Hybrid Drive Coming?

[Andy]

Has anyone heard whether Thinkpads will be early adopters of the new "Hybrid Drive" technology? I just heard about this a couple of days ago, it's going to change laptops altogether. The deal is that the drive incorporates a large cache of fast flash RAM. The drive does not spin in its normal operating mode; it only spins up when it needs to read new information into cache. The cache is flash RAM so it survives power outages. If the OS is aware of the hybrid drive, it can designate boot and hibernate areas so starting or waking your computer can be nearly instantaneous. Needless to say, battery life will be vastly greater than that of current laptops.

I'd love it if my next laptop could have one of these, but I'm not sure how long I can wait to replace my A31.

Andy

[dsigma6]

it runs on E85?

hah...that technology would be great. im sure my hd wouldnt hit 70C anymore...

[christopher_wolf]

Anytime somebody says "It is going to revolutionize [INSERT PARADIGM HERE]!" I always get out the popcorn and watch what essentially amounts to people shelling out money for the Brooklyn bridge.

Seagate has already had the Momentus HDDs out; 256MB of flash memory on it at best. The only way I can see this really helping out is giving a performance boost to the the HDDs. This is going to be primarily used for Vista. You know how Windows XP does a pre-cahce of oft used files for boot? Same thing for Vista; just on steroids. Vista will be booting, for the most part, on the flash portion of the HDD to start with. It does make for faster boot times, but I have yet to see how other OSes are going to handle it. Unless both Seagate and Samsung (Samsung has already made clear that they won't be putting firmware on the drives to allow Windows XP to boot in such a fashion as Vista utilizing the on-board flash) come up with support for Windows XP and/or a form of a low level API for it, I don't know if it can be easily utilized for other OSes or purposes other than attempting to reverse engineer it and see the hows-and-whats of the drive.

It will be interesting to see if there is a way to use that flash portion as a very large buffer as that could really boost the performance of the low RPM drives or at least offer smoother operation for larger and highly dynamic I/O ops.

[dsigma6]

so itll get you into windows quickly just to make you happy how quick it "boots," then have you wait anyway for the hd to start doing something?

[christopher_wolf]

so itll get you into windows quickly just to make you happy how quick it "boots," then have you wait anyway for the hd to start doing something?

The firmware they are providing for it would seem to use it as a large buffer/caching area as well; similar to what we have with ATI HyperMemory. The advantage of it will be that the flash memory is faster than the drive over short periods of time, combine that with a very robust read-look ahead functionality (already in HDDs now) and you have the ability to load small segments onto it and perform I/O ops quicker. The overall result will probably be a smoother flow of operation for any given program. That still requires firmware to implement; I would have said it is totally abstracted and hidden from the software accessing it, but Windows Vista has the ability to use the 256MB as a sort of boot drive.

In the best case, it is a simple, abstracted, set of instructions that can be easily implemented by other OSes and software to take advantage of the flash portion of the HDD.

[Andy]

so itll get you into windows quickly just to make you happy how quick it "boots," then have you wait anyway for the hd to start doing something?

Well, ideally it would nearly instantly wake up from sleep/hibernate, bringing you right back to the desktop you left when you closed the laptop. No spinup would be necessary for that. But I'll be ecstatic if my boot time can cut by a couple of minutes.

[Andy]

Anytime somebody says "It is going to revolutionize [INSERT PARADIGM HERE]!" I always get out the popcorn and watch what essentially amounts to people shelling out money for the Brooklyn bridge.

Seagate has already had the Momentus HDDs out; 256MB of flash memory on it at best. The only way I can see this really helping out is giving a performance boost to the the HDDs. This is going to be primarily used for Vista. You know how Windows XP does a pre-cahce of oft used files for boot? Same thing for Vista; just on steroids. Vista will be booting, for the most part, on the flash portion of the HDD to start with. It does make for faster boot times, but I have yet to see how other OSes are going to handle it. Unless both Seagate and Samsung (Samsung has already made clear that they won't be putting firmware on the drives to allow Windows XP to boot in such a fashion as Vista utilizing the on-board flash) come up with support for Windows XP and/or a form of a low level API for it, I don't know if it can be easily utilized for other OSes or purposes other than attempting to reverse engineer it and see the hows-and-whats of the drive.

It will be interesting to see if there is a way to use that flash portion as a very large buffer as that could really boost the performance of the low RPM drives or at least offer smoother operation for larger and highly dynamic I/O ops.

I should have mentioned that Vista is supposed to support these drives out of the box. I don't anything about other OS's supporting the technology.

[christopher_wolf]

so itll get you into windows quickly just to make you happy how quick it "boots," then have you wait anyway for the hd to start doing something?

Well, ideally it would nearly instantly wake up from sleep/hibernate, bringing you right back to the desktop you left when you closed the laptop. No spinup would be necessary for that. But I'll be ecstatic if my boot time can cut by a couple of minutes.

I wouldn't hope for that just yet for a 256MB flash area. A hibernation RAM-to-HDD dump will be alot larger than that. Also, the Suspend-to-RAM feature is already quite fast to begin with. A Modern BIOS supports a resume time of around 1-2 seconds; a clean Windows install, without anything getting in the way, can pop back up in 2-3 seconds.

Suspend to RAM is not going to change because that doesn't write the contents to the HDD.

Again, the only thing that might change is a hibernate where you compress and write the contents of the RAM on a portion of the dsk (this part will not change because you *do* need that part of the HDD to act as swap). So, if you have more memory than flash on your hybrid HDD, it will be of limited use. It also makes itself slightly redundant because, if you were to use the whole partition, that would be essentially the same thing as Suspend-to-RAM with the possibility of slightly lower power draw.

I am waiting to see how large they are going to make the Flash portion on the HDD; it could benefit hibernate, potentially, in two ways. Acting as a large cache for the bigger chunks of RAM and have the resume "pseudo boot" portion on drive or vice-versa if there is only a small amount of on-drive flash available (this might require a change in the way the ACPI deals with Hibernate if the firmware doesn't take care of it); secondly, acting as a backup to Suspend-to-RAM a la the RediSafe feature already implemented in the Thinkpad BIOS chipsets. The latter is more likely as it involves the least amount of change.

[Andy]

Well, ideally it would nearly instantly wake up from sleep/hibernate, bringing you right back to the desktop you left when you closed the laptop. No spinup would be necessary for that. But I'll be ecstatic if my boot time can cut by a couple of minutes.

I wouldn't hope for that just yet for a 256MB flash area. A hibernation RAM-to-HDD dump will be alot larger than that. Also, the Suspend-to-RAM feature is already quite fast to begin with. A Modern BIOS supports a resume time of around 1-2 seconds; a clean Windows install, without anything getting in the way, can pop back up in 2-3 seconds.

Suspend to RAM is not going to change because that doesn't write the contents to the HDD.

Again, the only thing that might change is a hibernate where you compress and write the contents of the RAM on a portion of the dsk (this part will not change because you *do* need that part of the HDD to act as swap). So, if you have more memory than flash on your hybrid HDD, it will be of limited use.

Pop back up in 2-3 seconds? That would be really nice.... I have tons of utilities running. Waking from hibernate takes my A31 about five minutes; from sleep, twenty or thirty seconds. I have 768 MB RAM and a 30 GB HD with an 800 MB page file. I've just increased the minimum for the page file to the system-recommended 1149 MB.

Do you know of any tools that would tell me what the @#$%^! the box is doing during all that time?

[thibouille27]

Anytime somebody says "It is going to revolutionize [INSERT PARADIGM HERE]!" I always get out the popcorn and watch what essentially amounts to people shelling out money for the Brooklyn bridge.

Seagate has already had the Momentus HDDs out; 256MB of flash memory on it at best. The only way I can see this really helping out is giving a performance boost to the the HDDs. This is going to be primarily used for Vista. You know how Windows XP does a pre-cahce of oft used files for boot? Same thing for Vista; just on steroids. Vista will be booting, for the most part, on the flash portion of the HDD to start with. It does make for faster boot times, but I have yet to see how other OSes are going to handle it. Unless both Seagate and Samsung (Samsung has already made clear that they won't be putting firmware on the drives to allow Windows XP to boot in such a fashion as Vista utilizing the on-board flash) come up with support for Windows XP and/or a form of a low level API for it, I don't know if it can be easily utilized for other OSes or purposes other than attempting to reverse engineer it and see the hows-and-whats of the drive.

It will be interesting to see if there is a way to use that flash portion as a very large buffer as that could really boost the performance of the low RPM drives or at least offer smoother operation for larger and highly dynamic I/O ops.

I should have mentioned that Vista is supposed to support these drives out of the box. I don't anything about other OS's supporting the technology.

Vista Mobile will but the Desktop Vista will not.

[asiafish]

so itll get you into windows quickly just to make you happy how quick it "boots," then have you wait anyway for the hd to start doing something?

Well, ideally it would nearly instantly wake up from sleep/hibernate, bringing you right back to the desktop you left when you closed the laptop. No spinup would be necessary for that. But I'll be ecstatic if my boot time can cut by a couple of minutes.

Macs have had instant sleep and wake since 1992, and had a very near instant hibernate (safe sleep) since early 2005, all without any need for fancy flash drives.

This is done at the OS level, not hardware.

[christopher_wolf]

Macs have had instant sleep and wake since 1992, and had a very near instant hibernate (safe sleep) since early 2005, all without any need for fancy flash drives.

This is done at the OS level, not hardware.

Mmmm, that reminds me of my 701c. I tested it with the PowerBook I had at the time and they were both great.

I could close the lid of the 701c and it would go into Suspend in an instant, before a second was up. I can open it and, no matter how much stuff was running, the screen would always be the way I left it and on before I even go the lid halfway open....That is some really good suspend/hibernate functionality. Then again, the 701c has an IBM BIOS for that, you can even access the features of the BIOS while you are in the OS. I can still do all of that with my 701c too.