Hybrid flash-magnetic drive

Found on Ars Technica on Monday, 25 April 2005
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MS and Samsung have jointly developed a hybrid hard drive (HHD) that uses a 1Gbit NAND flash memory as a read and write buffer. The drive caches data in the flash memory so that it can stop spinning for long periods of time, as the computer reads and writes to the flash instead of to the disk. When the drive isn't spinning, it uses less power, so this technology will be attractive for mobile hard drives. There's no word in any of the articles I've seen so far as to how flash memory's erasure endurance issues are addressed, if at all. From what I've read, NAND flash is good only for from 100,000 to 1 million writes, which doesn't seem like a lot to me if it's being used as a hard drive replacement.

I wonder about the possibility of making the flash buffer visible to applications, like Photoshop, for instance. It's possible that the OS could allow a certain amount of user-level and application-level management of the flash space, especially as that space grows bigger with drops in flash prices.

The idea is to make the cache big enough, because repeatedly spinning the HD up and down affects the mechanics more than constant spinning. I've been thinking of using flash cards before, but the limited writes kept me off so far. It could actually be neat to have several 2GB flash disks with an IDE adapter. Setting the IDE flash drive as boot device, you could switch your OS easily.