No Flash In The Pan

Flash memory teams up with hard drives to speed up your PC.

I have been closely following the Microsoft Vista beta releases, and trying to figure out the benefits that the new OS will offer regular users. Sure eye candy looks good, but it’s the more tangible benefits that count. By tangible I mean features that will make a difference in performance and productivity.

I am particularly intrigued by the technologies in Vista that aim to make the computer faster. The “Ready-Boost” feature sounds like a magical speed up in a sluggish PC by plugging in a high speed USB flash drive. The operating system will automatically use the fast flash memory on the USB drive to boost performance-without restarts or drivers.

  Ready for the boost?

Vista’s Readyboost Uses the available free memory on the flash drive to create an additional page file that stores freequently acessed data. Naturally, fetching data on the flash memory is a lot quicker than getting it from your hard disk-making your PC much more responsive.

Following this train of logic, would it not be a good idea to entirely dump the hard disk and run everything off flash memory? For one the cost would be prohibitive (think how much 60 GB flash drive would cost you). The second is that flash memory is good for small, random I/Os (like paging to-and-from disk), but hard drives are better for large sequential I/O commands. So, it’s probably a better idea to combine the two and to leverage thneir individual advantages, with some clear support from software.

 What if you yank the flash drive, either accidently or deliberately? Will the system hang or crash? According to microsoft, it won’t. (But we need to watch this). Vista, it seems, maintains a back-up copy. Of course, any performance gains are also nullified. The good thing is that this performance boosting measure can be used anytime and will work with any hardware-so no need to open up your PC to add RAM. And it even works for PCs that have limited, or no memory expansion slots.

The bigger picture

While readybost is specific to Vista, we have another concept from hard drive makers that also aim to speed performance. These are hybrid hard drives, which combine a magnetic hard disk drive and non-volatile flash memory on a single device. With the hybrid HDD, manufacturers are seeking to combine the robustness, low power consumption and speed of flash media with the storage density, low density and low cost of magnetic drives.

 Samsung has already announced a hybrid hard drive that combines NAND-based flash memory with a mechanical drive to speed up performance and conserve power. In the hybrid mode, the mechanical drive is spun down for majority of the time, while data is written to the flash write buffer. When the write is filled the rotating spins and the data from the write buffer is written to the hard drive. The hybrid drive saves power by keeping up the spindle motor in idle mode almost all the time-a portable devices. Windows Vista already supports hybrid hard drives with it’s “Ready Drive” feature.

Intel’s next mobile platform, code named Santa Rosa, also implements flash memory to storage related performance. It uses Intel’s Robson cache technology which will enable motherboards to embed flash memory to store common elements of the OS and other related data to boost performance right from the boot process. Thus the boot times as well as the resume times will improve significantly. Imagine your system taking just 3 seconds to boot and get ready for action!

The marriage of flash based storage with hard drives is a step in the right diection, and I hope the industry giants concentrate more on smarter solutions that don’t necessarily require cutting edge hardware to run applications.