Hybrid HD's

I wanted to know if I buy a laptop in the upcoming few months will I be able to upgrade my SATA hard drive with a hybrid one from Samsung?
It's a really interesting technology and I would do anything to test it Especially if it will make my windows vista experience even more satisfying.
Thank you in advance

 

Nothing is going to make Vista a satisfying experience. However, as long as the hybrid drive is SATA, I see no reason why you couldn't replace a regular HDD with a hybrid. I'm extremely dissatisfied that these are drives won't be compatible with XP. Hopefully there will be good Linux support for them.

 

Yeah, I really wish XP could take advantage of hybrid drives. That being said, the drives that are ENTIRELY flash-based will work like any other drive, with greater performance in every aspect. I'd be tempted if the capacity got around 80GB at a decent price.

 

Where did you see that XP wouldn't take advantage of them?

Maybe I'm missing some key aspect of this, but as far as I can see, there shouldn't be anything to "take advantage of". It's just a harddrive with a big, fast, non-volatile buffer. Vista might be able to explicitly detect that it's running off a hybrid disk, and shuffle data around to exploit it better, but it should still be recognized (and fast) on XP.

Or what? Am I missing something critical here?

 

Maybe not, I just assumed they were right, and I know that Vista is designed with hybrid hard drives in mind.

 

Do you have a link to it though? It's entirely possibly I've just missed that piece of news.

 

Vista has that Super Cache feature, or whatever you call it. The OS is designed to take advantage of the flash, just as it is designed to use the 1GB of memory to be found on future CPUs. I think XP will be able to handle the drive, but paying the premium price of a hybrid and then pairing it with XP is just a waste, really.

 

I remember specifically reading the XP couldn't take advantage of hybrid drives.

I'd prefer to have a completely solid storage drive, but, when the 32gb model costs in excess of 2 grand, i can't afford it.

 

Define "take advantage" of, I would figure it should be totally capable of using the drives. Now, will it be able to make best use of them, probably not, but I can see no reason why, if the drive has the same interface, XP wouldn't be able to access the drive (and just treat it as a normal hard drive).

 

I don't think that the drive suport is based int eh OS really. Again, it maybe that the OS can exploit it better.... But it really comes down to the chipset. If your SATA chipset can't support a hybrid drive, then it won't be usable.
At least, I guess thats how it will be.
As far as the onboard flash memory, I don't really think it's a good idea. Flash has a limited read/write life. So you may need to replace the flash in a year. That is, unless they've improved it.

 

I think the major "advantage" of the hybrid drives is for hibernating the laptop... the flash will read much quicker than an hdd, thus the laptop will resume much faster. XP does not have any support for this feature. This would be nice for someone like me, then I could leave my laptop in hibernate in class til I need it, rather than keeping it awake the full class and possibly only needing it for 10 mins, but I can't afford the minute long resume time when I start to need it.

 

I'd imagine it'd be a lot faster under XP as well. What happens is just that the OS dumps a bunch of data to the HD. And the HD will obviously put it in the flash ram first, because that's fastest, and then just push it to the "real" HD as needed. So most of your hibernate data would end up on flash in any case.

 

Well if a hybrid hard drive has a faster transfer rate than a regular hard drive, then it will be faster in Windows XP. I think that's pretty simple.

 

From what I understand Vista has a new feature called Ready Boost. It caches frequently accessed program files and DLL's, for faster access. Per Microsoft, a hard drive can handle 100 to 200 requests a second. Flash memory can accomodate 5000 requests a second.

Bad news: XP WILL NOT be able to take advantage of any Hybrid HD.

Good News: You dont need a hybrid HD to use Ready Boost in Vista. It will utilize an external flash drive card or thumb type device!

 

Again, define "take advantage of".

The harddrive will almost certainly provide a decent performance boost all by itself, without requiring explicit OS support. If the harddrive manufacturers did anything else, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
As ChangFest said above, if the hybrid harddrive is able to transfer a file faster, it will do so, regardless of the name of the OS.

The only difference lies in which files the OS asks to transfer, and when it does so. Vista might be more willing to cache files to the HD on hybrid disks, because it knows they can be retrieved quickly again

 

Pay attention: The flash memory portion of a hybrid drive works independently from the hard drive itself. Software decides what to write to the cache, and what to the drive. No Vista, no USE OF (read "take advantage of) the flash memory. The hybrid hard drive itself has no advertised speed, access, throughput, or transfer advantage over an otherwise identical non-hybrid drive w/o the flash memory.

 

Really? Where have you found that information?

 

Why is that so hard to believe? I know I've read it too, but it was months ago when I first heard of the hybrid drives, I couldn't tell you where I read it, but I know I did.

 

I'm not saying it's hard to believe (although I think it's an odd thing to do for the HD manufacturers. Would make more sense for them to make the flash layer transparent to the OS, like the current HD buffers, at least when running on an OS that doesn't take advantage of it explicitly).

I just want to read the info myself.

 

A Link to some hardware news feeds, you will be able to keep up w/ latest tech stuff. I get PC Mag feeds from ZIffDavis etc, read the stuff of interest, has been a bit on Hybrid HD .

Advertising gets us to want stuff we really do not have to have. USA mines the world & fills the landfills. >Tech good, but not @ environment expense!