On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 10:31:09PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
What I fully expect to see very soon are hybrid devices with enough on board intelligence to move data between flash and disk based storage based on access patterns. This is better than the vista approach because it is not using bus bandwidth. It will also (at least initially) be more accessible as I think it will be a long time before Flash can hit the cost per megabyte at the storage densities we are now used to.
This is part of the new Vista technology (called readydrive I believe?) which is a joint venture between Samsung and Microsoft so that laptop hard disks will have a cache of around 256 megs of flash on them so that resuming from hibernate can be done more quickly and it will allow a laptops hard disk to spend more time with the disk spun down thus saving power. It could also mean booting at power on with a larger cache is reduced as everything will be in flash and that the disk is less likely to be damaged when you drop your laptop as the disk is more likely to be spun down at any given moment in time.
In the older days of computing (I believe during the 80's) a common way to speed up hard disk was to have a megabyte or two of ram on the disks controller (especially used in database applications) which was battery backed up with a couple of AA batteries. In the event of a power a failure the disk would always be in a consistent state too (well, unless the batteries went flat which would take a couple of weeks) as the cached writes on the controller would know exactly what had actually been written out to disk. I'm sort of going on memory with this though as this was all related to me by someone I know who administered quite a bit of Sun kit during the 80's.
Thanks Adam