Hey everyone. I had an idea the other day and wanted to float it. Why doesn't a company like Apple use flash memory to act as a hard drive memory cache?
Imagine this: you have your 60 GB drive in your 17" Powerbook. But this is Rev B using Panther, and Apple has installed an additional hardware component in your box: 512 MB of flash memory. Now why in the hell would anyone want flash memory in a laptop with 60 GB? Simple: powersleep. I don't own a powerbook but I plan to buy the 17" PB rev b (I hear it might have 1.25 GHz G4). I've seen the Apple powerbooks and I love them, and I've noticed their sleep feature is really nice. Why can't we extend that more? Make the first laptop that truly powers on in seconds. We can't accomplish this with hard drives well since it's slow to come out of hibernation. And we can't use RAM since it's volatile. Only in the past couple of years have we seen a significant growth in flash memory capabilities. Nowadays you can get even a GB of flash memory for several hundred dollars, but the prices continue to fall.
Some day we'll have 100 GB flash memory cards as the standard (hopefully) so this idea will be obsolete, but until then: when you close your laptop and it sleeps, it stores all programs (user processes and the kernel) into Flash memory to preserve the snapshot. Then it shuts down, cuts power entirely. When you bring it back to life hours, days, years later, it loads everything into memory from the memory cache.
This also could be applied as a handy cache for secondary memory. Hard drives only come with 8 MB of cache usually, so using flash memory storage we could build a virtual cache on top of the hard drive. Your web server would cache most popular pages, MySQL would store a chunk of indices into flash as a backup to primary memory cache, and essentially OS X would use your 512 MB as a nice chunk of memory to hold non-volatile media.
I think there is a good potential here, and I'd be very hip to using a laptop that could boot only once every few months and powersleep in between kernel reboots. Hell, using the flash virtual HD cache you could reboot instantly as well. The hard drive essentially becomes a backup storage facility for your divx movies, images, and video files.
What do you think? Are they already using this in the powerbooks or is this is any way an original idea? I'm open to all comments. Remember I'm ignorant as to how sleep works in a powerbook. I'm only an aspiring switcher (when I can afford it in a month or two).
Cheers,
Mike
Imagine this: you have your 60 GB drive in your 17" Powerbook. But this is Rev B using Panther, and Apple has installed an additional hardware component in your box: 512 MB of flash memory. Now why in the hell would anyone want flash memory in a laptop with 60 GB? Simple: powersleep. I don't own a powerbook but I plan to buy the 17" PB rev b (I hear it might have 1.25 GHz G4). I've seen the Apple powerbooks and I love them, and I've noticed their sleep feature is really nice. Why can't we extend that more? Make the first laptop that truly powers on in seconds. We can't accomplish this with hard drives well since it's slow to come out of hibernation. And we can't use RAM since it's volatile. Only in the past couple of years have we seen a significant growth in flash memory capabilities. Nowadays you can get even a GB of flash memory for several hundred dollars, but the prices continue to fall.
Some day we'll have 100 GB flash memory cards as the standard (hopefully) so this idea will be obsolete, but until then: when you close your laptop and it sleeps, it stores all programs (user processes and the kernel) into Flash memory to preserve the snapshot. Then it shuts down, cuts power entirely. When you bring it back to life hours, days, years later, it loads everything into memory from the memory cache.
This also could be applied as a handy cache for secondary memory. Hard drives only come with 8 MB of cache usually, so using flash memory storage we could build a virtual cache on top of the hard drive. Your web server would cache most popular pages, MySQL would store a chunk of indices into flash as a backup to primary memory cache, and essentially OS X would use your 512 MB as a nice chunk of memory to hold non-volatile media.
I think there is a good potential here, and I'd be very hip to using a laptop that could boot only once every few months and powersleep in between kernel reboots. Hell, using the flash virtual HD cache you could reboot instantly as well. The hard drive essentially becomes a backup storage facility for your divx movies, images, and video files.
What do you think? Are they already using this in the powerbooks or is this is any way an original idea? I'm open to all comments. Remember I'm ignorant as to how sleep works in a powerbook. I'm only an aspiring switcher (when I can afford it in a month or two).
Cheers,
Mike
