Apple Flash-Booting MacBooks?

[gnasher729]

One thing I don't really understand is the proposal to spin up the hard drive less often. Typical machines these days have around a gigabyte of RAM, which can be used to buffer both reads and writes. How would adding 256 megs of flash help greatly?

Two things: First, if anything is kept in RAM that needs to be written, you would have to be able to guarantee that everything can be written to harddisk in the worst case scenario (computer unplugged, battery doesn't work properly, computer crashes). That is difficult. With Flash RAM, everything is safe even if you lose power completely.

Second, someone published estimates about the bill of materials for iPod Nano. Apparently, Apple pays about 10 dollars per GB, so I would expect 1GB on a MacBook, 2GB on a MacBook Pro.

 

[Synchro]

Seagate does them too

Nobody seems to have noticed that Seagate has announced hybrid drives too. Check out the Momentus PSD. I've seen them in some online stores too (scan.co.uk).

They come with 128Mb or 256Mb of Flash, as well as having SATA II, 8Mb cache, 5400rpm, perpendicular recording, and up to 160Gb capacity. Sounds like a notebook user's wish-list come true to me.

 

[Maccus Aurelius]

Nobody seems to have noticed that Seagate has announced hybrid drives too. Check out the Momentus PSD. I've seen them in some online stores too (scan.co.uk).

They come with 128Mb or 256Mb of Flash, as well as having SATA II, 8Mb cache, 5400rpm, perpendicular recording, and up to 160Gb capacity. Sounds like a notebook user's wish-list come true to me.

Nice. If it runs ok in a macbook, I'm getting one.