Samsung MH80 HD

[ApolloSpeed]

hmmmm......bet once this technology gets cheaper, these will be some kickass hardrives!!!

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Seoul (Korea) - Samsung has begun shipping what the company claims is the first hybrid hard drive on the Market. The new MH80 series is making its way to "select OEM customers" and will be available in retail outlets soon, the manufacturer said.

Samsung's hybrid hard drive ...

The drive arrives about one month later than originally expected, but while it missed the buzz of the Windows Vista launch, Samsung kept its general promises to make the device available in the first quarter of this year.


The MH80 comes in three capacities, 80 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB, and includes 128 MB or 256 MB of Samsung's premium NAND flash memory dubbed OneNAND. According to the company, the drives are "optimized" to work with Windows Vista notebooks and offers in combination with Microsoft's ReadyDrive software faster boot and resume times, increased battery life and greater reliability compared to traditional magnetic media technology.

In numbers, Samsung up to a 50% reduction in boot and resume times from traditional magnetic media technology. Since the drive avoids many power-hungry spin-ups of the hard drive and relies on the flash memory to store and access frequently used files, the MH80 consumes "70-90% less power" than a traditional hard drive, Samsung said. In everyday use, these power savings should translate into 20 to 30 minutes of additional battery time, depending on the notebook.

Information about the price of the MH80 drives was not available at the time of this writing.
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[Sloan]

Pretty cool.

I'm actually suprised that there's not more flashmemory based drives around now besides the portable ones. Just think, having a terabyte of flash mem as your drive. instant stuff. DUDE.

 

[kev]

yay! Finally reliable storage lol

 

[JBroll]

A problem with flash memory is that it has a limited lifespan for something that could be used as a 'real' storage and access point (of course, load leveling helps somewhat, but that doesn't completely remove the limitation) - about 1 million writes can be supported, but considering the stuff that you wouldn't even think of going into a hard drive, that's really not a lot. If you don't believe me, try using a flash stick as a swap and see how long it lasts before it bites the dust.

Another is that it's not terribly efficient - you can't write a byte at a time, you have to write and rewrite whole blocks rather than just changing a single 1 or 0; think of it as being like having a game of checkers where you have to move everything in a 4x4 square at once, rather than one piece at a time - not the best way to go.

One more problem is the sheer inefficiency of the file systems commonly used - your average file system is far from the most sensible way of doing things. A programmer by the name of Hans Reiser made significant progress in making more efficient memory schemes (ReiserFS is about 10 to 20 times as fast as what's commonly used in Windows or Mac OS X, just by removing a few odd limitations that spread the work load of file storage in odd ways), but he's currently suspected of murdering his wife and as a result isn't doing a lot more on the topic.

That aside, though, looks fun.

Jeff

 

[Sloan]

FACTS ABOUT FLASH MEMORY SUCK.

 

[JBroll]

Yeah, because, you know, reality is well-known to have a liberal bias.

Jeff