Y
Yousuf Khan
George said:
Well, flash isn't going to extend the life of the platters, it's only
good for the fast startup. In order to extend platter life you'd need
ram mostly.
Yousuf Khan
Well, flash isn't going to extend the life of the platters, it's only
good for the fast startup. In order to extend platter life you'd need
ram mostly.
Yousuf Khan
Y
Yousuf Khan
GSV said:
The problem you'd have with such a dynamically updated hibernate file is
that if you keep writing to the flash drive, it will quickly lose its
entire limited allocation of write cycles. The hard disks and ram have
unlimited write cycles (virtually), flash doesn't.
However, in a laptop environment, with a battery backup already
available, I can see them possibly going into save-to-ram (standby)
mode, followed by a save-from-ram-to-flash mode. You can completely turn
off the hard disk when power is lost, and make all updates only to the
flash disk, which would then proceed to update the disk when power is
restored. Very much like a journalled filesystem.
Yousuf Khan
D
daytripper
A solution looking for a problem...
With all of that in place, there's really no gain on the play: a laptop with a
functional battery shouldn't scram to disk just because it lost its mains
source, it should just pop a warning and keep on running. If the operator
decides to bail, (s)he can simply enter Hibernate. End of story, no flash
required.
At best, all the extra flash and code to use it could even hope to accomplish
is to save a few milliwatts of battery life when shutting down...
/daytripper
A
Arno Wagner
That would not make much sense IMO.
That is nonsense. The size of the disk has no impact on the per-sector
error corection. Maybe they mean that with 4096 byte sectors they
can use more efficient codes.
Arno
G
George Macdonald
I did not mean reduce wear of the platters but extend the lifetime of hard
disks in general as a mass storage solution, i.e. delay the switch over to
flash as a replacement for hard disks. It gets them a foot in the door
with the technology too... hopefully, from their POV, fending of Sandisk
et.al. from taking over the mass storage market eventually.
D
daytripper
Until cost per bit for flash at least enters the same arena as magnetics -
never mind approaches parity - I doubt the magnetic media companies are all
that worried about flash encroaching in their bread-and-butter markets...
A
Alexander Grigoriev
Oh, wonders of a journalled filesystem... BTW, you can do the same tricks
with NTFS.
I'm afraid, you folks argue two different concepts:
1. Filesystem robustness against power failure or system reset;
2. Complete system state restore across power-off (which is achieved with
hibernation, but requires some time for writing the state).
IIRC, OS/360 allowed the applications to restart from a saved checkpoint,
but it's not what's discussed here.
If anybody hopes to restore complete system state after an arbitrary power
failure (as if it didn't happen), you're out of luck without battery backup.
with NTFS.
I'm afraid, you folks argue two different concepts:
1. Filesystem robustness against power failure or system reset;
2. Complete system state restore across power-off (which is achieved with
hibernation, but requires some time for writing the state).
IIRC, OS/360 allowed the applications to restart from a saved checkpoint,
but it's not what's discussed here.
If anybody hopes to restore complete system state after an arbitrary power
failure (as if it didn't happen), you're out of luck without battery backup.
K
Keith
OTOH, do people really pay more for 200GB drives? Ok, I bought one on
BlackFriday for $29 (I would have bought a smaller drive at $29). Will
people pay for a flash drive it it were a similar price and half the
capacity? ...forgetting the write-cyle issue. My bet is yes.
BTW, what happened to MRAM? I thought we'd be swimminng in it by now. ;-)
D
daytripper
Geeze...."forgetting that the drive has a profound problem with wear-out"
kinda changes the nature of the comparison....But, ok, at only twice the
price, you possibly could be right - if in fact there's some perceivable
performance advantage, because capacity is still important. But at the current
rate of cost-per-bit closure, even you'll be an old gummer before that
happens.
ahahahahahahahahaha!
Reminds me of the annual visits from the FeDRAM folks...
/daytripper
T
The little lost angel
US$29 for a 200GB drive? New? I gotta get a truckload of these
Theyare going for like at least US$100 a piece here.
G
George Macdonald
Not wholly for a while yet of course but as interface/burst speeds go up
way beyond off-the-platter speeds, if a hybrid is on the cards in the
interim, I'm sure they'd rather be the ones selling the bits.
J
J. Clarke
George said:
They get their cut regardless--the only way some outfit that is not a hard
disk manufacturer could make such a thing is to start with a hard disk
bought from one of the manufacturers.
K
Keith
US$29 for a 200GB drive? New? I gotta get a truckload of these
are going for like at least US$100 a piece here.
Yeah, Black Friday (the Friday after the US Thanksgiving holiday) is a
huge shopping day in the US. Some stores have "loss-leaders"[*] to get
people in the stores, hopeing they'll buy something else. In this case
Staples (and office supply chain) was selling 200GB Maxtor IDE drives for
$29. I also snagged a dual-layer DVD burner for $19 and a spindle of
50 DVD+Rs for $3. Of course there are "rebates" to be filled out
(on-line in this case), so there was more out of pocket than $29.
[*] A "loss-leader" is a product sold (usually at a loss, hence the name)
to generate traffic.
G
George Macdonald
The 2 routes being considered here were in the HDD package or on the mbrd.
Y
Yousuf Khan
Arno said:
Yeah, that's what they meant. ECC is taking up too much of the disk real
estate these days.
Yousuf Khan
J
J. Clarke
Yousuf said:
???? It's taking up the same percentage it always took up. Disks today are
approaching the size of large datacenters 20 years ago, so I find the
"taking up too much real estate" argument to be kind of silly.
Y
Yousuf Khan
J. Clarke said:
They're just saying they can do a more efficient error correction over
4096 byte sectors rather than 512 byte sectors.
Yousuf Khan
A
Arno Wagner
How would you determine where the boot-sequence ends? What if
it forks? How far would you get actually (personal guess:
not far)? And does it realyy give you significant speed imptovement?
With Linux, kernel loading is the fastest part of booting. The
part that takes long is device detection and initialisatiom.
My guess is it is the same with Windows, so almost no gain from
reading the boot data faster.
I think that is nonsense. ECC is something like 10%. It does not
make sense to rewrite every driver and the whole virtual layer just
to make this a bit smaller, except meybe from the POV of a
salesperson. From an enginnering POV there is good reason not
to change complex systems for a minor gain.
Arno
F
Folkert Rienstra
Arno Wagner said:
You have always been an idiot too.
Right, that's huge. High time to cut that back.
You don't have the faintest idea what this is about, have you.
Completely engulfed in conspiricy theories.
This has been working in SCSI for years, stupid.
And it's already a reality in ATA/ATAPI-7.
Y
Yousuf Khan
Arno said:
You would manually choose which components go into the flash disk. Or
you would get a program to analyse the boot sequence and it will choose
which components to send to the flash. You can even pre-determine what
devices are in the system and preload their device drivers.
You've just made the perfect case for why it's needed. 10% of a 100GB
drive is 10GB, 10% of 200GB is 20GB, and so on.
Yousuf Khan