New higher performance notebook pc drive shipping soon

[KenR]

Samsung says it will soon begin shipping a hybrid notebook PC hard drive that uses less power, yet will boot and resume considerably faster than traditional drives.

Samsung said Wednesday that it had begun shipments of its first hybrid hard drive to select OEMs, and that retail shipments would begin "soon".
The new MH80 2.5-inch hybrid drives for notebook PCs will be available in 80-, 120-, and 160-Gbyte capacities, with either 128 Mbytes or 256 Mbytes of onboard flash memory, for caching purposes.
Samsung representatives weren't immediately available to answer questions on the drive's retail availability or pricing...
Acording to Samsung, its MH80 drives feature Samsung's "ReadyBoot" (not ReadyBoost) technology that offers up to a 50 percent reduction in boot and resume times from traditional magnetic hard drives. In addition, the drive consumes 70-90 percent less power than a traditional hard drive, which extends the battery life by 30 minutes before a recharge is needed, the company said.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2101571,00.asp

[f0dder]

Now, let us see hybrid flash drives for desktop machines as well, and with XP support... Or at least Intel's Robson technology.

[iphigenie]

Who needs hybrid... I would love a pure flash boot drive of 6 to 8 gb and a traditional drive for all the rest... why is it that small embedded PCs have had that for years and it's still not an option on any desktop machine or notebook?

[steeladept]

Who needs hybrid... I would love a pure flash boot drive of 6 to 8 gb and a traditional drive for all the rest... why is it that small embedded PCs have had that for years and it's still not an option on any desktop machine or notebook?

Funny you should mention that.  A coworker just told me about a 32GB Flash drive Samsung is putting out.  More info here:

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/21/32gb_ssd_samsung/

[urlwolf]

But remember, Flash has a limited # of read/writes... these HDs will not last as much as standard ones. I wonder how they plan to market that.

[iphigenie]

Well in normal business use you replace all hard drives every two years anyway. When it comes to servers it can be more often - the risk of failure is just too much. The HD might be theoretically working for longer but usually with the heat level they are in on the desktop you can't trust them that long.

Your average industrial flash (at a reasonable cost) is good for about 2 million R/W - I have never thought about exactly how long this would mean in regular usage. I bet you can do drives that cost more but last longer. Maybe the drive could have multiple flash chips doing raid which can be regularly replaced, and the flash chip itself would cost a lot less that the whole set up...

There's also the saving to be had in power consumption and cooling - which will also become a major PR issue before we know it - and the lack of noise - which is great for the worker. And saving the 5 minutes it takes to boot every time.

All in all it can add up to a lot of benefits for a relatively low capex cost

[iphigenie]

The article amuses me "cannot compete with 80Gb hard drives". We don't need 80Gb hard drives for most of what we do on the PC. Your apps and the files you work on can easily fit on a 30Gb drive. My windows partition is about 3gb and my apps partition about 6gb and most of what's on those is totally unused and they could be shrunk significantly. Then my "files" directory is about 20Gb but most of it is archive and I have it archived 2 other places too, so I could remove it. There's only a few gig of stuff that has been used in the past year.

The things that take space:
* games
* huge archive of images I never do anything with
* huge archive of photos I need to keep but look at rarely
* 50Gb of mp3 / oggs
* some video files when i decide i want to try to learn video editing again (twice a year)
* archive of software
* archive of old code, old files

Most of these you don't need on your main drive. The music is the tricky one I guess.

I think I could fit my OS, the apps I use regularly, and the files I work on currently on an 8Gb thingie. I could have a second, mostly-asleep drive with apps i use less, games, and files i occasionally need + the usual external archive drive.

I am thinking as I write here but for me the ideal system would be:

1. Small boot/activity drive which is low power, totally silent, and very fast. I.e. some sort of solid state flash memory.

2. A larger traditional drive which is turned off most of the time, but accessible on demand - for the games, music files and less often but still regularly needed files. It could also have everything that is on drive 1.

3. An external repository for archives, backups, files you might need to check out now and then

Something that would be even cooler would be a system that lets you move files to the active disk, kind of like a check in/check out system, when you use them, then back in the other drive (or the off machine archive) when you're done with it. Then if you don't use them a while moves them to the back up disk, to make space for things you use more. Either it would ask you (a bit like the annoying "unused files on your desktop" pop up) or it could do it automagically for you. So if you use an app or a game a lot for a while, you could "move" it to the active drive, then move it back off when you don't

All this won't be needed once flash drives are 100Gb at a reasonable price but for now it'd be nice. It's really a pain that moving apps is so hard on windows nowadays.

The current things available in the mini-itx and embedded motherboards tend to go up to 4Gb. Which is huuuge when you're using linux or bsd but just too small for much under windows. 8Gb at a reasonable price is probably not too far though...