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Samsung Q30 with 80GB/256MB MH80 Series Hybrid HDD
Samsung's Q3 notebook gets an 80GB/256MB hybrid hard disk drive

Flash solid-state drives (SSDs) are poised to make a big impact on the mobile PC market within the next few years. SSDs are faster, lighter, use less power, more shock resistant and are completely silent in comparison to traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). The only thing that is truly holding back SSDs from widespread adoption is their prohibitive costs for many consumer mobile platforms.

Hybrid HDDs look to bridge the gap by including small amounts of flash memory onto a traditional HDD. "The hard drive industry is continuously looking for ways to bring greater value to the systems in which our technology resides and to those who use them," said Joni Clark, chairperson for the Hybrid Storage Alliance in January. "Adding non-volatile memory to the hard drive brings about a host of mobility benefits that increases the value users want in notebook PCs -- longer battery life, faster response, greater system durability."

Samsung announced back in early March that it had begun shipping its new MH80 Series hybrid HDDs which are available in capacities of 80GB, 120GB and 160GB. These drives also come equipped with either 128MB or 256MB of onboard flash memory.

Samsung has now announced its Q30 15.4" notebook will feature the MH80 hybrid hard drives (256MB flash). Internal testing has shown then when compared to a HDD, the hybrid-equipped Q30 has 26% faster writes, 71% faster reads, 30% lower boot times and a 10% increase in battery life.

Besides the 80GB MH80 hybrid HDD, the Q30 also packs a 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 processor, 15.4" WXGA screen, NVIDIA GeForce 7400 mobile GPU with 256MB of RAM and a Super-multi dual-layer DVD writer.

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More solid state space for games & control
By GrandMareg on 4/23/2007 9:58:20 AM , Rating: 2
Lets say I wanted to load a complete game onto the solid state portion of the HD for quicker load times manually. Is it possible to configure it so I have complete control over what goes in and what doesn't? Also, would I be able to get a larger capacity easily?

Since I wouldn't be changing what's in that portion of storage often I have no worries about its life span.




RE: More solid state space for games & control
By SpaceRanger on 4/23/2007 10:10:17 AM , Rating: 2
256MB isn't enough for a lot of todays games. I'd like to see hybrid drives with 1-2GB SSD portions. This way you could put something significant in that space, like the pagefile.

This is a step in the right direction most definately though..


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By retrospooty on 4/23/2007 10:22:46 AM , Rating: 2
Agreed. The pagefile would be great... I think the end goal is to have the whole OS in that partition.


By LogicallyGenius on 4/24/2007 8:28:30 AM , Rating: 2
All the frequently accessed Operating System files should be stored on ultra fast Flash Disks and the Page files should be placed on the fastest areas of the hard disk, ie. on the edge of each disk platter.

The remaining FlashDisk should be used as hard disk cache.

And while shutting down the hibernation file should be place on the Flash disk.


By TomZ on 4/23/2007 11:54:01 AM , Rating: 2
I disagree. Ideally, you don't want the pagefile on the other side of an ATA interface. Instead, you should have more RAM and eliminate the pagefile entirely, and/or you should put the flash into the CPU's local address space so it can be accessed faster.

Hybrid hard drives are kind of a stopgap measure - they offer no benefit relative to adding flash onto the CPU's local bus, except that existing hardware designs don't have to be changed to support it. In the longer-term, chipsets and motherboards can be modified to accomodate flash memory directly, and reading from this memory is orders of magnitude faster than through an ATA interface.


By wetwareinterface on 4/23/2007 10:15:41 AM , Rating: 2
well on a desktop with a free parallel ata cable end you could get an ata to compact flash adapter (around $12) and a good high speed 1Gb CF card from someone like sandisk ($70) and completely control the data on the flash drive as it would show up as just another hard drive. for small file i/o this is faster than a hard drive but for large streaming files like an HD movie or copying data the hard drive would be faster.

in this particualr drive i believe the flash is used out of your control as extra hard drive i/o cache and by vista to speed up program loading. so no probably not gonna be able to tell the hard drive to only cache game maps etc...

the ghetto way though and you could spend around $400. and use a good raid 5 or raid 0+1 adapter that allows raid 0 spanning across both pata channels you find used on evil bay and speed up the deficiencies in flash tech with raid and get the best of both worlds. imagine sustaind throughput at the limits of 133mhz pata with 4 high speed flash cards with 4 or 8 Gb storage if you use 1 or 2 GB cards and 16 Gb with 4 GB cards. you could place your os and a few other apps on this setup and have silent operation from the hard drives and extreme speed in everyday usage and a couple large sata drives for data and extra non-everyday programs.


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By TomZ on 4/23/2007 10:18:56 AM , Rating: 2
This might be possible in theory, but the first implementation in Vista doesn't allow the user that type of control. It is controlled by the OS to meet the goal of faster OS boots as the article implies.

I could imagine third-party utilities that access the new ATA-8 commands to lock certain applications into the HDD flash. But as the other poster noted, 256MB isn't really that much compared to some applications.


By TomZ on 4/23/2007 10:23:12 AM , Rating: 2
One more thing: Also, one of the purposes of hybrid HDDs is to be able to fetch data while the HDD is not spinning. This gives two benefits:

1. Ability to start to load the OS while the drive is still initializing/spinning up

2. Ability to load and save application data while the drive is not spinning, for battery savings

If you're loading a game, the HDD is probably already spinning, which removes most of the benefits of using the flash. Since the data still has to go through the ATA interface, flash data transfer rates are in the same order of magnitude compared with transfer to/from the magnetic media.


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By Moishe on 4/23/2007 11:00:25 AM , Rating: 2
I would hope they would never open up that portion to complete user control. I think the effectiveness of the hybrid HDD lies in the OS being able to properly use the flash portion as a large L2 cache. A user would probably actually harm performance. I do think however that there should be some sort of tweaking interface so that the user could say "prefer games" or "prefer office use".

Funny thing is the biggest problem I have with the game I play the most (BF2142) is that the stupid intro movies cannot be skipped. My load times are shorter than having to watch those clips! Pretty annoying :)


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By TomZ on 4/23/2007 11:13:08 AM , Rating: 2
If the user doesn't care for the boot time speedup and battery savings, then why not let them do what they want with the HDD flash?

I agree that it might not be a good approach for Microsoft to put that into Vista, but I could imagine a third-party utility to do the same for this type of niche user.


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By Moishe on 4/23/2007 2:25:55 PM , Rating: 2
While I agree with you that it could be useful, it seems like a very niche market. Who wouldn't want faster boots and lower power usage?


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By TomZ on 4/23/2007 2:56:11 PM , Rating: 2
People who use sleep mode, and people who leave their computers on all the time, don't care about boot time. For example, I "boot" the OS on my machines maybe once a month at most.

I think that most people don't care about HDD power consumption at all, since it is a relatively small contribution to the total for most computers - all desktops and many laptops. Even for laptops, they are plugged into AC power most of the time. That leaves only the times they are truly mobile when HDD power becomes a concern for laptops.

Maybe the desire to use the hybrid HDD in this way is a niche, but in my view, the intended use benefit for hybrid HDDs is pretty minor overall.


By shaggeo68 on 4/23/2007 3:55:52 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
For example, I "boot" the OS on my machines maybe once a month at most.


Then obviously this solution is not targeted to your needs.
The average laptop user does power the thing down. Also,
Windows Vista puts a machine that is asleep into hibernate
mode after a bit(I think it's when batteries are low). So
you will see spin-up benefit then.

Also, you won't see someone with a UMPC plugged in wherever they go...they bought it for its mobility, no sense in having to be plugged in all the time.

This is certainly an intermediate product bridging the gap between HDD and SSD until SSD price comes down, however it does show a significant improvement on status quo (see article for statistics).

If user X wants a highly mobile laptop that he/she won't have to plug in every 4 hours, they'll get as much solid state storage as they can afford. And if they can't afford 100% SSD, this is a nice(cheaper) compromise.


RE: More solid state space for games & control
By SexyK on 4/23/2007 2:23:08 PM , Rating: 3
If you delete or rename the video files you don't have to watch them any longer. They are in the bf2142 directory under mods/bf2142/Movies. Rename all 5 of the .bik files and you no longer have to watch the intro movies (change one character and it will work).


By Moishe on 4/23/2007 2:24:47 PM , Rating: 2
sweet thanks I'll try that...


By TravisO on 4/24/2007 9:55:19 AM , Rating: 2
No you have no control, the SSD is used as a buffer that the HD writes to and reads from, and keeps data sticky that is being re-read often.


clarify
By MGSsancho on 4/23/2007 9:57:17 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
Internal testing has shown then when compared to a HDD, the hybrid-equipped Q30 has 26% faster writes, 71% faster reads, 30% lower boot times, 32% lower boot times and a 10% increase in battery life.

Lower boot times? I do not want to be a grammar Nazi because I am not. But I am a bit confused here.




RE: clarify
By SpaceRanger on 4/23/2007 10:11:56 AM , Rating: 2
Lower boot times is equal to a shorter amount of time spent booting the operating system.

a 30% decrease in OS boot time is nice..


RE: clarify
By MGSsancho on 4/23/2007 10:35:22 AM , Rating: 2
not that. it says lower boot times twice with different numbers each time


RE: clarify
By shaggeo68 on 4/23/2007 3:57:51 PM , Rating: 2
they must have fixed it now...only says 30%


What I need in a HDD
By EntreHoras on 4/23/2007 10:39:13 AM , Rating: 2
This family of Hybrid HDDs spins at 5,400 RPM.

I'd like one to spins at 7,200 RPM and has 2GB of flash memory.