I don't want to rain on the parade, but I am disappointed. I was hoping VISTA would accomodate gigabytes of upgradeable temporary storage (flash) on the motherboard. I am no engineer, but is the hard drive the best place to put the storage?

both Office 2007 Beta 2 and Windows Vista Beta 2 will make their official debut and be available for download to the general public.

This is the only part of the article that interests me. I'm literally jumping anxious for these puppies to totally kill my Easynews account limits.

Of course, the jumping part may be the 'Bou talking. I moosed it today. (Mmmmm...four shots of ever-lovin' espresso, baby...)

I have Giganews, unlimited for 25 bucks.. how much are you paying? I get 8 concurrent connections also, even though I only use 5 due to my ISP connection.

... wait a minute, are we advocating piracy?

Why are either of you worried? it's a public beta and will be downloadable via http?

Oh, we aren't worried... We like to brag about our newsgroup prowess :)

8 connections, 20GB a month with rollover, $9.98 per month.

There are plenty of Legal and Legitimate uses for the usenet. The *vast* majority of groups are legitimate. It is the "binaries" groups that spread Piracy, although technically, you could post binary files to *any* unmoderated newsgroup.

Hmmm...

Use a slammed MS server that we'll be lucky to get 20K.sec out of (if we can connect)...

-or-

Use a download manager, 8 threads, and get ~400k/sec, guaranteed.

Not a very tough descision, my friend.

This is the future, Windows Vista has support for using mass storage devices for faster boot up and increased performance, it seems that this may be able to be used in the same way. Ownage!

Yeah, finally a post that actually gives me some info about Vista that I actually find promissing..

doesn't the magnetic field mess up / erase flash memory? since a harddrive uses one hrmm..

You are getting your urban legend and technology messed up with your early learning of computer disks.

Disks, like floppys COULD be adversely affected by a magnet. It may mess up just enough bytes to ruin the data. If you have a powerful enough magnet, I suppose it could erase the disc also.

The hard drive, utilizes magnetic medium, but its encased in a metal housing, I doubt a wave of a magnet would do it much harm.. But I wouldn't go trying it.

The Flash technology uses an electronic medium to store the data in a eeprom (I think) type of medium, and the data is written not on a platter, but a purely solid state non-volatile state. I don't think a magnet would affect it much..

ALL technology can break down at some point, tape, disk, even CD's are subject to a limited life. CD's can typically last about 2-3 years, but not much longer than 5..

So even if you keep data away from magnet, interference, if you don't "massage the data" every once in a while, it will eventually decay.

Massaging the data was the main problem they have with development of Flash memory technology. Or, trying to have a self powering/massaging module that will keep your stored memory for a long enough period until you turn the power on again. They finally have a decent working model of that for use with a large enough capacity to be competitive with HDs. And since the Japanese have finally lowered memory prices enough, both volatile and non-volatile, plus the increase in the amount of storage, the hybrid drives are coming to market.

Now, if you have two Tesla coils arcing between each other with in your case, there is a better risk of magnetic interference, assuming you have upped the amperage on the bolts' power. Though, you could implement a nice Tesla coil arc of, say, 100 mA and be half safe, while still impressing your friends with your customized case.

Now, I think its in Arizona they are trying to build massive sized Tesla coils to show the potential of wireless power transmission. That's the future, I tell ya.

Note: Actually it's Neveada. You can find more here:
LIGHTNING ON DEMAND - www.lod.org

I think it's very promising. It's the next best thing to attempting to build a 500gb flash drive. I just wish the flash on the drive was big enough to fit as much of the entire OS as possible completely - so, 2gb dedicated to OS and system files only and then the other 2gb dedicated to making the drive fast as sh^t. Now you're probably thinking, my XP windows is 2-3-4gb in size....you don't want it to load everything in the windows directory, just what you need for bootup and system drivers. This would make booting almost instantaneous, as well as plug n' play would be, plug and play now...not plug and play in 30s or 2mins. The fact that it's a dedicated 2gb means that nothing would be overwritten essentially, just added. So, you change your video card from ATI X1600 to Nvidia 7800, you remove the driver and tell windows to 'remove driver from flash'....you know, something like this....(and yes, I know it's Vista, but I'm speaking in terms of now).

I think this is a total breakthrough and completely ready to go places.

Hardcore gaming geeks have been buying IDE->Flash port convertors and using 512MB flash maindrives for a few years now. The way they seem to be implementing this, they'll skip over the negatives of Flash Memory(like its sustained transfer rate for video editting and stuff).

Someone took it as a challenge to built the smallest gaming machine. Their WinXP is apparently 50mb when installed on disk, and it's surprisingly feature-filled for such a small installation...

What are your sources for this information (all of what you have posted about)?

The executables alone are bigger than 50 meg, that is impossible to have such a small WinXP footprint.

I want to see the documentation to prove this as well....

Sadly the pagefile will kill flash devices. It's constantly being written/read from and on flash mem it's perf isn't acceptable quite yet.

I don't use page files.... kill certain services, tweak the registry to "utilize ram before paging" and you are good.

A Pagefile isn't required.. unless you run server...

To RootWebGod & rijp:
http://www.msfn.org/boar...ST&f=34&t=55003
http://www.microwinx.com/

If you've got a spare computer lying around and own XP...you can try it yourself.

Pagefile can be completely disabled on XP, though Windows 2000 isn't so fortunate.

If it works then I'll be happy as heck. I heard about this a while back but heard some negative things about it. Perhaps if seagate backs it I will be convinced.

A fantastic idea, but I really thought they'd be starting with bigger caches than that. Still, 256MB should provide a noticeable improvement. Although flash read/write speeds aren't particularly high, the seek-times should help system performance considerably.

Not sure I understand the need for a particular version of Windows (or any other os for that matter) to 'support' these drives. Why can't the drives be built to take care of everythinbg themselves, totally transparently ? That way they just appear to the outside world as a normal drive, that just happens to perform blazingly fast much of the time.

*The drive will also be less prone to break down, he added. Boot-up time is also decreased, because applications can be retrieved from much speedier flash memory, which takes only a few milliseconds. Although slower, the drives can store more data for less money.

The flash chips will perform a couple of different functions. When consumers write a word-processing document, the data will go straight to flash. When the flash chips are almost full, the drive will wake up and take the data. Some PC makers will also likely embed media or music players along with other commonly used applications to ensure that boot time will be somewhat rapid.*

*Microsoft's hybrid hard disk design features a non-volatile (NV) cache added to the hard drive to store frequently used sectors for fast boot and resume times. M-Systems's Director of Technical Marketing, Esther Spanjer, notes that 90% of users, on average, use only 10% of operating system sectors. By duplicating the most commonly used data onto the NV cache, you can minimize dependency on the hard drive for frequently accessed sectors and speed up performance. A cache size of at least 128MB is recommended, but drive manufacturers could conceivably incorporate caches as large as 4GB or more to store critical system data like registry or favorites info. Microsoft's hybrid drive design is currently supported only in Vista, but wider adoption is expected as standardization of the platform expands.*

*Intel's "Robson" cache takes a different approach, placing the NV cache directly onto the motherboard. With the entire operating system loaded onto flash memory, booting can occur directly from the cache. Once again, a minimum 128MB cache is recommended, but 2GB to 4GB sizes could provide more flexibibility*

http://www.extremetech.c...2/0,1697,1902072,00.asp

*An IDEMA-sponsored committee found that increasing the standard sector size to 4096 bytes would provide a sufficient platform for future high-areal density drives. This larger 4K standard would allow ECC to maintain the same bit error rate (BER) without sacrificing signal to noise ratio (SNR) . Longer sectors decrease the per-sector overhead among larger swaths of data, and bit space is used more efficiently. With larger 4K sectors, drives will benefit with not only enhanced reliability and tolerance, but greater capacity as well.

The migration from 512B to 4K sectory sizes will require systematic changes that will occur over time. Production of 4K sector drives is expected to start in 2007, but a transition period will follow for a number of years after as the market moves to standardize on the 4K native block size drives. Operating systems like Windows XP, for example, will still need to support 512B emulation for the continued function of legacy drives. Vista, scheduled for release in 2006, will take another 2-3 years before becoming a mainstream OS.*

http://www.extremetech.c...2/0,1697,1902074,00.asp

256MB.. isn't that a bit small.. I can buy a 4G SD chip for $94 today.. 1G for $25.. 256MB USB FREE..

Yes, it may seem small for a user installable update, but when they manufactured the device, which takes years, it may have taken into account devices availalbe, cost effective for that time...

Yeah you can upgrade it.. or maybe this will be a reason to upgrade to larger drivers later, because of the bigger cache..

And when talking about hard drive, we are talking ns times, not minutes saving data.. so it probably don't need a 250 meg buffer for every long.. only long enough to get the bytes it needs, and then read/write to the hard drive.

Current drive buffers are 8 meg cache, so 250 is a big increase, even when it isn't as big as a 4 gig flash drive, its hundreds of times bigger.

I would like to see some more specs on this.. to get details on how the cache works maybe its changed as well, and drives have faster acess times, and therefore the need to hold data longer isn't necessary...

256MB is *more* than sufficient for cache.

This isn't a storage medium, it's a transfer medium.

*Technically speaking, hard drives already come with flash inside them, said Barnetson, but not enough to store applications or data.

The hybrid drives will be marketed under the ReadyDrive moniker, which is a Microsoft brand name. Notebook specification sheets thus will likely say something like "100GB drive enhanced with Windows Ready Drive."

Samsung is also working with Microsoft on ReadyBoost. In ReadyBoost (also known as EMD), a flash memory key stuck into a computer can act as supplemental main memory. With this technology, it will be easier to load Windows Vista, the upcoming update of the operating system, onto current computers. Vista will require more memory than Windows XP. One problem that Microsoft has had in the past is that consumers don't upgrade the operating systems on their existing computers much, because a software upgrade would entail a hardware upgrade.*

Still a transfer medium.

In your post they compare it more to RAM, than to cache, almost.

This just isn't for me. Looks like it might be a huge hit in the 'Gaming Enthusiast' niche, though.

*What do you do if you operate an MMORPG with the world's largest game universe and users start to complain that things are getting sluggish?

You're already running 150 IBM Blade servers but at peak times - over 15,000 simultaneous players - frequently accessed game features take a painful 20 seconds to load.

This was the challenge faced by the sysadmins at EVE Online recently. Even with ninja-fast RAID arrays, it was diagnosed that the database servers suffered from serious storage bottlenecks.

RAID works best when serving large chunks of data; EVE Online's busy servers were clogged up serving tiny pieces of data. Typical disk access times are 2-5ms (milliseconds, or thousandths/sec) and what was needed was a faster disk access time of 20-50µs (microseconds, or millionths/sec).

You can decrease a traditional hard drive's access time by increasing the rotational speed - the Western Digital Raptor drives are a bit-tech favourite because of their 10,000 RPM speed, and Seagate's Cheetah SCSI drives hit 15,000 RPM. However, there is a limit to how fast you can spin the platters before extreme forces start to creep in and spoil your fun.

The solution, then, is truly 21st Century and very, very cool: a 64GB Solid State RamSan-400 array from Texas Memory Systems. Rather than rotating platters, Solid State Disks (SSD) uses memory chips for storage and s***s the bottleneck back to waiting for the user to ask it to do something.

Forget SATA-II and even Ultra-320 SCSI: the RamSan-400 hooks up via a 4GB Fibre Channel interface and has 3000 MB/s random sustained external throughput. That's three gigabytes per second. Sustained. Importantly for EVE Online, it can also handle 400,000 I/Os per second, with a latency of less than 15µs. "We did consider upgrading to faster disks, but the specs for the RamSan were so insane that we had to look into it", said Jörundur Matthíasson, Database Manager for developer, CCP Games.

Within four days of installation, EVE Online set a new Peak Concurrent Player record with 17,032 playing at the same time, and the infrastructure is designed to scale up to 25,000 players simultaneously zooming around the one, massive game world. By switching to SSD, the EVE servers are now experiencing a 4000% increase in performance.*

I don't know about you, but this make my disk hard!

Actually, 16MB caches have been around for more than a year. 16*8=128. A cache "dozens" of times larger, but not "hundreds".

Pah!...Why get a Ram-San-400 when you can get 8 of them? ;)

http://www.superssd.com/.../tera-ramsan/indexb.htm

Ooh...here comes the 200,000 players.

RAID works best when serving large chunks of data; EVE Online's busy servers were clogged up serving tiny pieces of data

Sounds to me like they left too much up to the server and not enough up to the client to me...

*shrug*

Err...you didn't really read what he posted did you. The problem was 17,000+ players all accessing the database many times for small bits of data. That could mean accessing the market, a loot can, thier hangar, wallet, corp info, eve-mail, factories or any number of other small things that all need to be server side. In MMO's you never trust data on the client side, unless you don't care about people using hacks/exploits.

I dunno if I'd ever use one of these.

It seems like they are just an accident waiting to happen.

As I undertsand it: These drives write to NAND first, and then write to the platter when full, or the Data on NAND is not needed anymore.

Kind of like delayed-write, but built into the drives.

Now... I disable delayed-write on *all* the PCs I use regularly. Call it paranoia. I don't want the data I've saved being lost when the computer loses power just because the drive had chosen not to write it to the disk quite yet.

This is definately not a tech I am eagerly awaiting. I hope they do not *ever* plan on adding this functionality to server disks. At the very least I hope it can be disabled with a jumper.

NAND is non volatile, just like the magnetic platter. What makes you think a power outage would cause data loss? If you save a document it will first be saved in the flash memory. If you turn off the power and turn it back on it's still there. The hard drive only has to realise as it starts up that there's still unwritten memory in the flash memory area and write it to the disk.

If this happens, then this is nothing more then using the flash memory as your main hard drive, and the platter drive being used for archiving infrequently used data (especially as the flash gets bigger).

If you turn off the power and turn it back on it's still there.

So we would assume....

They didn't say, and I haven't seen any specifics. The comment above was based on first impressions (I really hadn't heard much about this until now.)

So...

1.) Will the Hard Drives store only whole data and no fragments of code, or snippets of files?

2.) Will the hard drive be smart enough to save the data from NAND when power is restored? Will it depend on the OS/Driver? Will it do it *at all*?

Also...what happens after the NAND dies? Hard Drives last many years...NAND used as cache...not so much.

Just doesn't seem like the best idea for me. (Of course, I rate data integrity well above speed.) I am sure the benefits of speed will far outweigh my concerns for many laptop users.

*Samsung's hybrid drives, which work with Microsoft's Vista, will come in a variety of capacities when they appear in computers next year. The drives, though, will contain either 128MB or 256MB of Samsung's OneNAND flash memory. OneNAND is much faster than typical NAND memory.*

*1.) Will the Hard Drives store only whole data and no fragments of code, or snippets of files?*

Its a flash drive. From what I have been reading, it will replace the spinning hard drive as much as possible, so that data is stored on flash as you need it. Vista is a ready drive, that will let you load the OS, so theorhetically it will boot up faster (remains to be seen on how this will work)

*2.) Will the hard drive be smart enough to save the data from NAND when power is restored? Will it depend on the OS/Driver? Will it do it *at all*?*

Yes, the technology is built in. So it will be there, and requires no external support. Its transparent to the OS, except for a special case where a driver can utilize the feature of the hard drive.

Its not cache per-se it's flash, they are making the distinction, so I think they are planning to make this a long term replacement.

It is a good point how does flash stand up under continued use? I don't think the world is ready to commit servers to this technology yet...

And integrity is a concern, and it should be even for laptop users, ESPECIALLY for laptop users, considering they travel (or that is the point of a laptop). you wouldn't want to have any significant downtime when you are on the road..

I suppose I will have to wait and see how it stands up to the ultimate tests...

Time, and Use.

I'll not be an early adopter of this tech, to be sure. While I will be the first to admit I simply cannot *survive* without my 1GB U3 Drive, and am looking to go larger, I am simply not ready to commit to this as anything beyond a handy little tool.

I am looking forward to it.. I love testing new technology.. I don't mind being the guinea pig.

I wouldn't worry so much about delayed-write as I would about the flash memory running out of writes long before the HDD would've normally died.

Why build these into hard drives anyway, why create slots on motherboards so you can upgrade your "ATA cache"?

That's why they're using NAND flash - it's actually more reliable than our current magnetic HDDs. I can only assume that's why they're starting small too - 256MB isn't particularly big, given you can buy 1GB MicroSD cards that are smaller than the current memory chips on HDDs.

If your data was important to you, you would be using an UPS anyway. Servers more so - caching is critical for them, and anyone who runs a server *must* have it on an UPS. You'd be a fool not to.

Hell, we regularly sell UPSs to home users, who are worried about losing data, blowing PSUs or suffering other power-related PC damage. It's not like the devices are expensive.

See above, PC Tool. NAND has already been proven as more reliable than our current magnetic HDDs.

I'll look at the pricetag first and then decide. :P

256MB!? That's so low - I often write more data than that in under a minute! This thing would be spinning up 20 or 30 times per hour. :/

I hope they later offer HHD's with dual 1GB flash chips in sort of a RAID-0 fashion, for that extra speed. ;)

Point me to the docs, man. Not offense, but I'd rather see technical specs than some guy I don't know 'claiming' they're more reliable.

lmao...

Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of those??

*grin* Sorry, couldn't resist.

and you're sooo missing the point..