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Hybrid Drive Boosts Laptop's Skillset |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Wednesday, 10 October 2007 |
While
Solid State Disk drives might get all the glory, there's a lot to be
said for combining the relative strengths of Flash memory with those of
the more traditional storage of hard disk drives.
While
Flash memory drives can deliver significant speed and power reduction
advantages over traditional magnetic disk technology, they still fall
far short in terms of cost per megabyte, translating to very expensive
prices for relatively diminutive Solid State Disks.
One
approach as stated is the hybrid disk drive and although we haven't
seen much of this clever combining of old and new, the announcement by
disk drive manufacturer, Seagate
Technology, heralds something of a new era for storage in laptops and
other mobile devices.
Not
that Seagate's new drives are anything new, but the fact that the
company has claimed it is now manufacturing, and shipping in quantity
will ultimately translate into affordability for mainstream users.
Seagate says its new Momentus 5400 PSD hard drive ends the
perennial trade-off for notebook PC makers by delivering faster
systems without increasing the power consumption associated with more
powerful components (the PSD stands for Power Savings Drive).
These
new drives combine non-volatile cache (Flash memory) to beef up the
specs of the old reliable storage favorite. In this case a 256MB flash
memory isn't going to help your storage capacity and it doesn't have
to. The spinning discs take care of that, as usual.
What
the cache does is speed the drive functioning and allows the system to
store start-up and other files on the faster cache component. This gets
you away from the traditional requirement of waiting for the hard
drive's
platters to spin up to speed before boot-up can begin.
With
the Flash included on a hybrid hard drive, the boot-up files are on the
Flash memory and are ready for immediate access as soon as the boot
sequence begins. Once the
drive spins up, computer files are pulled simultaneously from the
spinning media and the flash.
Once you get up and running the system can then use the cache to store
frequently used files. While a traditional hard drive will include a
volatile cache this is used only for input/output buffering, but this
goes much further.
It has the effect of significantly lowering power consumption because
the system can reduce hard
disc drive power usage by as much as 50 per cent says Seagate. In
hybrid mode, the hard drive's spindle motors spin down when not in use
withthe Flash memory keeping the system RAM fed with read/write data.
Reducing
platter spin time also extends the life of the drive by
minimising wear and tear, so when the drive is using the cache, the
drive heads are locked enabling the drive to withstand 900 Gs of
shock, the rough equivalent of dropping a laptop from a height of six
feet to a hard surface - while it is operating.
If
you are using the new Windows operating system, you can get even higher
performance thanks to the smarts Microsoft has built into Vista. The
ReadyDrive technology uses a technology called Vista Superfetch to
analyse
computer usage patterns - such as how frequently a worker accesses
certain files - and place commonly accessed user data in the flash
memory to shorten system response time.
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