Hardddrive with integrated flash memory

This might be future if we are to believe what harddrive manufacturer Samsung and software developer Microsoft. They plan on creating a hybrid-harddrive that will except for teh regular platters also contain a flash memory for storage. The flash memory will act as a larger cache to minimize the usage of the actual harddrive. This will pull down power consumption, heat dissipation and prolong the life expectancy of the harddrives.

 

Microsoft’s next generation operating system Longhorn will fully support this technology and they’ve calculated that with a 64-128MB flash memory the operating system should manage for 10-15 minutes without accessing the harddrive.

“The upside to all this is that normal usage models show that average users don’t usually write more than 64MB every 10 minutes. This means that the average case may see zero writes hitting the hard drive for 10 minutes, and possibly more with the 128MB solution. Combined with the read cache built into Longhorn, we could see zero disk accesses for 10 to 15 minutes on a heavily utilized system once the OS and applications have initialized. This could mean very large thermal and power savings on notebook drives. Microsoft talked about dropping average drive power consumption over 50%.”

Samsung and Microsoft has been speaking about the new system at WinHEC and at Anandtech they’ve written a report on their plans.

:: Read more at Anandtech