Hybrid hard drives: what's not to like? Flash-based SSD drives may be bloody fast, but they're also bloody expensive. For some road warriors, price is immaterial, but for most mortals — or for their employers — price is everything. This is where hybrid hard drives come into their own, delivering better performance than traditional hard drives, but for only a small …
what system is he booting from a 4gb partition?? in my world 4gb is atleast half of enough!!
My v-lite-ed win7 install is around 5gb add antivirus, important apps and office and my ready to roll footprint is about 9gb, but that still leaves 20gb of ssd to play with i suppose... and another 16gb on a memorystick duo
to carry a few hcsd cards for storage? I use an ssd in a desktop for booting and a cheap sata2 for data - ssds aren't finished yet. they are expensive and have odd hangups like random writes taking ages. that's the real reason for avoiding writing to them, not the price of storage
The flash is used to hold the most-frequently-accessed files. It doesn't appear to be a cache, as the files aren't written through to the disk, they just get stored in the flash area. The manufacturer claims it's "adaptive", so presumably files migrate back and forth between disk and flash, based on some usage metric.
You still retain your mobility and you can fit it into most reasonable notebooks.
It is a pity nobody does a flash replacement for notebook CDROMs. HP used to offer 80G disks that slotted instead of their DVDs but the price was... to put it mildly.. extortionate. There is a market for it - especially with today flash prices.
Awsome concept, might be alright for a linux box, but screwed for windows.
XP currently takes up an arm and a legg of space by the time you install all the damm patches, and whilst I have cut XP down before to get it on a 4GB drive with office, it was quite an effort.
Now I know you are suggesting you keep apps such as office on the normal HDD parts, but still, Windows 7 is not small and in a couple of years with updates, bolt-ons and patches with gona be fighting for space.
If they kicked off with 8Gb's over 4Gb's I would say they have got it about right and covered almost all low end needs and allowed one or two primary applications to share the speed bump.
Anyway, screw this for a laptop, I want this option in a 3.5" desktop drive.
Whilst I'd agree an 8GB option would be good for some, it should be noted that it's not necessary for the 4GB to cache the entire OS image. Firstly there are likely to be very many files which are referenced only very infrequently. If you can cache 90% then that might be fine. Secondly, the greatest benefit of an SSD if so random access. Large files are often adequately services from an HDD as they are read sequentially and, hence, efficiently. Just being able to cache the file system directory structures will have a huge benefit.
The latter being the former designed by a committee, rather like this hybrid. It seems to be a rather unhappy lashup that is aimed at what is in all probability tempory window of opportunity in the storage market. As flash prices come down and speeds go up even further (in the course of the next two to three years) these will become a curiousity. I do not see them doing very much business.
Somehow I seriously doubt the claim that the HDD knows to store the most frequently used files on the flash. They are a block-based storage device storing addressable chunks of 512 bytes or 4096 bytes (on newer drives) in a single sector, and that is all.
So unless someone wrote firmware for the drive to understand the structure of FAT, NTFS, EXTx, ZFS, etc the drive wouldn't even know the concept of a File.
What I can see going on is the drive keeping an eye on how often a particular sector is read, and the most read sectors are mirrored in flash. You could almost call it a non-volatile cache.
*Troll, cos where are the muppet icons when you need them!
Excellent point. Would 'adaptive' mapping just mean the most popular blocks go on the flash, the less popular ones on magnetic? If so, that would probably mean 4GB is //plenty// for Windows as not all of those services and DLL's are touched every single boot time, so most of the bloaty crap goes on magnetic but the kernel, maybe winword, etc end up on the flash part?
My homebrew Intel Quad Core PC, HP Tablet PC (2006) and Dell Laptop (2003) all 'Fast Boot' (or use hybrid sleep mode) in Windows 7. I find that I rarely need to do a full reboot; more often because a Windows update requires it.
On the other hand, my old homebrew Intel P4 PC, which my wife and kids use, refuses to recover from sleep mode reliably - also Windows 7 - go figure!
Paris because I've got no morals and would enjoy recovering from hybrid sleep with her (Protected mode - of course)
Ill-informed comments from people who haven't actually read anything about the product in question? Help! I'm in the Register comments section again.
FWIW, I've got one, and it's not as fast as my Samsung PBJ22, but it's still bloody quick and four times more space for less than a third of the price.
This whole arguements about SSD Being better than HDD is really starting to drag on.
"for example, booted and loaded Adobe's CS5 in 28 seconds while a 2.6GHz MacBook Pro fitted with a hard drive took almost 70 seconds"
BULL!! I have a Samsung Spinpoint F3 SATAII 7200RPM 1TB HDD with 32MB of Cache. Windows 7 Professional loads in approx 30 seconds, Photoshop CS5 loads in approximately the same time, 30 seconds.
The drive cost me £60. Why should I pay double, in some cases 4x, for a drive that will save me approximately 2 seconds, and is a quarter of the size!!
Personally I'm waiting until the SSD are truly quick (i.e. instant on) and cheaper than HDDs. I contemplated buying a small SSD as a boot drive, but after the amazing performance I have got out of my Spinpoint, I won't be purchasing an SSD in the immediate future.
At a price point that makes them very attractive will this technology move to 3.5" & 2.5" enterprise SATA/SAS drives and will this increase sales of 2.5" based storage arrays. Hopefully this time around they will succeed. Will the data on flash and magnetic disk work with disk defragmentation tools?
At a price point that makes them very attractive will this technology move to 3.5" & 2.5" enterprise SATA/SAS drives and will this increase sales of 2.5" based storage arrays?
Hopefully this time around they will succeed. Will the data on flash and magnetic disk work with disk defragmentation tools?
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