Fast flash sidelines the hard disk

A flash hard drive costing around $100 can produce as much as a 50 percent improvement in system performance with the aid of new features in Vista, Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, according to Samsung.

The company is showing a 32Gbyte solid state drive (SSD) at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (Winhec) in Seattle. But Don Barneston, associate director of flash marketing at Samsung, said this is far too expensive for most people though it clearly had applications where in ruggedized computers in which a hard drive is too fragile.

‘Eventually all drives will be solid state but at the moment flash is just too expensive,’ he said. ‘But if you think about it you don’t need 32Gbytes to get most of the benefits.’

Barneston showed an new Alienware notebook containing both a standard hard drive and a Samsung 4GB solid-state drive, with a fast Serial ATA interface, that uses a Vista feature called Super Fetch that can use any available non volatile memory, including USB drives, to speed up performance.

You could, of course, speed things up yourself by oading your applications in flash and you data on the slower hard drive. But Barneston said Super Fetch goes one better than by optimizing use of the flash by watching what you do.

‘If it knows that you usually play a particular game on Saturday morning it will load it ready for you.’

The system can also save power drain by minimizing use of the power-hungry hard drive.

A similar effect can be gained from hybrid drives, also being pioneered by Samsung, that pack both a hard disk and up to 250Mbtes (on current models) of solid-state memory.

This uses a Vista feature called Ready Drive, which was demonstrated in a keynote by Will Poole, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Market Expansion Group. It uses the solid-state memory as a super-cache, minimising use of the hard drive.

‘When it does that it's able to spin down that hard disk and keep it still, reducing the amount of power that's consumed, and extending battery life, said Poole’s assistant, Greg Graceffo.

He reckoned it could add thirty minutes to the time you could use a notebook between charge. In addition boot times and performance are improved, and if the notebook is dropped, nothing stored in the solid-state drive is lost.

There are more details of the SSD and hybrid drives on our Test Bed blog