Longhorn Requires New Harddrive

According to an interview I saw with the Tablet PC guys at Microsoft, this is so that they can 'spin down' the HDD and conserve limated battery life.

Notebooks/Laptops will also benefit. The speed thing is prob just a extra bonus.

Tablet PCs tipically have shorter battery life than Laptops because they have the additional digitizer circuitry to power.
 
The part I don't get is this: "In addition the use of a solid-state memory as a front-end to the drive should allow the Longhorn operating system to boot significantly faster, Samsung said."

Why would it boot significantly faster? Why aren't you still limited by the initial transfer speed of the drive at boot loading up that cache in the first place? Mmm, I guess I don't know enough about how the OS is using data during boot. I've got an 8mb (I think) cache on my current HD.
 
Harddrives are almost never limited by transfer speed, instead it's access time that plays the major role in performance (by an enormous vast margin).
 
I think the idea is that when the machine goes to hibernate...if the hdd has 128 megs of flash it will store the initial bulk of the data required to start back up from hibernate there...and then give the hdd time for it to spool up to 7200 rpm or whatever....and then once the data in the cache is exhausted, pick up the remaining data from the disk which by that time would have spooled up. Thats what I understood heh. I dont like the flash memory though...too darn slow isnt it?
 
suryad said:
I think the idea is that when the machine goes to hibernate...if the hdd has 128 megs of flash it will store the initial bulk of the data required to start back up from hibernate there...and then give the hdd time for it to spool up to 7200 rpm or whatever....and then once the data in the cache is exhausted, pick up the remaining data from the disk which by that time would have spooled up. Thats what I understood heh. I dont like the flash memory though...too darn slow isnt it?

But when you boot the computer it has to POST so the HDD has already spooled up by the time you load Longhorn. :?
 
Transfer speed is probably not going to be much of an issue, there are already solid-state drives with very high throughput. What concerns me is data integrity over time, because flash wears out eventually and windows and its associated programs are notorious for creating periodic spurious disk I/O that would kill any current flash cache within a couple years at most. So we'd be WORSE off this way actually, unless flash rewritability makes progress in vast leaps and bounds until these harddrives hit the market...
 
DudeMiester said:
Hard drives wear out too, so as long as the flash last a similar amount of time to a regular hard drive then you're fine.

Good point HDDs have an average life of only around 5 years.
 
Harddrives don't die THAT fast. Considering how small these caches are (relatively speaking), they're going to get overwritten A LOT, and they're going to die friggen fast too. Even if each bit lasts the advertised one million-ish writes for current flash, it's still going to die very fast. Just think of stuff like filesharing programs and distributed computing clients. When I ran SETI, I know it generated tiny writes every couple seconds, and it'll be even quicker for faster CPUs than the old hog I ran at the time.
 
Pure RAM => PuRAM ...it was a RAMcache designed to hold all of the BIOS and OS startup files permanently so the PC would never have to POST then acces the harddrive boot block... lieberman if they ever were a company folded recently....


www.go-l.com

I think they were vapor with very nice mock technology as they talk way too much about how "real" they were on their now defunct home page.

Excerpt:
"A movie? A hoax? Oh no. Most definitely a true Hollywood story but very, very real.

And while all of this was taking place, many started betting we simply did not exist. But, we did. And while managing to talk with Intel, Microsoft and all the big guys that in a rapid succession all wanted to take meetings with us, all wondering who we were but vividly interested in what we were doing no matter how insane it was - no investors ever came to be in place. Most individual orders could not be taken due to low product volume at hand, all large order inquiries were put on an ever-growing mailing list only, securing manufacturing and prototyping of new designs could hardly be attainable, answering thousands of monthly sales inquiries became an impossible task, the banks declined our capacity to accept major credit cards due to the inexistence of an investment collateral, phones could not be answered because there were not enough phone lines, and no matter how much product came out of the assembly line, it was nothing more than a small fraction of the ever growing requests on queue."

Pure Bullshit IMO, not humbly.
 
Actually there is a review of one of their laptops, the only go-l product ever to be reviewed, and while it was nice it's was really just a standard barebones laptop with good parts. So they are not totally a fake, they've made at least one laptop, lol!
 
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