Submitted by “Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs. The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC.”
place the OS static files in there and the rest on the disk – should greatly speed up time, and keep the disk alive by not having too many writes.
Isn’t this what Amiga did with Kickstart 20 years ago?
@KenJackson
Amigas had Hard drives with Flash memory chips to reduce boot time?
Or was it like the Tandy computer line which had DOS in ROM soldered onto the mobo?
if you really want to reduce amiga boot time you can use the recoverable ram drive (any No. of them) and it will keep its contents through anything but a hard reset (thats one inital copy of the boot drive per powerup not every reset).
shame the MSwindowdoesnt have one of them, might be far faster to boot with that and a 2 gig stick of ram ( the amiga did it in 512 k
).
Edited 2006-05-09 05:50
Kickstart is the name given to the bootstrap ROM. …
The Kickstart also contained many stock parts of the Amiga’s operating system, … This meant that a powered-on Amiga already had a lot of the essential parts of the operating system available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS#Kickstart
This sounds very much like the Samsung article, but it’s talking about the Amigas of maybe 20 years ago. (I’m not sure of the timeline and wikipedia didn’t give dates.)
I’m not even an Amiga user, but I’m just bringing up the very relevant issue that this isn’t a new idea, so comparison with earlier systems is fair.
Isn’t this what Amiga did with Kickstart 20 years ago?
Almost. Amiga, like RISC OS and Commodore 64 BASIC btw, simply had it’s OS on a ROM chip. Now however (and the article is sparse on details), it seems like they’re going to put the OS on a flash disk. Which could in principle be seen as a rewriteable ROM.
It’s a bit of superfluous technology I would think, since it’s simply a matter of having a flashdrive built into your computer, together with some OS magic (unionFS?) so you’re not continually writing changes to the flash part.
8-bit computers loaded their OS from ROM, but they were so simple that they were usually called “monitors”, not OSes. Commodore disk drives had their DOS in ROM.
Amigas, Ataris, and Archimedes (British-made Amiga-class machines from educational-computer-maker Acorn) had part or all of their OS in ROM, and loaded the equivalent of init-scripts, extra drivers, and OS patches from disk. The original Mac, and I believe “OldWorld” PowerMacs, (but not NewWorld ones) did the same.
What the original poster is probably thinking of is actually the reverse: some Amigas (the original, later retronymed to Amiga 1000, and very early A3000’s), had a minimal firmware which would load Kickstart (~BIOS) from disk, and prepare the computer for loading a boot-up (game or OS) disk.
“The new product will be introduced along with Microsoft’s Windows ReadyDrive feature … ReadyDrive refers to software technology that supports the HHD.”
Not that I don’t appreciate the effort behind this, but Microsoft isn’t the company I want backing this technology.
Well if they make it open enough for other OSes to take advantage of, I’ll sit down.
Please provide a reason why you belive MS shouldnt be part of this. Until then, your comment is basically a troll …
The comment would of been voted down, but unfortunately, OSNews’ voting system is still broken, thanks OSNews!
Please provide a reason why you belive MS shouldnt be part of this. Until then, your comment is basically a troll …
In case it wasn’t already blatantly obvious, and other readers have already pointed out, some people (such as myself) would not want to see this technology a Windows only feature.
Samsung is providing the hardware, Microsoft provides the software. There are yet to be answered questions like: can that software be replace with something open source (for instance)?
I also fail to see how your comment offers anything useful, other than calling me out, yet you get voted up. There’s nothing wrong with OSNews’ voting system, it’s the voters that are broken
It’s the 2004 presidential election all over again…
Please provide a reason why you belive MS shouldnt be part of this. Until then, your comment is basically a troll …
I’ll provide two. 1) Microsoft is the reigning champ of vendor lock-in. Any technology they get their hands on is liable to become unusable to the outside world. 2) Windows has never been the least bit good at distributing itself over multiple disks. At least with Linux, I could put /boot and /sbin on the flash drive and the rest on the platters. What will Microsoft do? Since they already have a name for the “technology,” I’m thinking huge, mysterious binary that takes complete control of the flash area and will only allow you to boot one operating system.
Hi,
booting a system is like installing a system. It doesn’t really make sense to do it very often.
With today’s hardware (esp. disks) it takes less time to save all the memory content to disk (on-the-fly-compressed), as to shutdown a decent “bloated” operating system.
Easy to tell it also takes much less time to read back the data on startup of the machine than to boot it.
And you can continue working where you stopped. No additional power consumption while the power is off. It is power consuming to copy back all the memory data, but it is also while you startup applications, etc.. Better productivity anyway!
What is needed? An operating system capable of this; hardware drivers capable of this.
What is not needed? An additional flash drive
I don’t understand why people still talk about booting, esp. on laptop devices, other than OSes like Windows like to operate worse and worse after running too long.
Even on desktop machines it is more convenient to use suspend-to-disk, as hard drives are faster. Half of the startup time (with suspend to disk) on my 3 years old desktop machine is wasted by the BIOS…
I don’t understand why I should buy hardware which assists in nothing else than booting. This flash memory is built into the drive, so I can’t use it to take data with me. Anyway I can’t efficiently use it in runtime as the “boot” data (operating system) will have to reside there, otherwise it needs to be copied back from disk, wich will make it silly (battery usage, time loss on shutdown instead of boot). The data used while operating will not be read from flash but from memory, as it is much faster…
A better idea would be to include flash memory into a notebook for a suspend-to-flash like feature. 1 Gig of RAM fits into 512 Megs if zipped. It could still be called silly.
Regards,
Ford Prefect
Edited 2006-05-08 13:56
I perfectly agree with you about suspend to disk. The Shutdown option in all OSs should by default suspend to disk. I also think new BIOSes should be introduced which are tightly coupled with suspend-to-disk options, so that the time the BIOS takes in the boot process is only minimal hardware initialization, and it doesn’t have to setup anything that a realmode/DOS-like OS would need.
My girlfriend has a laptop (Nexoc Osiris S602) with a very fast BIOS POST. The BIOS takes about 1-2 seconds until the boot manager shows up. So it is really doable, even today, even with all hardware initialized.
I ask myself if EFI initializes much of the hardware, too. Perhaps it’s just the way to go.
I don’t understand why I should buy hardware which assists in nothing else than booting.
Me neither. But I don’t even use suspend-to-disk, since I don’t use a laptop. All my PCs just keep running all the time, that way I can access them from each other.
The obvious but unstated weakness to this is the extra hassle of UPGRADING. My suspicion is that they will use DRM or something like it to prevent use of the flash by Linux. I wonder if that’s the real motive.
The obvious weakness of this is the incredible power consumption that you cause by letting all your computers on all the time. This is just a waste of energy!
Tom
It’s only a waste if it has no value, but it has great value to me. Besides, it’s not an incredible power consumption–the monitors are off and it’s doing very little disk access.
I leave mine on all the time to, I just turn off the monitor. With the system idle and display off, it’s not really using that much energy. Being able to just flip on the monitor and immediately start using it is well worth what little extra cost it adds.
It does however take power to keep the fan going, the drives spinning, etc. You also end up puuting more strain on the various moving parts (of which there are plenty) by keeping the computer on all the time
Restarting though puts thermal stress on every non moving part. And there are more chances some engine would fail while cold-starting than it brokes while spinning constantly.
My suspicion is that they will use DRM or something like it to prevent use of the flash by Linux.
Let’s take off the tin-foil hats for a minute, please. Just because Microsoft supported it first doesn’t mean that there’s a conspiracy to screw over your favorite OS.
…doesn’t mean that there’s a conspiracy to screw over your favorite OS.
You’re right–it’s not a conspiracy. But it could be a business strategy, and that’s what I fear.
I agree with Ken, this has the potential to be misused to prevent peoples choice.
If I want to install Linux instead of Windows that’s up to me, that’s the good thing about of having a free market economy..choice! Also what about those people that need to dual boot.
IF DRM is used on this device then it COULD be used to prevent installation of other OSs. Maybe we’re being paraniod but experience suggests that when given the chance MS will use any chance they can to get the advantage. (Although I guess that too is part of the free market economy)
I can imagine that there are some BIOS hooks that could make non-MS boot managers like GRUB useless/broken in this hybrid drive system.
I can’t think of a better way to prevent another OS from being installed than to make all competitive system unbootable through hardware.
Odds are, installation of this hardware is the precursor to guaranteed platform control by MS. The Intel/MS ‘Palladium’ chipset was unpopular because it served no real functions other than to guarantee MS-authorized installations were running (and possibly some other obscure and poorly-marketed features). This hybrid disk has a better selling point because it serves a more functional purpose while hiding it’s dirty little secrets (if our fears turn out to be well-founded).
Hopefully Linux has enough momentum now (at least amongst those using it as a server OS) that any technological attempt to lock out Linux (or anything else) will result in that technology suffering the same fate as the PS/2, MCA, and ACE. Either that, or MS will tie itself to what will effectively become an MS PC, and price competition will eventually drive their crap out of the market even sooner than it would have already.
Edited 2006-05-08 18:30
Static OS files in flash = lower battery consumption whenever.
There’s why.
I don’t particularly like to post off topic, but I’ve seen something like this a couple of times recently:
“1 Gig of RAM fits into 512 Megs if zipped.”
Compression of that type is not deterministic wrt data size. If that RAM was holding mpeg4 video in it, it would barely compress at best, if it was empty, well, then it would compress to a few bytes.
Low level engineers cannot count on things like compression always hitting a target. It either has to definitely always work or… well, that’s the option. You have to be a software person to get away with putting up a failure dialog on the screen.
People will buy the product that starts faster. When evaluating 2 programs. Microsoft have got that right. Have always got it right.
I remember listening to adverts on the radio 9 years ago, and there was a company(I wish I rembered the name), That sold instant *on* solutions. It went along the lines of 100 users wasted 5 mins a day for 280 days at about £10 an hour worked out at about £23000.
I don’t see exactly why Microsoft is investing this much proprietary technology into a process (booting) that isn’t a performance-related task. Oooh, so you get to boot 2-3 seconds faster – and why? How many times a day do they expect people to be rebooting? Is this a sign of something really bad about Vista? I agree with comments above that ‘suspend-to-disk’ is more significant than cold-booting in regards to system startup/wake. Plus, the yet-to-materialize ‘Vista’ shouldn’t be the target for speeding-up boot sequences – LINUX is! Linux takes far longer to start from cold/off than most OSes, and this would make it a much better candidate for such a hardware feature. And providing flash memory on a HHD is just another feature which will be targeted by viruses and the like. Will we have to ‘reset’ HHD flash memory that gets infected? Yuck! Bad and pointless this is…
>>LINUX is! Linux takes far longer to start from cold/off than most OSes, and this would make it a much better candidate for such a hardware feature.<<
The problem with Linux in general when it comes to bootup time is the init scripts, they don’t tend to run in parallel, compare the bootup of Fedora Core 5 with Solaris (Nevada) on the same machine and ye’ll notice ye get to the login prompt on solaris alot faster. This is mainly cause Sun replaced SysV style Init with SMF. Likewise Apple have done something similar regarding their startup procedure (not owning a MAC i’m not too up on them)
Yes, you are quite correct – and because of the complexity of the Linux init sequence, it would be unlikely to show much (if any) performance gain from this type of flash memory hybrid during startup. One can only hope there is a work in progress to improve this – the first complaint I hear about Linux (usually from novices) is the boot time. I question whether or not it would be possible to generate a mostly ‘already-booted’ image and quickly load this state upon power-up?
I’ve not worked with Solaris myself – so I can only take your word on it (which I do trust, as you responded kindly). I’m unfamiliar with SMF, but for sheer geek-glee, I enjoy watching the pages upon pages of start-up Init debug. It usually scares the hell out of newbies.
Macs (I use them often) do have a respectable boot time, however I’ve noticed many inconsistencies regarding that. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s not. And the (somewhat meaningless) progress bar during start-up also has a sporadic motion and presence (sometimes it gets to 40%, sometimes 100%) before a login prompt is displayed.
The problem with Linux in general when it comes to bootup time is the init scripts, they don’t tend to run in parallel, compare the bootup of Fedora Core 5 with Solaris (Nevada) on the same machine and ye’ll notice ye get to the login prompt on solaris alot faster. This is mainly cause Sun replaced SysV style Init with SMF. Likewise Apple have done something similar regarding their startup procedure (not owning a MAC i’m not too up on them)
Agreed, the couple of times I’ve gotten initng to run properly with any degree of stability, the improvement has been striking.
As for Mac’s, I know they implement something similar but in all honesty my gf’s powerbook takes about as long as my Suse laptop to get to a useable desktop, so I don’t know how aggressive their parallel booting algorithm is.
Some distros implement pre-loading in the boot up process as well, I’m not sure that the gain from pre-loading services into memory offsets the delay caused by doing so, I’ve seen arguments both ways. I could see flash as maybe being a middle of the road solution that offers a performance increase without requiring preloading to RAM, but in the end I have to think it would be incremental at best.
I still think a faster hdd and as much available system memory as possible, to either reduce the need for swapping or to move swap to a ram disk, is easier to implement and more realistic for a faster system.
Now, if they could somehow integrate flash with a faster bus, then maybe we’d see something magical. I’m not an engineer though, so could very well be that I’m talking through my hat about everything I’ve said here and overlooking some basic principles. But I’m just not sure where the real advantage is with this.
incorrect post (self)
Edited 2006-05-08 17:30
Linux doesn’t have to be slow, look how the ubuntu team has lowered boot time by making the startup scripts more parellel. Combine those improvements with the faster gnome load and Dapper has a very speedy boot now.
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/dapperbeta#head-568c85543656b120d6e37…
It’s not “Linux” your talking about but several distros.
A clean linux distribution and configuration boots very fast. Even if I don’t boot very often as I use suspend-to-disk, my boot time is very low. Here are two graphs (I tried twice to see if there are differences):
http://fopref.meinungsverstaerker.de/div/bootchart1.png
http://fopref.meinungsverstaerker.de/div/bootchart2.png
This is ArchLinux (http://www.archlinux.org). Other people already mentioned the init scripts. Arch uses a BSD like init which is very fast… and services are started in parallel, too (at the least end).
I didn’t do any tweaks, just in the services list declared the last 5 ones or so to start in background.
If this is anything more than a flash drive piggybacked on a standard hard drive, appearing as two seperate volumes to the OS, I’d consider it overkill.
If that’s all it is, then I could see this easily being implementable by any OS, just place the core OS/system files on flash and set that to boot. The last thing even Vista needs at this point is any degree of funky re-engineering for the sake of proprietarizaiton.
Besides, while I know Samsung is a leader in flash memory production, I’ve used a couple of their hard drives in the past, and I’m not sure I’d turn to Samsung if speed, performance, stability or reliability were any of my concerns. A decent high performance 7200 or greater rpm drive would do more for overall performance me thinks, particularly in a laptop.
If this is anything more than a flash drive piggybacked on a standard hard drive, appearing as two seperate volumes to the OS, I’d consider it overkill.
I’m hoping that it’s intelligently combined, so that the flash behaves like a transparent “boot time” cache (e.g. a cache of the first N sectors read). That way it’d improve performance for all OSs without any changes to software….
I still prefer Intel Solution its more configurable. and wont force you in any way. and stabler than make it part of HD
I don’t think you guys get a lot of this. When I first saw it, I was like holy cow! This is a BIG ONE. The only thing that’s bigger is Flash drives.
Reading the press releases, the 1 Gigabit OpenNAND acts as a big buffer. My guess is that it’s one drive.
First off, you need to get out of the desktop is the only use for PCs mode.
–Laptop users power cycle fairly often. There may be a suspend mode, but most just power down.
–It really bumps up Vista as a Consumer Electronics OS. More so than XP Media Center, OS X, BSD, or any Linux. I’m geussing this is the primary thrust.
You save quite a bit more than “1 or 2 seconds” on boot. To go from a complete cycle off to the login screen can be well over 30 seconds, esp if the user has plenty of boot-time processes.
While operational uses will not be affected as much, since predictive technologies aren’t that fantastic yet, but it will reduce hard drive spinning. While currently hard drives continue spinning unless told otherwise in power save dialogs, this drive will be spun down.
I’m sure things can be optimized, i.e. if you’re playing a game, the game and maps can be loaded here since it’s unlikely you’ll be doing anything else. In gaming, map loads are biggies. I just don’t think it will be an overall performance boost in day-to-day applications.
If the drive isn’t spinning as much, it reduces operating temperature and prolongs drive life. It uses less power since the drive is spun down more often and thereby prolongs battery life – or at least offsets some of the power needed to run Vista’s graphics.
After I read it, I realized that this was a big leap and so I read other press releases. This is a Microsoft Technology. You can’t say “let MS not be a part of it.” Some press releases refer to it as “Microsoft’s Hybrid Hard Drive Technology” that uses Samsung’s OpenNAND. They ARE it and Samsung is a part of it. This means that if they want, they can not offer it openly. It’s theirs, they paid for it and developed it. They don’t have to share this time. It uses additional ATA commands they developed to improve efficiencies. If Red Hat, Novell, IBM or Apple want to develop this technology, they can pay for its development.
With that said, I’m sure Apple will leapfrog them to Flash disks. Various OSS developers will reverse engineer it and it’ll make it to the OSS community. As far as what I read, it appears other unnamed HDD OEMs are licensed to produce and volumes start later this year.
But in performance, having near-instant on would be a big victory.
Google Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk (or Drive) for more info.
In 1993 I had at work several Wang 386/25 machines that had a motherboard ROM with DOS system on it. BIOS settings permitted booting from this ROM or from HDD, and I cant say that booting from ROM or HDD differed much regarding bootup speed.
Of course current flashroms are much faster so that is interesting.
Didnt Samsung announced not long ago the solid state HDD for notebooks… I read it somewhere but cannot find this announcement now.
it all depends on how much the drive cost but I am all for it as far as the technology goes. Plus I was thinking of a hard drive upgrade for my notebook computer anyway. I guess it’s a good thing I decided to hold off. Now if only Hitachi would decide to couple this new technology with their 7200rpm 2.5″ drives …