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New Seagate hard drives increase battery life by 25%

Squonk

Squonk

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Information Week said:
Seagate Technology on Monday launched its first combination disk storage and flash memory hard drive, joining rival Samsung Electronics in offering hybrid drives that manufacturers say speed the boot-up time of PCs and significantly boost battery life.

The Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD, which stands for "power savings drive," offers 160 Gbytes of traditional rotating disk storage and 256 Mbytes of flash memory. Sony is the first PC maker to offer the new product, making it available in its Vaio SZ650, Melissa Johnson, product-marketing manager for Seagate, said. Three other PC manufacturers also plan to offer products with the new drive, but Johnson declined to name them.

The Momentus sells for $190, which is almost a 30% premium over a traditional drive of equal storage. The higher price, however, gets the buyer technology that Seagate claims can quicken the time it takes to boot a PC by 20%, and uses half as much power as a traditional hard drive. The Sony Vaio gets 25% more battery life from using the hybrid drive, Johnson said. "There's good value across the board for this hybrid technology."
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Let's hope we see these in the next rev of the MBPs!

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202400049
 
The PCWorld review mentioned that they specifically use a Vista feature to make use of the extra flash ram.

Maybe some support will get added to Leopard in future (end of October is in the future, right?🙄)
 
Eidorian said:
More like OS X needs to support this, right?
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While reading the article, I was hoping that Apple was one of the unnamed vendors who has been working with them to bring these to the market. I sure do hope that Leopard will have support for new fangled devices like this. More battery life and more performance, yeah, sign me up!

EDIT: So, is that to say that the OS must know how to take advantage of this new drive technology to gleen any performance out of it? Or is it the case that in order to get all of the 20% boot time and 25% battery life improvement you need to be tuned for it and otherwise you might get half of that?
 
It would seem you need the OS to be aware of it, so it installs the appropriate files on the flash, not the rotating platter.In practice, its probably even more complicated than that.

Leopard...end of October is rapidly approaching.
 
Squonk said:
While reading the article, I was hoping that Apple was one of the unnamed vendors who has been working with them to bring these to the market. I sure do hope that Leopard will have support for new fangled devices like this. More battery life and more performance, yeah, sign me up!

EDIT: So, is that to say that the OS must know how to take advantage of this new drive technology to gleen any performance out of it? Or is it the case that in order to get all of the 20% boot time and 25% battery life improvement you need to be tuned for it and otherwise you might get half of that?
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The operating system needs to be aware of it. Sadly, the hard drive itself doesn't have the logic to do it.
 
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