Westserve

Hybrid hard drives

One of the more interesting hardware developments – being pushed in part by Windows Vista – is the evolution of the humble hard disk.
While hard drives have grown dramatically in size, their growth in speed has been less dramatic. And it’s well accepted that hard drives are one of the biggest consumers of power in sensitive applications like notebook computers.

Enter flash memory. The speed and capacity of flash RAM has been developing really quickly, along with a rapid drop in price.
Combine a normal magnetic media hard drive with a healthy sized flash ram chip and you have a hybrid drive.
These aren’t available yet, but it won’t be long because Microsoft is pushing the development along parallel with Vista. The basic concept means that flash ram (from 128Mb to perhaps 4Gb either on board the drive or on the mobo) acts as a large cache, holding perhaps the whole o/s and registry and providing a huge speed boost. Flash memory can just about saturate the SATA bus bandwidth of 1.6 GB/sec.
There two approaches being taken with hybrid drive development, but both promise such things as:

• Very fast start-up from hibernation
• Fast start-up from cold (when essential o/s files are cached in the flash ram)
• Big power savings in notebook computer applications
• Longer life from hard drives by reducing load on the electro-mechanical components.

More info is a here