Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive 243
writertype writes "Today, Seagate announced about a dozen new products, including its first hybrid laptop hard drive that includes a 256-Mbyte flash chip to save power and speed up the time a notebook recovers from hibernation. Interestingly, the new Momentus 5400 PSD has also exceeded earlier estimates of hybrid hard-drive performance, which said that such drives would add an extra hour to the typical battery life of a notebook PC."
Tax deduction? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Tax deduction? (Score:2)
Re:Tax deduction? (Score:2)
Re:Tax deduction? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Tax deduction? (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but how many LOC? (Score:5, Funny)
Bah, these measurements tell me nothing.
How many Libraries Of Congress can I store on this thing?! That's what I need to know!
Re:Yes, but how many LOC? (Score:5, Interesting)
I always wonder how they're counting the "DVD movies"...Raw and untranscoded? Transcoded to a 700MB avi? A direct copy of the DVD to your hard drive?
Here's the math... (Score:5, Interesting)
- 4 games/8GB or 2GB/game
- 8hrs video/8GB or 1GB/hr video
- 133 hrs music/8GB or 60MB/hr or 128kbit
- 2560 photos/8GB or 3.2MB/photo
Thus here is the math: - 750GB HDD - 300 GB left over
- 450 GB HDD = 15000 songs + 1500 photo + 50hrs video + 50 games + 25 DVDs
- 450 GB HDD = 60GB songs + 5GB photo + 50GB video + 100GB games + 25 DVDs
- 235 GB HDD = 25 DVDs
- 1 DVD = 9.4 GB
I guess they really mean it. Of course, the only way you're going to get a DVD onto your hard drive is through... um... antiquated software.
Re:Yes, but how many LOC? (Score:2)
Will it work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?
Re:Will it work? (Score:3, Insightful)
That requires software modification. As we know, most users are running either the current incarnation or the previous incarnation of Microsoft Windows. A change to Windows that would use such a device would be two versions out, which means three PC lifecycles before said seperate flash device has any signifigant market share.
In o
Re:Will it work? (Score:2, Informative)
On 2000 or XP, the drive will act like a normal drive, albeit with more cache.
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
Windows doesn't know how to do software RAID either, but Nvidia's drivers and BIOS provide that. Yes, it sucks that Windows is proprietary, but if you went to MS and said "We'd like to improve your OS for you", I think they'd jump at the chance, and they'd help you (help them) any way they could.
Re:Will it work? (Score:3, Informative)
Tasks that require knowledge of what data means without cooperation from the software generating the IO are difficult or impossible to do in a device driver depending on the task. It would be hard, where hard is a relative term in the context of software raid being easy, to accelerate hibernation in a block device driver. It would be impossible to do it well.
Yes, I write storage device drivers for a living, and have personally implement
Re:Will it work? (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, many of the memory pages are mapped as "read-only", for example all executable files running. Those do not need to be swapped out or written to the hibernate file - they can be discarded and read back again from the hard-drive when the thread executing them becomes active.
As an extra
It's been done... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, with a fair amount of memory on a laptop and a good filesystem (or Laptop Mode on Linux), you don't need this Flash device to avoid using the disk. Problem is, I've never really gotten it to cache much of the music, although it will avoid writing until it has to, even if
Re:Will it work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
Compatability really doesn't count since it requires specific support in Vista, so they could've implemented it to use a completely separate flash device rather than one that's built into a drive.
I'm taking the "ease of integration" thing with a large pinch of salt too - if this is primarily for notebooks then you can more or less discount upgrades (how many people really upgrade the drive in their notebook?). So this will be installed
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
drives are faster, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention your average notebook hard drive these days is fully capable of pushing 20+MB/sec for the linear read a "resume" requires, unless the hibernation file is fragmented. Even fairly expensive media like Sandisk Compact Flash "Extreme III" cards for digital cameras can't hit that, and one of those (1GB) costs about the same as a 100GB hard drive. Silly.
My Macbook by default hibernates, but I found a setting to flip that off so that it "sleeps" like it should (involve the 'defaults' command, I forget exactly.) Now it takes about 2 seconds to 'wake up'. Ironically enough, hibernation takes longer than it takes to boot (about 25-30 seconds) and the scale has probably been tipped even further in favor of "booting" with another GB of ram I just added; by my rough calculation it'd take well over a minute if most memory was in use at time of hybernation (maybe the OS clears out all disk cache before doing it- you'd hope so.)
Hibernation is for when your battery is pretty much dead and the laptop wakes up to hibernate before it looses the contents of RAM due to battery failure...and can people REALLY not wait the time it takes to boot or wake up from hibernation and copy the data back into RAM? Yeesh.
This seems like an attempt to save themselves in a market they're just not competitive in. From all accounts I've seen (and personal experience), Seagate's ATA-drive reliability is in the trashcan these days; the 7200.8 was a fiasco, and the 7200.9 doesn't seem much better. IBM sold off their drive business (which was a market leader in almost all segments) after the Deskstar/Deathstar fiasco, but Hitachi seems to be doing fabulously. I had a 7200.9 300GB drive that died within 12 hours of operation. It's been RMA'd, and the replacement will be sold on Craigslist or similar. In the meantime, a shiny new, cheaper, cooler-running, quieter Samsung Spinpoint is sitting in its place.
I think Seagate has seen the writing on the wall- hence the merger with Maxtor. I would imagine you'll see them merge Seagate/Maxtor technology in their ATA line and sell exclusively under Maxtor, and Seagate will go back to being a mostly SCSI brand, as their reputation there seems intact.
Re:drives are faster, too (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:drives are faster, too (Score:2)
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
It sounds like this would be very good though (as long as the size is enough to hibernate) so that when battery runs realy low the system has no chance of failing before the hibernation save is complete.
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
But I can say that if you did integrate with the OS, then you wouldn't necessarily need to cram all the system files into that space; you'd only need to cram all the system file pages that your system uses to boot. I have no idea how large this set is, except that it is bounded on the upper end by the total file size you thought would have to go in, but my intuition is that it's a lot smaller. (Win
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
Not true. Flash memory is faster than hard drives (both in "seek times" and in raw transfer speed), so this would allow the core operating system files to be transfered quicker. As well, hard drives typically take a few seconds to "spin up" before being available to load data off of -- so this could also have the added
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
*
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
True, 256mb isn't enough to hibernate off of... however, what if the hibernation method were revised a little? If the OS were to clean out it memory caches (modern OS's cache just about everything -- disk, network, applications, etc.) and then only use as much hibernation space as is actually being used in memory? My workstation has 2 gigs of memory, but rarely am I actively using
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
That's not how hibernation works. (Score:2)
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
If Munin is right about my computer, there are 341 megs serving as caches and 51 megs used as buffers. If I am reading the graph correctly, I am using just over 400 megs for programs and working data. I am not touching the swap file.
Another optimization would be t
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
I live in a world where most computers around me have at least 1 gig of ram these days. Even Dell's bottom feeder computers have 512 base with frequent 1 gig upgrades for free....
Re:Will it work? (Score:2)
Re:Will it work? (Score:3, Informative)
Any benefit to existing laptops? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone smarter than me know more about these drives?
Old objects of lust (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Old objects of lust (Score:2)
lifetime of flash? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a bit worried about how long that flash memory is going to last. It's got a limited number of write cycles, and presumably everything going to the drive goes through the flash cache.
Re:lifetime of flash? (Score:2)
Doubtful, given the wear-and-tear issue you point out.
I rather think the flash cache is to store the RAM data when the machine goes into hibernation, and to load back in quickly when the machine comes out of hibernation. Without flash, you would have to wait for the hard drive to spin up before it can retrieve the RAM store.
Re:lifetime of flash? (Score:5, Informative)
Since Seagate is already defect managing the disk with their firmware, I don't see it being a big challange to have it defect manage the flash as well.
Want some cheese? (Score:2)
1) "When compared to a hard disk drive, a further limitation is the fact that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles)" (Flash memory limitations [wikipedia.org]).
2) 4 years of 24/7 operations is 35,040 hours of use. That's about 28.5 writes/hour, or a write every other minute for 4 years. Cha
Re:lifetime of flash? (Score:2)
Call me a cretin, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Call me a cretin, but... (Score:2)
The flash on hybrid hard drives is used to store data (say a copy of system RAM when hibernating) after the machine is off...think solid state storage like a USB drive, not solid state like system RAM.
Re:Call me a cretin, but... (Score:2)
The article highlights faster resume times from hibernation. In that case the power has been off, which would empty the cache.
Re:Call me a cretin, but... (Score:3, Informative)
What's the difference between a 'hybrid' drive and a drive with a really big cache?
Cache is volatile, flash memory in a hybrid drive isn't. Thus a hybrid drive could save time when you boot, while a large cache won't.
Re:Call me a cretin, but... (Score:2)
Re:Call me a cretin, but... (Score:2)
Death of Harddrives? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.
Given the rapid pace of development of flash memory, how long until hard drives are gone altogether? It would seem the breakout of flash memory in the marketplace is bringing us one step closer to relaible instant-on systems, with none of the tedious waiting for drives to spin up.
Re:Death of Harddrives? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd imagine that hard drives will go away only once they find something akin to flash that isn't limited in the number of writes. Having a limit of a million writes is completely reasonable for iPods, cameras, and other devices where you do infrequent large writes. Having
Having a flash device for the OS and programs and a hard drive for general purpose storage, though, that I could see being feasible in not too long.
Re:Death of Harddrives? (Score:5, Insightful)
The write limit is not going to be the barrier to replacing hard drives for nearly as long as price and size are going to be.
Re:Death of Harddrives? (Score:2)
Re:Death of Harddrives? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably a good while yet (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine the hybrid HDs will be the first step. Try and get the best of both worlds. A small flash store for frequently accessed thigns to get lightning fast random access, a large magnetic disk so you don't compramise on storage. Windows Vista is apparantly going to be pushing this rather hard. MS notes support for it as one of the features, and even if you lack a hybrid HD, you can get something similar by giving it a USB flash drive and instructiong Vista to use it as an app cache. Parts of programs are then put on the flash to speed load times.
I think that's the kind of thing we'l see for a number of years here until flash gets cheaper.
Re:Death of Harddrives? (Score:2)
Re:Death of Harddrives? (Score:2)
Good question, but not quite the right one. Most of the time you wait for your computer isn't the hard drive spinning up, but the OS transferring information from the hard drive to RAM (and to other parts of the hard drive). Flash RAM will do this faster because it won't have to wait for the HD's heads to access a particular part of the spinning drive, but it will still take time.
We'll never have the same instant-o
I'm not surprised (Score:3, Interesting)
Having said the above, it occurs to me that you could use some of the techniques on a regular laptop that Damn Small Linux (DSL) uses. Flash memory can only be written to a finite number of times. In order not to kill the flash memory, DSL runs entirely in memory. (If you want to write to the flash memory, you have to explicitly mount it.) So, if you were to tailor your operating system to avoid using the hard drive the same way DSL avoids using the flash, you should be able to significantly increase your battery life without special hardware.
flash memory lifetime? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:flash memory lifetime? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this matter when you have a smart OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK I guess I can think of a few reasons...
The flash wont need refresh cycles to keep its data intact, so that gives you a power reduction...
The flash can still retain its state even when you shut down, so "wakeups" should be faster..
The hard drive is in charge of the caching, taking some thinky think load off of the CPU.
but from a performance perspective, it seems that Linux would do better with 256MB of faster, closer, shinier RAM instead of a wad of flash.. Plus your caching mechanism can be improved without having to buy a new hard drive.
Re:Does this matter when you have a smart OS? (Score:2)
You missed the point, this idea was introduced at the "2004 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference".
Perhaps Microsoft will use this memory space to load such advanced technologies as anti-virus, anti-spyware, defrag, or other useful novel ideas...at least to the Windows-world?
Basically what this boils down to is if you have dumb software, you need smart hardware.
Seperate battery backing for RAM? (Score:2)
Re:Does this matter when you have a smart OS? (Score:2)
Regarding the other announcement, DB35 series... (Score:2, Interesting)
I might want to check those out for personal storage too. It sounds like they might make a nice, quiet, fileserver for my home, with the right case (I was thinking P180) and components.
There's this interesting snippet, though, which concerns me, in the DB35 series' product datasheet [seagate.com] (PDF,
Mod this up, please (Score:2)
These are good questions.
Flashy Mobiles (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see how <20GB HDs have any place in the portable market anymore (outside of tiny niche multimedia producers), as even $35 80GB HDs are overkill for most people who network, as most everyone does. If every notebook, handheld, iPod, phone and other mobile device used Flash instead of HDs, Flash prices at that industry scale would drop, capacities would multiply, and $5:GB up to 32 or 64GB would be common. While much of the rest of the cost of the device would be lower without extreme measures to accommodate the hungry, inefficient HD.
Re:Flashy Mobiles (Score:2)
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_25_ide.php [bitmicro.com]
I'm not 100% certain where you can purchase them, but when I looked into it ~6 months ago I did find some avaliable for online ordering.
Re:Flashy Mobiles (Score:2)
Let me know when you find a simple IDE/Flash adapter that I can plug the cheap commodity Flash stuff into, to replace my 10GB IDE HD.
Re:Flashy Mobiles (Score:2)
1. Desktop usage:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.asp?keywo rd=2105 [monoprice.com]
And a 2 or 4 port PATA raid card,
or
http://www.topmicrousa.com/st-123cf.html [topmicrousa.com]
and a SATA capable motherboard or SATA raid card.
The second has the advantage of being easily hotswappable.
Disadvantage: Not as cheap as you might like. Probably $50-$100 investment required.
2. Notebook usage:
http://americanesuperstore.stores.yahoo.net/cfad-0 03.html [yahoo.net]
Get two
Re:Flashy Mobiles (Score:3, Interesting)
I think there is a demand for the benefits. But I also think notebook dealers don't market them (educate the market) because margins are still higher on 2.5" HDs, especially the ones bundled with new notebooks. Just unbundling those HDs opens competition from other HD vendors. And without market education, the unfamiliar products will find only niche markets, which also decreases dealers' economy of monolithic
Re:Flashy Mobiles (Score:3, Interesting)
Since it was so easy to ask & get, I'm upping the ante, with a better order
And for dessert, how about a fanless PIII/1GHz
Bad idea (Score:2)
If its the drive, then that sucks because the drive would need to know about the filesystems in use, and chances are it would only support Microsoft filesystems.
If its the OS that manages which files to put there, then it still sucks, as the drive and flash are combined.
It would be much better to have the flash as a separate component. Apa
Re:Bad idea (Score:2)
From the links (which don't give much detail), it sounds like the drive "looks" like a normal HDD to the machine. It just happens to have a nonvolatile cache built in, which means it can start serving files even before it spins up (which most likely explains the faster booting and restoring from hibernation); and for certain types of an
Flash vs traditional materials (Score:2)
How much faster is flash storage memory than hard drives?
While 256MB would still speed boots for hibernate files larger than 256MB, current boot speed of a 256MB hibernate file from a hard drive is nearly instantaneous anyway, negating any real value to this. The real value would only kick in for systems with more than a gig of memory.
Re:Flash vs traditional materials (Score:2)
Hydrogen? (Score:3)
Flash lifetime? (Score:2)
In that case it may be easier to get one of those IDE/compact flash adaptors and have the flash as a separate device.
How to do this with Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Insure you have the correct interface connections to the computer (USB port, USB cable, CF/SD drive, weird built-in hybrid device).
3. Boot Linux
4. Find location of Flash device. A modern distro will point this out to you on the desktop.
5. Use your GUI partitioner to define the flash device as your swap space. Be sure you purchased a flash device with size > system ram.
6. Suspend2Disk really, really fast.
Also, given a reasonably long up-time, enjoy the perks of a system with high-speed swap space. Applications, data, kernel; whatever! It all gets faster! Be sure to crank up your swappiness value for maximum effect; this'll have Linux swapping out just about everything it can get its hands on.
Given a modern flash device, with 1 million or so read/write cycles, and defect balancing, even under very high-usage you should get years of use.
Rewrites and other musings... (Score:2, Insightful)
failure rates (Score:2)
In the past year or so, I've had, literally, 50% of all drives I have purchased fail. Mostly Western Digitals, FWIW.
For that matter, I've had several expensive raid controllers fail too. This shit is really starting to piss me off.
Re:failure rates (Score:2)
In the past year or so, I've had, literally, 50% of all drives I have purchased fail. Mostly Western Digitals, FWIW.
For that matter, I've had several expensive raid controllers fail too. This shit is really starting to piss me off.
Odd, because I haven't seen a drive fail in quite a while personally (and I probably have 20+ spindles sitting next to me in
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
You have the screen (flourescent backlight) (likely tens of watts) and the CPU (Intel Core Duo is 31W), probably the GPU too. Cutting the CPU to an LV chip (Core Duo LV is 15W) might give you a two or four more hours, depending on the display and the GPU. Don't tell me that saving one watt is going to save an hour of power on battery time.
oh really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh... Someone in Samsung's PR division does not realize that the typical laptop does not get 11 hours of battery life. There has got to be a way to hold PR folks accountable for the stupid and wrong things they say.
Re:Mbytes? (Score:3, Funny)
Are those 6 minute MegaAbs?
Re:Mbytes? (Score:5, Funny)
No, not six minutes, SEVEN! No one could get a good workout in just six minutes, duh!
Hmm... MegaBS = 1000^2 people bullshitted? Could come in handy with all these RIAA topics.
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:5, Informative)
It's unlimited reads, but limited writes, so assuming you're using it to store OS code, the limited writes probably won't be a major problem. The limitation is usually in the low millions as well.
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:2)
Thats exactly what I want to do with it. In fact, thats all I want the system to do AT ALL. Hybrid drives are nice and all, but why isnt there one damn SATA/EIDE/ATA/whatever 4GB+ flash-only drive?
This would be invaluble to us in a server environment. All our storage is remote already, for gods' sake just give me a puny little solid-state drive that will rarely fail. Drives are the biggest thing we loose. It would drop costs for us all over the place.
I'd even us
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:2)
They [pcengines.ch] are. [newegg.com]
Correction (Score:2)
You would not be wanting to use this space for anything like swap space because NAND write time is so slow (compared with platter). It would probably be good for storing/buffering multimedia files so that you can shut the disk down while you're playing.
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:2)
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:2)
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:2)
Some BIOS's are more than cabable of booting from a USB device, so who's saying you couldn't do this already?
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash? (Score:4, Informative)
MirrorDot to the rescue! (Score:2, Informative)
http://mirrordot.org/stories/838dd483f468b1c95ac0
Extreme Tech:
http://mirrordot.org/stories/c6b3da4e4e2b800ddf83
Re:OS support? (Score:2)
Me? I've got 2GB of RAM, so it won't speed up hibernation for me. Still, getting another half hour or more out of my laptop would be nice.
Re:OS support? (Score:2)