Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (32491)	6/13/2006 7:22:07 PM
From: inaflash	Respond to of 60323

"Hybrid disk drives or systems that implement a hybrid disk drive must meet the requirements outlined here," Would Robson technology with motherboard flash qualify as the latter? While Hybrid disk drives are a good stopgap, I've recently shifted my opinion to include the flash on the motherboard. On a laptop with only 1 disk drive, it's fairly indifferent. The logic/firmware for handling the flash can reside either in the disk drive, or in the OS, but more likely than not, it will be in the OS. If the system has 2 or more drives, managing the flash in the hybrid system becomes complicated. The OS can do a better job with a single flash stash on the motherboard and deal with the external plugin cards for the rest. Is there a big advantage to having flash on the hard drive?

To: slacker711 who wrote (32491)	6/13/2006 7:24:26 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Microsoft's program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres confirmed to TG Daily that inclusion of hybrid hard drives will be a requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo, beginning in June 2007. Well, that's going to take a couple of fabs or more of capacity in itself. Wonder if STX regrets selling their SNDK stake? I dunno, as scarey as this decline--both in the general market as well as in Sandisk--has been, I still feel like this is a very nice buying opportunity. Maybe not tomorrow, or this week, but maybe on options expiration day. Certainly by, say, the first week or so of July. But, as some say, I'm no virgin at being wrong.

To: slacker711 who wrote (32491)	6/13/2006 7:26:40 PM
From: Pam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Boston (MA) - At a discussion of flash memory technologies to be included in Windows Vista and "Longhorn" here at TechEd 2006 this morning, Microsoft's program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres confirmed to TG Daily that inclusion of hybrid hard drives will be a requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo, beginning in June 2007. How does this announcement tie into Intel's Santa Rosa platform announcement which requires nand flash on the motherboard? If we have a hybrid HDD does one still need nand flash on the motherboard? What if there a SSFD as the HD instead of magnetic HDD, does one still need nand flash on the motherboard? PS: Looks like this is a repeat of what inaflash is asking. I was a tad late in posting this.

To: slacker711 who wrote (32491)	6/13/2006 7:47:54 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

More Vista flash requirements.... tgdaily.com TechEd 2006: Microsoft preps flash-based "performance accelerators" for Vista Scott M. Fulton, III June 12, 2006 14:43 Boston (MA) - Microsoft is working on a trio of technologies that will utilize flash memory as supplemental memory rather than as storage devices. Collectively referred to as "PC performance accelerators," Microsoft will debut SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive to store and access frequently used data from peripheral flash devices and hyrbid hard drives. The upcoming Vista will not only require dramatically more hardware horsepower than the current Windows XP. More details coming out of the currently held TechEd 2006 conference suggest that even simple hardware upgrades may not be the best choice for some users when upgrading to Vista. New features indicate that a completely new PC could be the best way to go. Among these new demanding features are Microsoft's "PC performance accelerators," which take advantage of the general availability of flash memory. ReadyDrive pertains to how the operating system utilizes the Flash memory from a hybrid hard drive. Microsoft presenter Matt Ayres told TechEd attendees that the initial cache size will be 256 MB, the first 32 MB will be exclusively reserved as a write cache. Up to 68 MB more may be set up for boot/resume pinning, which places frequently accessed sectors during power up or resumption from suspension, in non-volatile RAM, Ayres said "Pinning" refers to the remapping of sectors to memory locations, without actually relocating (and thus deleting) data from the hard drive. The remaining memory is split between two functions. What memory isn't reserved by OEMs for pinning for their own purposes, is requisitioned for read pinning. At least this much of ReadyDrive memory acts like ReadyBoost memory at this point. Microsoft's Matt Ayres demonstrates the memory allocation scheme for ReadyDrive, its memory management facility for hybrid hard drives. SuperFetch, which was premiered at PDC in Los Angeles last September, will be a Vista feature that maintains frequently accessed data from the hard drive. ReadyBoost (which had in previous demonstrations been referred to as SuperFetch) will enable the operating system to requisition Flash memory from USB devices, or conceivably other sources, for use as higher-level read caches. Especially ReadyDrive appears to become a substantial performance-enhancing factor in Vista computers. Data that decisively proves how much faster hybrid hard drives will be than standard models, are not yet available, according to Ayres. The reason: The prototype models Microsoft presently tests utilize a grade of Flash memory that is pretty much as slow, as Flash goes. Production models are likely to use much faster grades, he said, though the effect of accelerating the Flash on performance speeds cannot yet be quantized. Still, he said the average seek time for a random access hard drive may be about 10 ms, while the speed Microsoft's team sees with the prototypes it's been given, is closer to 1 ms. Ayres would not say whether this speed was realized with a hybrid hard drive based on Samsung or Seagate technology. Would the write cache for ReadyDrive memory truly offer a performance improvement, one attendee asked, given that standard HDDs already have a write cache that uses high-speed memory - presumably, higher speed than Flash? The performance improvement won't be realized as much during writes as during reads, Ayres admitted, although the true benefit of having a write cache, he believes, is that it enables the drive to spin down almost 90% of uptime, reducing wear on the drive and improving reliability and durability.