Samsung releases hybrid HDD

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 8th March 2007
Comments (19) Stumble
Samsung releases hybrid HDD

"Look, I'm flashy!" - Samsung has released the world's first hybrid HDD.

Aside from the past few months with totally flash-based drives, there haven't really been a lot of advancements in hard drive technology for a few years. Much of the focus had been on getting drive sizes increased rather than seek times to be faster, which has led many of us to be waiting for "hybrid drives." Well, the wait is now over - Samsung has shipped the first ones.

The new drives feature a combination of a regular platter array (standard HDD technology) and NAND flash memory. The flash memory increases the drive speed considerably by allowing commonly accessed files to remain on it rather than on the platters, thus virtually negating seek time. NAND flash is particularly good at small files being requested often, which frequently happens as one runs an operating system. Conversely, standard platter-based HDDs are better at large files being accessed less frequently, such as stored media.

Hybrid technology also comes with one other benefit - NAND flash is particularly low-power, and the data on it does not need to be read from the platter, thus eliminating the need to spin the drive. Samsung estimates that its new drives will increase battery life for notebooks by up to 30 minutes thanks to that feature alone, making the drive an asset for any road warrior. Of course, we'll believe it when we see the final result - but since the drives have already shipped, that won't be too long.

These models are entirely Vista compatible, though it may be wise to examine their usability in other, earlier operating systems before purchase if you don't want to use Vista. Also of note is the size of the flash, which isn't exactly what one would consider "spacious" - the NAND components are currently only 128MB or 256MB. That's plenty to offload drivers and frequently accessed parts of the OS, but it won't hold your entire install - which means some intelligent design will be needed to determine what moves into the flash space.

Hopefully, now that the pebble has been thrown, we'll see this technology snowball quickly. It would be nice to have a space large enough to house the entire OS on the flash portion - currently you could only include DSL or other small linux variants in their entirety. We recently showed how quickly you can install Vista by using flash memory, it would be great to see how quickly you can boot and run it.

Have you got a thought on the new drives? Let us hear about it in our forums.
Quote atanum141 8th March 2007, 14:43
sounds good.
Quote airchie 8th March 2007, 15:12
Looks wicked.
Looking forward to Raptor drives with this kinda tech.
Can you imaging a raptor for a couple of gigs of flash memory???
I'd buy that for a dollar (or more like $500 :D).

Typo:-- Fixed, thanks! - Da Dego
Quote Veles 8th March 2007, 15:59
Not just a raptor drive, a parallel perpendicular water holgraphic raptor drive :p
Quote sinizterguy 8th March 2007, 16:11
Awesome. Now I just need to sit back and wait until a 1 or 2 GB flash SATA 120 or 160gb one comes out.
Quote randosome 8th March 2007, 17:21
i actually watched a long song and dance about flash drives, and they look pretty interesting, except vista has to tell the HDD what to put in the flash memory (otherwise it just acts like a HDD)

Although they did demo the fact, if your not working on it, those hundreds of tiny read/writes that happen can just be buffered in the flash memory, so you can actually get the HDD spun down for like 90% of the time if you aren't doing anything

It will become much more interesting when they are a couple of GB though, not that you want to store the OS in nand, but the combination of big enough flash and ram will probably allow the HDD to sit idle

Although i do wonder about HDD life - drives last longest when they are on for sustained periods, so constantly starting and stopping the drive seems like a bad idea
Quote riggs 8th March 2007, 17:25
Sounds fantastic, and while the memory size is very small, this should start the ball rolling.

And an extra 30 minutes laptop power is always a good thing!
Quote Ramble 8th March 2007, 18:31
Nice.
I hope they're releasing a high performance one for us enthusiasts rather than a bunch of laptop drives.
Quote Brooxy 8th March 2007, 20:41
I don't think i'm going to shell out on one of these for a while, not until I'm able to get the entire OS on the flash section, and all my data on the rotary.

Still, as said before, it's nice to see the ball is now rolling :D
Quote DXR_13KE 8th March 2007, 21:05
let the ball roll...... and then buy a uber fast hard drive.
Quote Crazyglue 8th March 2007, 21:08
wow, that 128mb or 256mb of flash is pretty much worthless... why cant they just stick a 1gb stick or 2gb stick (like in thumb drives) in there and make it a awsome hdd, instead of a decent one.
Quote Da Dego 8th March 2007, 21:51
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazyglue
wow, that 128mb or 256mb of flash is pretty much worthless... why cant they just stick a 1gb stick or 2gb stick (like in thumb drives) in there and make it a awsome hdd, instead of a decent one.
The technology is a LOT more complicated than that...and actually 128-256MB is far from worthless, as I explained in the article? I'm just curious how the system will manage what's on that portion and what isn't.
Quote Paolo 8th March 2007, 22:21
My only question would be how this affects the overall drive lifespan - has flash memory progressed beyond the point where it's life under constant read/write is comparable to the rotary part of the drive it's a cruicial part of?

Cheers,
Paul
Quote Buzzons 8th March 2007, 23:22
doesnt NAND have a finite amount of read/writes? if its continually cashing data it will surly hit this limit "quite" fast, in comparison to the life time of a standard hard drive -- can you replace the NAND in the disks ?
Quote Emon 9th March 2007, 07:06
Flash life has gotten a lot better. The drive can also balance the load of where the reads and writes occur. Samsung has a 32 GB all flash drive with an MBTF of 228 years.
Quote randosome 9th March 2007, 07:59
Quote:
Originally Posted by Da Dego
The technology is a LOT more complicated than that...and actually 128-256MB is far from worthless, as I explained in the article? I'm just curious how the system will manage what's on that portion and what isn't.
alot of the OS doesnt actually need to be used all the time, so you really dont need to put it all in NAND

Also, ontop of that the drive has to cache the files into nand memory anyway, so its just prefetching files better
Im wondering what the sweet spot will be where the drive doesnt have to spin up for long periods of time (assuming your not playing media) because the nand has all the data you need
Quote sinizterguy 9th March 2007, 09:03
With this drive in combination with a SD card or other flash memory storing any media I want to watch as well as offering ReadyBoost should increase the battery life on my laptop as it should allow the hdd to spin down.
Quote airchie 9th March 2007, 09:15
I imagine having the swap file in the cache of the HDD would help?
You could in theory set a system managed swap file to be stored in the cache and it would only be filled if needed...

How would this work in raid?
As your PC 'sees' the disks as one drive, would it still be able to access the nand on the drives?
Would you simply double the nand size or lose it alltogether?
Quote randosome 10th March 2007, 00:13
Quote:
Originally Posted by airchie
I imagine having the swap file in the cache of the HDD would help?
You could in theory set a system managed swap file to be stored in the cache and it would only be filled if needed...
its possible it will do this, it caches data that your likely to need, and all the writes while the HDD is spun down

if you want to find out what actually happens youd need to talk to MS, beacause its their software behind the scenes making this happen, Its called ReadyDrive

Edit:
Btw its hardly amazing samsung did this, i mean they just followed MS's specs im guessing, they didnt even have to write any software for it - their just the first to get a product out there
Quote mctigger 12th March 2007, 19:34
Been waiting a long time to see one like this being released, It will improve battery life in laptops by a considerable amount, but if they put in a biggar Flash memory, the prospects for high performance machines, increase rapidly!

Imagine Playing a high intensity game (can't think of one just now), with little to no load times!!! Awosome!
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