Hybrid Drives
Sometime last year, Rob Howard and I were talking about laptop technology. He was wondering when we'd see the replacement of platter-based drives with flash memory. There will be all kinds of benefits:
- 0 seek time
- Lower power consumption (no moving parts / spinning platter)
I don't know how it came up, but Xander Sherry and I were talking about this again yesterday and he made some great points for why we haven't replaced all our drives with flash drives yet:
- Flash memory is still expensive - a Gig of nice quick flash memory on Amazon still goes for almost $100. Even if it was only $30, a 100 Gig flash drive would be several thousand dollars - you gonna pay that?
- The times you can read and write to a flash drive is still somewhat limited compared to a traditional harddrive. I haven't researched this to know how limited but it's a good item to keep on the list until I learn more.
Interestingly, Xander found the following article last night about hybrid Seagate drives coming out with Windows Vista. "The most radical drive," the article reads, "is the hybrid Momentus 5400 PSD (Power-Saving Drive) which adds 256MB of Flash memory to a 5,400rpm SATA300 2.5 inch hard drive. The Momentus also has 8MB of conventional cache memory. The highest capacity model of PSD will achieve 160GB of storage with two platters and four read/write heads."
256 MB of Flash memory? 8 MB conventional cache? What is this, 1994?
My camera has 256 MB of Flash and I'm waaaaaaaaay behind the times. I've had 8 Meg of cache in my drives for, what, 4 years?
Great RADICAL idea but poor execution. How about something with a little testosterone? Maybe I'm just being a little too Tim Taylor here but wouldn't a Gig of Flash and 32 Meg cache sound better? The thing isn't going to be availble for another year - component prices are going to cut in almost half by then - step up to the plate, boys, and tell us why 8 Meg of cache is now inadequate, demonstrate how you can load small countries into your Flash and author your SOW, BRs, Project Plan and PowerPoint presentation without spinning up your hard drive. THAT'S RADICAL.