RSSSanDisk wants to hybridize your hard drive
by Tim Conneally
SanDisk has announced the upcoming availability of Vaulter, a solid state memory chip that will be able to turn standard HDDs into hybrid hard drives.
The flash-based PCI express module operates in parallel with the system's hard drive, with the duty of storing and launching the operating system and user-defined applications. By doing this, Vaulter relegates the hard drive to "cold storage," where the system can draw from only when needed.
The 0.9 draft of the ONFi 2.0 standard is set to be released in January 2008, roughly the same time as SanDisk will begin offering Vaulter to OEMs. It will initially be sold in 8GB and 16 GB sizes.
Earlier this year, Samsung released a complete hybrid hard drive which includes an 80/160GB 5400 rpm drive supplemented with 256MB of NAND flash. The drive, given the name FlashON, was made available not only to OEMs, but also consumers by means of an optional upgrade to Samsung's 15.4" R55 multimedia notebook. The whole system retails for $1923 USD.
Vaulter, however, is simply the solid state component awaiting partnership with a hard drive. Vista users may utilize the Windows ReadyDrive feature to facilitate integration of SanDisk's product, and it could conceivably be paired with a variety of hard drive brands.
SanDisk is betting that users will likely be more willing to hybridize their current drive setup than go out and buy a complete system, which will soon become a legacy anyway.
8 Comments
"80/160GB 5400 rpm drive supplemented with 256MB of NAND flash" for the facile price of 1923 USD.. thats insane..
Give us a 750 Gb or 1 Tb drive with 1-4 Gb flash memory.. for a reasonable price. Is that too much to ask ?
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I am so glad you read the article
and managed to quote, then skip then quote
the part that you skipped was where it mentioned a laptop that has an option of a flashon drive, the WHOLE system (that is laptop + Flashon drive) retails for 1923
a 160gb flashon drive costs about $230usd
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my bad I was skimming the text.
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This sounds great, but I must admit I'm disappointed that there's no mention of RAID.
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Raid is not handled by hard drives, it is a controller based or software based technology, why would they mention raid?
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Price?
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How many write cycles this NAND flash can endure?
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I don't know if that will be an issue. If the plan is to only put the OS on there - the majority of the traffic would be READ-ONLY. Things like the registry, config files, logs, etc - would go to your normal hard drive - but all of the files that only change on a limited basis would go on the NAND drive.
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