Apple and LG plan Flash Laptops

Lucas123 writes "An article in Computerworld states that Apple and LG each plan to launch new laptops — one that's supposed to ship this month — with hybrid disk drives. The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk, kicking in data that can be cached like portions of the operating system, which can make for much faster boot up and resume times."

Sweet

[danpsmith (922127)]

Let me be the first to say:

<borat>Nice</borat>

Re:We've already got one!

[the darn (624240)]

You have just missed a Monty Python reference. Please turn in your Slashdot card, as well as any and all other nerd paraphernalia.

drives are like hybrid cars

[1u3hr (530656)]

NO, they're NOT "like hybrid cars". Stop it with the inane car analogies.

The word "hybrid" has a meaning outside automobiles. Originally it was a biological term.

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[Crazy Man on Fire (153457)]

The disk dive is a hybrid. It combines a standard platter-based drive with flash memory to hold the stuff used to boot up. This is supposed to improve boot speed.

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[MightyYar (622222)]

I agree that car analogies often are incomplete, but this is hardly a bad one. You take an electric car and a gasoline-powered car and do an engineering mash-up and you get a car with many of the advantages of a gasoline car (capacity, cost) and many of the advantages of an electric (power consumption, throttle response). You take a platter-based hard drive and a flash-based drive and do an engineering mash-up and you get a drive with many of the advantages of a platter-based hard drive (capacity, cost) and many of the advantages of a flash-based drive (power consumption, latency).

It's actually not a bad analogy.

The only thing stranger than all of the car analogies is the impassioned resistance that they invoke.

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[drinkypoo (153816)]

The only thing stranger than all of the car analogies is the impassioned resistance that they invoke.

Would you like it if car people make idiotic computer analogies all the time?

"Well, I increased the CFMs of my carburetor, which is like doubling your ram. And then I added a second fuel tank, which is like adding another hard disk."

But seriously the reason that people like me resist it so strongly is that most of them are just fucking stupid. This one is less stupid than most but it's still not a very good fit. In fact, it's not all that analogous which is why I resist the analogy. But I didn't rail against it for the reason that you state; this is probably one of the best car analogies that's been used on slashdot recently :)

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[operagost (62405)]

Ooh! Let me try...

I upgraded to Vista, which is like kicking myself in the balls.
I started playing World of Warcraft, which is like smoking crack (but less socially acceptable).

Re:drives are like hybrid cars

[MightyYar (622222)]

Actually, that was not my argument at all. I was saying that the things improved by a "hybridizing" a car are very closely analogous to the things improved by "hybridizing" a hard drive, no matter what the definition of hybrid is:

• fuel capacity <-> hard disk capacity
• cost <-> cost
• power consumption <-> fuel efficiency
• throttle response <-> latency

I agree that car analogies can be forced and bad, but this one is actually pretty good.

Add more ram and make smarter bootup sequences

[tomstdenis (446163)]

Adding more ram for a disk cache is a simpler (and often lower power) solution to speed up disk activity. Writing to flash takes power, leaving the flash on [so you can access it] takes power. But you can't use flash as random access memory.

Putting the laptop in suspend mode throughout the day (instead of hibernate or off) can also lighten the load on the disk/battery. Bonus points would be for flushing the read cache, compressing the in use memory and turning off as many memory banks as possible during suspend. (I know that's not trivial hence the bonus points).

Tom

Re:Add more ram and make smarter bootup sequences

[Maddog Batty (112434)]

Adding more ram for a disk cache is a simpler (and often lower power) solution to speed up disk activity.
Not if your hard drive is switched off (remember this is laptops we are talking about). It takes quite a while and a lot of power for a hard drive to spin up. You can get data from a flash chip within micro secs of switching it on.

Writing to flash takes power, leaving the flash on [so you can access it] takes power.
The whole point with flash is that you do not need to leave it on. Once the data is written to it, you can switch it off until the data is needed. RAM needs to have some power (though not much when in standby) to keep the data in it active.

hybrid

[mastershake_phd (1050150)]

The new drives are like hybrid cars

So they get 50mpg?

Question

[stratjakt (596332)]

Does the flash inside these things die after however-many thousands of writes?

It sounds to me like the life expentancy of one of these would be greatly diminished over a conventional HDD.

Has flash technology advanced to the point that the limited write cycle thing isn't an issue, or do they just expect you to replace it every few months to a year (depending on how much you use it)?

Re:Question

[forkazoo (138186)]

Does the flash inside these things die after however-many thousands of writes?

It sounds to me like the life expentancy of one of these would be greatly diminished over a conventional HDD.

Yes, they do eventually die. No, they won't die dramatically younger than a hard drive. Modern flash uses wear-levelling algorithms, so that no particular bad block will kill the whole flash drive. It'll just make a small block inaccessible when it finally dies, which won't happen very often. OTOH, when a head decides to dig into your constantly spinning mechanical platter and make a noise that makes you feel sick... Well, there just isn't any algorithm fix for that.

Read Cache is not the point!

[samael (12612)]

The point is that it can turn off the hard drive while you're working away, until the flash cache is full, and then turn it on long enough to dump the contents. This should save a lot of battery power.

Rumors, Analysts, and Apple

[maggard (5579)]

First, rumor has it is all this is. An analyst put it in a report and everyone is passing it on a valid. Especially with Apple folks should know that rumors & speculation are just that.

Next it was widely reported a few years ago when Apple made a huuuge futures purchase on flash memory getting an excellent price and assuring their supply. Someone more motivated then I can crunch the numbers but even with however many million iPods sold I'm guessing Apple still has flash memory to play with and a decent price.

Then there's the non-US market. Yes, Americans want 21" screens, 6 speakers, 200 GB hard drives, and accept 30 minute battery life from their portables (oftentimes too big even for American laps). The rest of the world typically wants really small, really light, just enough computing enough power for on-the-road use, and 12 hour battery life. Thus an ultraportable will fill a huge hole in the Apple product line, one many posters to /. may not even be fully aware of.

With all of that in mind do I expect Apple will come out with some sort of clever new device that is small, robust, and runs for longer then others on the market? I wouldn't be surprised. Apple has innovated time & time again, particularly on laptops, and part of their market is remarkably price-insensitive (I've rarely heard "Get me the best Dell, whatever the price!", I've heard that regularly about Macs.) What starts at the top often soon moves down.

Finally, Apple still does largely design their own motherboards, owns their own OS, can implement a new technology without needing to coordinate it among many parties. But do I think J. Random Analyst is going to be all that insightful about Apple's hardware future? Not particularly, he's just an excuse to post another story about everyone's favorite conundrum.

Re:OK Sure

[tak amalak (55584)]

Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?

Re:OK Sure

[FSWKU (551325)]

Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?

I think that term is reserved for the ones already using Sony batteries.

Re:OK Sure

[drinkypoo (153816)]

Oh, and can I be the first to coin the term "Flashtops"?

No. [eweek.com]

Re:OK Sure

[TheNetAvenger (624455)]

There has been so much speculation, but where's the proof? It'll have to run a slim OS like the iPhone to work well on flash due to the high rate of paging MacOS does.


I won't comment on OSX's paging, other than it needs a bit of refining as it tends to be over agressive.

However, I think Apple's initial plans are to use the Flash on these drives as more of a Read area for portions of OSX that are accessed at startup or frequently.

As for the lifespan of Flash, if the device or OS is smart enough to not use the same bits over and over and distributes the writes intelligently(Since areas of Flash are fairly equal in speed), then the lower end bits won't get any more use than the top end of the cache, and in theory the flash should last as long as the HD platters. There are also techniques to extend Flash usage by what bits are used and when, so the limited writes are extended beyond just linear write lifespans of the Flash.

Remember the HD Mfrs are not stupid about caching or Flash limits, so this is stuff that people a lot smarter than the average SlashDot reader has already considered and worked around.

Re:OK Sure

[Trailer Trash (60756)]

....people a lot smarter than the average SlashDot reader....

I hear they're also taller than the average midget...

Mac ROM returneth?

[rdarden (87568)]

However, I think Apple's initial plans are to use the Flash on these drives as more of a Read area for portions of OSX that are accessed at startup or frequently.

Not unlike the old days when some of the core OS functionality was stored in a custom Mac ROM. Funny how things are cyclical.

Re:Mac ROM returneth?

[andreyw (798182)]

Except ROM is slow, "Read-Only", and needs a special interface (if any at all.... but if you wish to use block device abstractions, say hello MTD) while what Apple is doing will just be a logical extension of their already present boot cache mechanisms.

So - 'no'.

Re:What "resume" time?

[GiovanniZero (1006365)]

Actually, OS X is superior when it comes to sleep. Because Mac's have a set amount of hardware so they can develop for their own platform and make sure everything is fine tuned and working well.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225106&cid=182 31650 [slashdot.org] ->This discussion talks about hardware differences and shows one of the reasons that Apple has superior stability.

Windows and even linux machines can have such a wide variety of hardware and all it takes is one bad driver to make sleep or suspend not work. Furthermore suspend2 for x86-64 doesn't come compiled in most distros of linux and you have to recompile the kernel to get it to work.

While your notebook may not have any problems with sleep it is probably the exception. Lots of windows boxes will sleep but when you bring them back up sound won't work or usb ports won't work. It's a pain.

Re:Miniature version of MacOS X?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746)]

If these disks make a MacBook use less battery power, great. But I don't see why the world needs a miniature version of MacOS X.

Back in the day, Apple used to ship Macs with a copy of pre-OS X, Mac OS on a ROM. It was basically unused, but it did have the advantage that if your hard drive went down or an extension to the OS was making your system unbootable, you could always boot from the ROM and at least do a hardware check to see if your problem was hardware or software related. Apple could re-introduce this feature using Flash memory, although I'm not convinced it is really worth their time.

Re:Warranty?

[jusdisgi (617863)]

The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk...

Oh...so that's how hybrid cars work...