Samsung's Hybrid Hard Drive Exposed

Erica Campbell writes "Samsung is preparing to release a new Flash memory-assisted computer hard drive that boasts improved performance, reduced energy consumption, a faster boot time, and better reliability. The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it."

So awesome

[Warbringer87]

that buffer is fucking huge. Laptops awesome, wonder when they'll actually work on a regular size one though. Then again, seeing as it's gonna be the first batch out the door, potential issues from what is practically a new drive type will scare me, and my wallet away.

Re:

[SoloFlyer2]

it works as long as their website consumes less than 20% of the cpu on the hosting box, as soon as it consumes more, no one can access the site for a coupple of mins...

This was in the news a year ago

[Utopia]

Looks like Samsung and Microsoft designed this together.
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/news /HardDiskDrive_20050425_0000117556.htm [samsung.com]

It was on display at WinHEC in April 2005.

Re:

[Trogre]

Hmm so I wonder if Samsung had to sign some kind of non-compete clause to keep Linux and OSX out.

TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, don't know how to link to one of the Caches, but here is the text of the article:

Samsung's HHD prototype
Samsung is preparing to release a new Flash memory-assisted computer hard drive that boasts improved performance, reduced energy consumption, a faster boot time, and better reliability. The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it.

Samsung's HHD - faster boot and resume on Vista
In mid-May 2006, Samsung unveiled a prototype hybrid hard drive (HHD) at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. Samsung's prototype HHDs have a buffer of 128 or 256 MB, much larger than the 8-16 MB of cache in current hard drives. This new buffer differs from the existing cache buffer on hard drives not only in size but also in structure, composition, and qualities. Conventional cache is made out of volatile memory that is erased when the drive is powered down. HHDs add another layer of cache consisting of Flash memory that is non-volatile and can be accessed quickly when the drive is powered on. Adding a large buffer to a hard drive can also reduce the drive's power consumption, thereby increasing the battery life, and reducing the time required for the system to resume its operation after suspension. Indeed, boot or resume time will occur about twice as fast as conventional hard disk drives, saving 8-25 seconds, and laptop batteries will provide 20 - 30 minutes more power. Another added bonus of the HHD is the improved reliability due to less mechanical wear and tear.

Samsung and other manufacturers are currently pursuing Solid State Drive (SSD) technology (to be covered in an upcoming TFOT article). Currently Flash prices are too high to allow SSDs to replace standard hard drives of any reasonable size and, although Flash prices are continually falling, it will be several years until such a drive will become affordable to most users. Here enters the near-term solution for enjoying improved performance at a reasonable price - the hybrid hard drive, combining the low cost and large storage capacity of conventional hard drive technology with quick and low-power Flash memory.

Apart from the reduction in Flash memory prices, hard drive manufacturers such as Samsung believe that we are about to undergo a major storage revolution in the next few years due to the upcoming release of Windows Vista. This new operating system from Microsoft will introduce three new performance-enhancing technologies: SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, and ReadyDrive. According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive". Windows ReadyBoost allows users to use a removable Flash memory device such as a USB thumb drive to improve system performance. ReadyBoost retrieves data stored on the Flash memory more quickly than data stored on the hard disk, decreasing the interval until the PC responds. Windows ReadyDrive enables Vista-based PCs equipped with an HHD to boot up faster, resume from hibernate in less time, preserve battery power, and improve hard disk reliability.

Hard drive platters won't have to spin as much
Hard disk platters are components of hard disk drives that consist of circular rigid disks that store magnetic data. While the platters in conventional hard drives rotate most of the time, thereby consuming a great deal of power, the platters in HHDs are usually at rest, as if they were off. In HHDs, incoming data is generally written to the Flash buffer and any saved documents are saved to the buffer, instead of being written to the hard drive each time. Only when the Flash buffer is almost full or when the user accesses a new file that is not stored on the buffer, will the HHD platter rotate or "spin up". Thus, the battery power of laptops with HHDs is preserved, extending battery life.

To learn more about Samsung's hybrid hard drive technology, TF

What's so special about Vista?

[CastrTroy]

What's so different about Vista that makes this drive benefit from Vista. Will the drive not work in Windows XP, Linux or Mac OSX machines?

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[MindStalker]

Vista is designed to be bootable from flash memory. Significant changes to the bootcode of XP would be nessesary for the instant on features. The other features could possibly be incorperated with drivers.

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[timeOday]

As a Linux laptop user (yes, there are a few of us) super-fast bootup would be a very attractive feature, and an advantage now falling to XP. I'm curious how the boot time will compare to a resume from "suspend to disk" (though the attractiveness of suspend to disk / suspend to ram are limited by the fact that they're often a nightmare to set up anyways).

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[StikyPad]

It might be useful to Linux users who turn off their workstations as well.

Oh wait...

Re:

[oohshiny]

You've been able to boot from Flash for years. These days, you can easily stick a 4G or 8G flash card into your PCMCIA slot and boot off that. But don't expect miracles: the boot process itself takes time. That's being addressed, though, with a rewrite of "init" (shipping with Ubuntu Edgy Eft).

Re:

[pe1chl]

Parallel running of boot scripts has been standard in SuSE Linux for quite some time.
It is usually the first thing I turn off. But then, I do not boot my systems very often.

Re:

[pdbaby]

...I had an uptime ... with Windows XP.... 280 days.

That kind of uptime with Windows XP means you missed a significant amount of critical vulnerability patches! :-)

Re:

[LizardKing]

You're not running a shitload of security updates if you haven't rebooted in 55 days.

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[NineNine]

That is actually reason enough for me to re-think that whole Vista thing. With partial flash drives and eventually 100% flash drives, the last major component of computer hardware failure, namely, all of those closely moving parts in a hard drive, will be wiped out. Wow. That sounds pretty cool.

Oh yeah, and it'll be fast as hell, too.

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[soupforare]

Just because flash doesn't move doesn't mean flash doesn't fail.

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[anethema]

No, but flash DOES fail fairly predictibly and in certain ways. You get a certain amount of write cycles per sector, etc. You implement a write spreading alg on the drive and increase its life dramatically. You can easily start marking sectors as bad and have VERY early warning on drive failure. You can extend life dramatically by having extra sectors on the drive for write spreading (more benifet the more full the drive is). Also with current write lives, we can have drives you can write to 24/7 for years without that sector failing. With the write-spreading the drive lifetime would vastly outstrip a normal hdd on average.

The access time is also VERY low compared to a HDD, and unless the controller itself fries, its almost impossible to have catastrophic data loss.

Basically, we cant switch fast enough, there are no downsides but price.

Re:

[pe1chl]

The access time is also VERY low compared to a HDD

It depends. I have one of those "IDE Flash disk" modules in a system I want to keep as silent and lowpower as possible.
It looks like a normal IDE connector (a bit larger) and plugs directly in the motherboard, looking just like a normal IDE disk to the BIOS, the OS, etc.
(so you can just install your system on it and boot, read/write, etc. no special drivers or trouble with booting from USB)

However, this device is easily outperformed by any modern harddisk.

funny?

[oohshiny]

I can't tell whether you're trying to be funny.

That is actually reason enough for me to re-think that whole Vista thing.

Has the ability to boot and run Linux off flash made you "re-think that whole Linux thing"?

With partial flash drives and eventually 100% flash drives, the last major component of computer hardware failure, namely, all of those closely moving parts in a hard drive, will be wiped out.

They'll be replaced by a medium that has a much higher MTBF for writes.

Oh yeah, and it'll be fast as hell, to

Re:

[ad0gg]

If flash gets faster we'll have instant on computers. Turning on a computer will be like turning on a tv.

Re:

[Spiked_Three]

Here is a movie that goes into it;

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=2386 08 [msdn.com]

Re:What's so special about Vista?

[Who235]

Can anyone spell oligopolistic collution?

Actually, it's spelled 'collusion'.

How long until failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I can't RTFA as the account has already suffered a slashdotting, but I have a question about this drive. Isn't there an upper limit to how many times you can write to flash memory before it ceases to function? Granted, hard drives wear out eventually, but unless this stuff is of high quality then the cache is going to wear out before the rest of the drive.

When the cache dies off, what happens?

Re:How long until failure?

[bcat24]

I think the cache is designed to help with booting and suspend/restore, so it shouldn't be written too much. With a large enough flash buffer, it should be able to least for the normal life of the drive.

Re:

[wwahammy]

Actually flash is used significantly more than that. The cache will actually store writes and once the flash starts to get close to full, it actually writes the cached writes to disk. While I'm sure Samsung and Microsoft have worked hard to extend the life of the flash, with that many cache I don't see how the cache could last even close to as long as the drive. My understanding is that flash is reliable up to about 100K writes compared to millions of writes to a disk drive. I still haven't heard how the dr

Re:How long until failure?

[Hadlock]

Modern flash is in the 10s of millions now; the flash in your $20 thumb drive is just old trickle down tech in the 100k write range. 30 million write cycles should last about the expected lifespan of the computer - 3 to 4 years.

Linux Next?

[Yehooti]

It's designed for Vista, but I want it for Linux. How long until then I wonder?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

A week after they hit the market?

Re:

[dotgain]

Ha! That's for the 0.85-alpha82-pre1 version!

Open source coders are good, but they're not Godlike. If the specs aren't open they get practically nowhere sometimes, and if they are - they'll still take as long to iron out the bugs and get it stable than anybody else.

Re:Linux Next?

[JimXugle]

You can have a similar effect now by using a flash drive as your root partition, or as a swap partition. Keep in mind that using it as a swap partition would make the drive age faster.

Re:

[misleb]

You can have a similar effect now by using a flash drive as your root partition, or as a swap partition. Keep in mind that using it as a swap partition would make the drive age faster.

Why? If your machine is hitting swap that often, you need to get more RAM. That is a HUGE performance hit. Ideally, your system should barely touch swap. At least on Linux. I guess Windows can be pretty liberal about swapping things out...

-matthew

Re:Linux Next?

[keesh]

Except that Linux does preemptive swapping long before you run out of RAM, so that if something suddenly needs it, there's no huge delay whilst things get swapped out.

Re:

[misleb]

Except that Linux does preemptive swapping long before you run out of RAM, so that if something suddenly needs it, there's no huge delay whilst things get swapped out.

Monitor swap usage on any healthy Linux system and you'll notice that usage remains pretty low most of the time. Anything you DO swap out should be largely unused anyway. So I don't really get how using flash for swap woudl wear it out faster unless you were using it as a substitute for more RAM.

-matthew

Re:

[Bizzeh]

most usb flash drives only write around 17mb/s, how is that faster than sata2 drive doing nearly 100mb/s?

Re:

[Kingrames]

If the hardware is designed for Vista, I'd bet it already runs better in linux.

Re:Linux Next?

[Dunbal]

for how long you can chain a bunch of fat Linux programmers to your house with Mountain Dews (with caffeine) and french fries.

      Forever, then?

Apple?

[SuperBanana]

The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and will be one of the first hardware designed specifically to benefit from it."

Given Apple's strong relationship with Samsung (iPod shuffle+nano memory both come from Samsung, I believe- and I'm almost positive Samsung has supplied RAM to apple on+off since the golden olden days), what do others think about the possibility of this ending up in a Powerbook, er, Macbook Pro- and 10.5 being designed to take advantage of it?

Apple can be hit or miss with the latest and greatest- they took forever with USB2 (yeah yeah, firewire blah blah) and lagged behind a lot of the smaller laptop mafacturers with Expresscard (given there's next to nothing for expresscard, who can blame them?)...it'll be interesting to see if Apple thinks this is a win or lose technology...

Re:Apple?

[znu]

See rumor here [appleinsider.com].

In short: Intel apparently has a similar technology (presumably with the flash memory being on the motherboard, rather than in the hard drive, which seems like a better idea), and it's rumored Apple is working with them to get it implemented for next year's Mac laptops.

Investing in flash technology

[kingkade]

Flash technology seems promising and looks poised to take over devices that would be better off using solid state components (laptops, etc) that traditionally don't. I've wanted to invest in Samsung and flash technology in general. Samsung seems to only be on the Asian markets, is this so? Does anyone know of and good mutual funds/ETFs that allows one to invest in this specific tech sector?

Spansion

[sirra462]

Check out Spansion [spansion.com] if you want to support an American company. They are a spin off of AMD, and have some impressive technology when it comes to flash memory.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I've wanted to invest in Samsung and flash technology in general. Samsung seems to only be on the Asian markets, is this so?

http://www.samsung.com/AboutSAMSUNG/ELECTRONICSGLO BAL/InvestorRelations/IRFAQs/StockDividend/index.h tm#a2 [samsung.com]

It's listed in London and Luxemburg too, and in the US, you can buy stock through Citibank.

It only took me a minute to find this information, it wasn't secret, hidden or hard to find. I only needed two clicks on the Samsung site.

tricky marketing

[Beuno]

The new hybrid hard drive will be released around the same time as the upcoming Windows Vista

Why don't they just flat out say they don't know when it's going to be released?

Super Enthused

[Deliveranc3]

Is anyone else super enthused by the clearness of the HD rather than any performance improvements?

Sure faster boot ups will be great and eventually bootup will equal Flash -> DDR2 memory transfer speed but this seems like more of a limited upgrade.

Except the clear shell that's just too sexy for words!

Re:

[timeOday]

Another possible advantage - if the disk heads in a laptop can stay parked 90% of the time, it should dramatically reduce the odds of a broken/corrupt disk.

Why does the CF have to go on the disk?

[pensivepuppy]

If Vista knows about the CF, why does it need to be on the hard disk itself? It sounds like all the heavy lifting is being done by Vista anyways. WOuldn't it make more sense just to use any CF attached to the system for this caching, etc, and use normal hard disks instead? That way adding CF to a PC would improve its performance, no matter what type of hard disks you have attached.

Re:Why does the CF have to go on the disk?

[RoundSparrow]

Vista does support this - ReadyBoost - but USB2 isn't nearly as fast as SATA 300.

Who knows how much benefit it really provides, but it sets the direction. Nice for the software to be ahead of the hardware.

Re:

[mrchaotica]

USB2 isn't nearly as fast as SATA 300.

So what? [addonics.com]

Re:

[mrchaotica]

Neither are hard drives (with the possible exception of those expensive 10K RPM ones). Besides, the point of the flash memory is to handle small, random-access stuff -- exactly the area disks are worst at.

Re:

[asuffield]

Vista does support this - ReadyBoost - but USB2 isn't nearly as fast as SATA 300.

Nearly flash memory nor hard drives are anywhere near as fast as USB2 or SATA 300. It's not going to make much difference to performance, unless you're using a whole lot of them (in which case SATA 300 has the advantage because it's several busses, while USB 2 is typically just the one shared bus).

Re:

[Achromatic1978]

I was under the impression that it did. I plugged a CF card into my laptop when it was running a Windows Vista beta, and it popped a dialog along the lines of "Do you want to use this device for file storage, or for increased system resources?"

Head to Head Power Consumption

[Doc Ruby]

That article mentions power savings a lot, but never boils them down to raw consumption numbers.

If a standard current notebook 40GB HD were replaced with 10 standard 4GB Flash drives, how much less power would the Flash consume than the HD?

oh?

[racebit]

Additionally, do you honestly think any company (Intel, Microsoft, Samsung) would back this technology if it was limited to R/W cycles in thousands?

Oh? Last time I checked...my xp seems to stop working after only several hundered read/writes, funny that.

Re:

[Tatsh]

Additionally, do you honestly think any company (Intel, Microsoft, Samsung) would back this technology if it was limited to R/W cycles in thousands?

YES!

"MONEY MONEY MONEY!" -- from the horse himself

Since the site is down

[CrackedButter]

Anybody know if these will have a PATA interface? My thinking would be putting this into laptops that currently exist, say for example my 12"PB?

Fixing software problems in Hardware

[Casandro]

Actually I think it's more like fixing software problems in Hardware. The situation in which this technology will improve access time is when you have to randomly seek on your harddrive. Unfortunately that is needed in Windows as there is little possibility to keep all your bootup files one after another in the order you need them. With Linux, however that is rather easily possible. You can create an initial ramdisk which the computer can load very quickly without much booting and then boot from it. Theoret

Use Flash for directory structure not cache!

[Anonymous Coward]

We did some basic research with Flash / HDD hybrids two years ago. As such disks weren't available, yet, we were using a real (Notebook)HDD and a IDE-Flash-HDD in parallel.
Our goal was to minimize energy consumption for mobile devices (i.e. not a lot of ram available for caching and the device is switched off repeatedly to save energy).

Using a very sensitive (time resolution wise) energy measurement device, we determined, that most energy was consumed by moving the heads into position. The difference was substancial: Around 0.63W for the HDD spinning idle and about 5.3W during heavy seeking (e.g. trigered by a "find ." in the root of a freshly booted system).

We decided to not use the flash as cache (flash is quick to read, but slow to write) and just put the relatively static metadata (directory structure, inode tables...) onto the Flash drive, but keep there files and data on the HDD, as each directory access triggered a expensive seek, but delivered very few data, compared to reading a file.

To simulate our mobile device we used a Linux-System limited to 32 ram to prevent the system from excessive caching.
We observed up to a factor 8 reduced energy consumption and as a surprising side effect a factor 6 increase in speed!

When increasing the available Ram, this advantage quickly vanished on repated benchmark runs, as the System appearently cached the directory structure very effectively. The first run after booting however still performed substancially better with our system, no matter the amout of ram. (And this was our target useage profile: Power on, search something, Power off).

As the code was an embarrassingly ugly hack to the ext2 driver and we envisioned trouble keeping the hdd with the data and the flash-hdd in sync, it was not persued further.
However with hybrid drives becoming available, it might be worth a more detailed analysis...

Neat... not new

[eples]

My iPod does this. It has a 20GB disk and 32MB ram (or is it 64MB?). Anyway, not new.

Interface

[Trelane]

My main question is what the interface is going to be to this. Is it going to appear as regular flash media? Will there be extended PATA and SATA commands to address the Flash/modify the drive priorities? The re-posted article says that it's only designed for Windows Vista and will not support XP; does that mean that the interface is now totally different from anything else and these drives won't work?

Finally, why the hell haven't they given Linux hackers a go at the drives? There are certainly those who would be interested in supporting the technology. AMD and Intel sure seem to (note that Linux supported x86_64 before it even shipped!)

Re:Ship time

[Teresita]

Wonderful idea for the manufacturers, flash drives only get so many [wikipedia.org] read/write cycles before they go T.U. Not so good for the consumers.

Re:

[Who235]

Excellent point. TFA has been Slashdotted so I can't see the specs without an undue amount of initiative on my part, but presumably if they put enough flash memory in, and used a proper distributive algorithm to make sure the same sectors aren't constantly written to - there might be little danger of this drive failing any sooner than a conventional drive.

I hope.

Re:Ship time

[Surt]

The number of read/write cycles is now typically sufficient to write at full speed 24/7 for 3-4 years.

Has it changed in 3 years?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

We wrote a driver to read and write fat 16 flash drives for an embeded system. The testing for it wrote and read full speed 24/7 for two weeks before they died. I assumed that was because of the limited read write settings. Or is it possible the low quality connection was to blame? Doesn't really matter they were only used to transfer settings. As any one whos had to support them knows, they often just die for no apparent reason. I'm not convinced that this is a system I'd want my data on.

Re:Has it changed in 3 years?

[Dun Malg]

We wrote a driver to read and write fat 16 flash drives for an embeded system. The testing for it wrote and read full speed 24/7 for two weeks before they died. I assumed that was because of the limited read write settings. Or is it possible the low quality connection was to blame?

Since not even you seem to have any specs on the flash drives you were using, what sort of answer are you expecting? Maybe the drives were new but used old memory. Maybe the internal voltage regulators that drop it from 5v to 3.3v were crappy. With no more info than "they were flash drives" and the post-mortem consisting of "they died", any conclusion would be idle speculation.

Re:

[kisielk]

Guess he's not called "Shooter of Bul(l)" for nothing.

Flash parts die in 3 weeks of solid write tests

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. If you write to ALL of the writable adressable area of a flashram , you will not get over 200,000 full writes on average despite the lies. In fact, the parts fail in 2 or 3 weeks of lab benchtests.

The flash fanatics keep modding down these facts to -1 for some insane reason here.

Flash has LIMITED write life.

The devices spread the data around to hide the limited write cycle life, and uses error correction to hide the limited write cycle life.

At some point its worthless.

Flash is idiotic for a backing store (virtual memory) based hard drive. And atomic-commit algorithms and other safety mechanisms for structure preservation and corruption avoidance such as "Journaling" only make the chatter worse.

All the disk chatter destroys the lifespan of the flash part.

Worse... flash is SLOW for lots of non-paralell-capable individual 512 byte requests, which typically are not spread across multiple flash parts.

True, a megabyte read can be fast in flash, but lots of random 512 byte reads or writes are far slower than a modern hard drive STILL in 2006. (15,000 rpm scsi from 7 diff manufacturers for example).

But the article is about hard drives... still.. its hopeless and foolish.

people who use their computers a lot will have data corruption earlier... all due to flash problems

Re:

[Tim Browse]

True, a megabyte read can be fast in flash, but lots of random 512 byte reads or writes are far slower than a modern hard drive STILL in 2006. (15,000 rpm scsi from 7 diff manufacturers for example).

Really? What are the seek times on these 15,000 rpm scsi drives that out-perform solid-state devices, and where can I buy them?

Re:

[dgatwood]

Enable swap on a flash volume. Install it in your grandmother's computer (256MB RAM, with the OS recommending 512MB). This is a real cause for concern, IMHO.

Not all wear leveling algorithms are created equal. In the worst case, your writes get hashed across a relatively small percentage of the cells in a particular flash part. Even in the best case, your wear leveling is still per flash part, not across the entire hard drive. Thus, unless the drive is spreading the cache load out evenly across all p

Re:Ship time

[VitrosChemistryAnaly]

Wonderful idea for the manufacturers, flash drives only get so many [wikipedia.org] read/write cycles before they go T.U. Not so good for the consumers.

What would be neat is if you could swap out flash drives in the event of a failure. Or upgrade the flash drive capacity. I'd be more interested in that than a permanently integrated flash drive. You're correct to be skeptical of its lifespan.

Re:Ship time

[Phroggy]

What would be neat is if you could swap out flash drives in the event of a failure. Or upgrade the flash drive capacity. I'd be more interested in that than a permanently integrated flash drive. You're correct to be skeptical of its lifespan.

Well then, good news for you: Vista supports a feature called ReadyBoost [microsoft.com], which can use just about any flash memory device (e.g. a cheap USB thumb drive) as a cache to improve performance.

Re:

[pipingguy]

There are now adaptor USB thumb drive-like devices (that are a bit wider than the typical thumb drive) that you can swap SD cards (as used in some digital cameras, for example) in and out of. Mine is a cheap-o ~$20 model and flimsily plastic, but I think these will become much more popular and sturdy in the coming months as people discover the flexibility of the format.

Re:

[schmiddy]

Out of curiosity, how similar is Vista's ReadyBoost feature to just mounting a USB drive as swap in Linux? Can you hot-unplug the drive in Linux if it's being used for swap? According to a FAQ on ReadyBoost [msdn.com] I found, Vista will back up the pagefile to disk so it's not a catastrophe if you yank out the USB stick.

And is there any setting in Linux to tweak to let the system know you've got a fast swap partition, other than simply monkeying with /proc/sys/vm/swappiness ?

Re:Ship time

[Phroggy]

Out of curiosity, how similar is Vista's ReadyBoost feature to just mounting a USB drive as swap in Linux?

Not really similar at all.

Can you hot-unplug the drive in Linux if it's being used for swap?

Nope, your system will crash unless you swapoff first (and of course that will fail if you're using more memory than you have physical RAM).

According to a FAQ on ReadyBoost I found, Vista will back up the pagefile to disk so it's not a catastrophe if you yank out the USB stick.

Correct. The data on the USB stick is used as a cache, not swap.

And is there any setting in Linux to tweak to let the system know you've got a fast swap partition, other than simply monkeying with /proc/sys/vm/swappiness ?

If there were, how would you want this information to affect Linux's behavior?

Re:

[pe1chl]

In my experience, swapping to USB is usually much slower than swapping to harddisk.

You might think that flash memory is much faster than harddisk, but this is not really true (certainly for write).
Try to benchmark a USB key and a modern harddisk. The disk will easily do 50-60 MB/s bulk transfers. Try to make the USB key do that.

You may gain a little because a flash key does not need to seek, and thus has less latency when a single disk is used as swap and filesystem and needs to seek between the swapspace

Re:Ship time

[eebra82]

You're mentioning aged technology. Flash mems have improved since then, plus, it's slightly different technology.

Additionally, do you honestly think any company (Intel, Microsoft, Samsung) would back this technology if it was limited to R/W cycles in thousands?

Last but not least, such hard drives will also store data which stays more consistent than regular data. It could store vital boot files, files to your most common applications, etcetera. In other words, files that do not change much over time. It's not like you're going to save your most frequently used documents to this section of the drive.

So to sum things up, you will not have to worry about the SSD part of the drive. It will probably even outlast the mechanical part of the drive.

Re:

[dave562]

It could store vital boot files, files to your most common applications, etcetera. In other words, files that do not change much over time.

I would imagine that all of the boot files plus commonly used .dll files would get stored to the flash section. Then when the system shuts down, it would write the page file to the flash in addition to all of persistent application data necessary to quickly boot the hibernated session.

Flash has gotten better, but it can still fail...

[figgypower]

Flash has improved by leaps and bounds, with the earlier Flash drives supposedly lasting 1000 read/writes. Nowadays, from what I can gather the average Flash drive lasts 300,000 to 1,000,000 erase/writes. Good, but still finite and, relatively speaking, more finite then HDs. Flash also has cycling quality control problems, which are not as severe in the HD industry. All that said, I'm not saying Samsung shouldn't go ahead and make its hybird hard drive, but consumers should realize that the Flash compon

Re:

[eebra82]

Yes, Windows Me sucked, we all know that. XP is more secure than its predecessors. Sure, there's a shitload of malicious software for Windows, but Microsoft never stated XP would be completely safe, just SAFER. And yes, some Intel chipsets have not been perfectly good.

Intel and Microsoft are obviously trying to make as big profit as possible, but that doesn't mean they're idiots. Yes, Windows Me sucked, but it was not developed to provide excellent stability and security. It was well known that as long a

Re:

[Lonewolf666]

Intel and Microsoft are obviously trying to make as big profit as possible, but that doesn't mean they're idiots. Yes, Windows Me sucked, but it was not developed to provide excellent stability and security. It was well known that as long as it's built on the Win95 kernel, it's going to suck about as bad.

I am sure Microsoft knew that. But Windows ME was still marketed as an improvement, and that is the point:
Selling something often has higher priority than making sure the customer is happy and will return.

Re:Ship time

[Tim C]

Heck, MS says XP is "more secure". More secure than what?

Than previous editions of Windows, of course, and they're right.

I just had to clean my wife's laptop that is SP2 and fully patched with MS Windows Defender, MS Windows firewall and AVG anti virus and the thing has spyware crap on it that was bringing it to its knees.

And are Defender and AVG kept up to date? Is she running as an admin and installing any old crap she comes across? Is the firewall actually running?

A single anecdote proves nothing; I can attest to three XP machines that I personally use that are perfectly clean and have been for serveral years. Before blaming the OS, I'd check with your wife about how she was actually using the machine.

Yes, I do think any one of those companies would back any technology if that technology would make them a profit.

I can see that from Samsung, but neither Intel nor MS are going to be producing or selling these things, nor any hardware or software that relies on them. They're not going to stand to make any money on them, but will take a knock to their reputations if they back them and they're crap. Perhaps MS won't care, but Intel has serious competition from AMD, and can't be quite that cavalier.

Re:This site could benefit

[bcat24]

[nitpick]I know you're just trying to be funny, but the site was suspended due to exceeding its CPU quota, not its memory quota.[/nitpick]

Re:This site could benefit

[Dunbal]

the site was suspended due to exceeding its CPU quota, not its memory quota.

      So maybe if they had preloaded the site into memory, we wouldn't have this problem...

Re:SuperFetch uncool...

[realmolo]

Why would you want your RAM to be unused? Unused RAM is useless RAM. Seriously.

I'm sure that Vista is smart enough to free up the RAM that SuperFetch is using if it could be better used for something else. It's really nothing more than a more pro-active version of the disc-cacheing that every operating system already uses.

Re:

[dbIII]

I'm sure that Vista is smart enough to free up the RAM that SuperFetch is using if it could be better used for something else.

It's a tweaked XP not something newer than plan9 - it will probably swap it out to disk so you get a big page file and a delay while it is doing it, which is probably one reason this new drive will help.

Personally I think it is stupider than doublespace since memory limited programs like image editors are commonplace now. The annoyance of not being able to print for a couple of mi

Re:

[ichigo 2.0]

Why on earth would it swap cache into the page file? That would be utterly pointless, and you are insulting their programmers for even suggesting that. If you want to bash Microsoft, at least come up with something realistic, as opposed to "the programmers of Vista are a bunch of retards who are unable to code anything properly".

Re:

[dbIII]

Why on earth would it swap cache into the page file?

No. I'm talking about the preloading into memory of a pile of applications and then having to swap that out of memory when you start something different. You get that now with office and some other stuff and I really don't want to see that happen with anything else let alone every major application on the PC at once. Perhaps some reading comprehension would be in order before putting something I never wrote or even implied in quotation marks.

Re:

[ichigo 2.0]

Preloading applications into memory is called caching. And suggesting that these preloaded applications would be swapped into the page file when they could simply be discarded and reloaded from the HDD when more RAM becomes available is silly. The act of swapping running programs and their data into the page file is a different thing altogether, and has nothing to do with SuperFetch. SuperFetch won't prestart the applications, only copy their data into RAM, and then if you happen to start the application in

Re:

[dbIII]

And suggesting that these preloaded applications would be swapped into the page file when they could simply be discarded and reloaded from the HDD when more RAM becomes available is silly

I'm assuming SuperFetch will be like the MS Office caching from the same company and will swap out to virtual memory instead of discarding the cached data. Unfortunately I haven't read anything yet that convinces me otherwise although I would like to be proved wrong - do you have any links?

Re:

[ichigo 2.0]

I decided to dig up a source for my claim and failed to produce one. Additionally, I found a source [windowsitpro.com] that makes it seem like SuperFetch does in fact swap cached data to the page file. Looks like me giving Microsoft the benefit of doubt has backfired, as I'm now looking forward to SuperFetch a lot less. I apologize for bashing you, I was the one being silly here.

Re:

[Lord Crc]

Personally I think it is stupider than doublespace since memory limited programs like image editors are commonplace now. The annoyance of not being able to print for a couple of minute while the memory swaps out can come to everyone.

But since SuperFetch preloads program data, the data is already backed on disk, it just needs to update the SuperFetch cache table and voila, fresh memory page ready to serve the hungry hippo. Should be almost as quick as a regular alloc. At least that's my take on it.

Re:

[dbIII]

Sorry for the confusion but my comment is really about Vista and not the new drive (although the drive may mitigate what I see as a problem by helping with the speed of writing to the disk swap file/virtual memory). I see this new feature operating in this way and in the spirit of the silly menu item reordering based on what application have been used recently.

1/ Vista boots, starts a pile of services and asks for a login.

2/ Vista looks up a list of recently used applications and preloads them into memor

Re:

[pe1chl]

so the memory your preloaded applications are using gets written to a different part of the disk (which takes time).

I don't think that Microsoft programmers are so dumb that they would write memory info which they loaded programs (from disk) to a different part of the disk, taking time.
Maybe YOU should take some time. To study how a virtual memory system works, and what is done with clean and dirty pages when they have to make room for other data.

Re:

[Tim C]

it will probably swap it out to disk

Why on earth would it do that? This is permanent data we're talking about, not transient; if the RAM is needed for something else, it will simply be dumped. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to write it to the page file.

It is paticularly stupid on the MS Windows platform where people typically only perform one application task at a time

Well, I'll grant you that the user is typically only interacting with one app at a time. However, I can't remember the last time I

Re:

[silverdirk]

I retract the statement just made. I tried "grep -R foo" in /etc, and after running it 5 times it ran diskless. The only argument to be made would be about who has the best cache replacement algorithm.

Re:

[MostAwesomeDude]

I was going to ask what version of Windows has grep preinstalled...

Re:

[misleb]

All that prefetching garbage is only useful when you first boot up and start you apps. For normal operation, the dynamic disk cache, which Linux uses nearly all free RAM for, should take care of "preloading" (or is that postloading?) commonly accessed files/programs for you. Either way, you're gettign about the same overall effect.

-matthew

Re:Flash

[NosTROLLdamus]

Captain Cold takes over the world.

Re:Flash

[Dunbal]

What happens when the flash dies?

      The same thing that happens when your hard drive crashes - kiss the data goobye. That's what backups are for. You DO backup every day, don't you?

Re:

[CrackedButter]

Back ups are for wimps, back in my day we used Apple's TimeMachine and have done for ages. Think about it.

Re:

[Tatsh]

The problem here is if we're talking about fully flash hard drives. If you bought two, one for backup (even in a ghost or RAID ghost setting), how can you rely on the fact that one won't die when it was written onto the same exact number of times, byte for byte, and used for the same amount of time? It's similar to current HD's, but these tend to not break at the same time.

Flash also can only be written onto so many times before it's rewriting capabilities start to suffer badly (don't remember the exact num

Better than HDDs

[ichigo 2.0]

AFAIK, the flash is only used for caching small files and for faster booting, all the data will eventually be stored on the HDD. Also, they assumably use algorithms that check the flash for bad sectors and marks them unusable if they stop functioning. HDDs also use similar methods, but a flash drive will be able to die more gracefully, as there is no mechanical parts that can fail abruptly.

Re:Is ReadyBoost really worth a crap?

[drsmithy]

How is this an improvement?

Because the _latency_ of flash is dramatically lower than mechanical hard disks.

You are looking at throughput, not latency, which is _vastly_ more important when talking about average access patterns. This is why an older SCSI drive with markedly lower throughput, but significantly better latency, will often perform better (especially for things like swap).

(Not to mention, your estimate of a 7200rpm drive is pretty generous to the tune of nearly 2x real-life performance).

I understand that there are other factors in play when accessing the hard disk, but.. I digress. Is this supposed to be a cheap way for Joe Schmoe to upgrade performance?

Yes. More accurately, cheap *and easy*.

"Don't buy 1GB of RAM for $100, but a 1GB flash drive for $30 and get 1/109th of the performance upgrade!!"

Firstly, it's going to deliver a significantly better benefit than than.

Secondly, upgrading RAM requires opening the case and putting it in. Most people are not comfortable with opening the case in the first place, let alone mucking around inside the thing possibly breaking stuff.