still... a limited number of read/writes is the last thing somebody would want on their harddrive, right?

hmmm, I hope they have some new super high speed spin up tech as well otherwise it'll add 7+ seconds of latency every time you access a file that's not in the cache with the drive spun down.

Why were we waiting for some special flash memory for this? Even PC100 SDRAM @ 64bit is hundreds of times faster than magnetic.

The phuture is here.

how is a harddrive "designed" for an OS? Talk about marketing fluff.

I really like alec's daily news posts!

yeah, but how much will it cost? :(

I wonder why it's taken them this long to actually do this.

Sounds interesting I guess. I'd always wondered why HD tech had seemed fairly stagnant compared to just about every other component.