The hybrid hard drive will mount a one-gigabit OneNAND flash chip inside a hard drive, which will serve dual duty both as a write buffer and as a solid-state boot disk for the operating system. The act of writing data to the hard disk, such as user files or cached images while web browsing, would instead be intercepted by the hard disk. Only when the flash memory's "write buffer" was full would the hard disk be spun up, minimizing the time and power that would be spent keeping the drive's rotating media spinning.
"What's different now is that it's real," said Ivan Greenberg, strategic marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, in an interview. "The Longhorn base drivers have been made final, and made the plan of record."
Samsung and Microsoft will demonstrate a prototype of the drive at WinHEC using an emulator to simulate the system, Greenberg said.
At this point, however, only Samsung has signed up to manufacture the drive, Greenberg said. As an extra incentive, Samsung plans to appeal directly to OEMs.
"Now the promotion starts," Greenberg said. "We haven't been able to go out and tell any of the OEMs that we've been working with Microsoft, so you can imagine that if we had gone to Dell and talked about the concept, the architecture of the [hybrid solid state disk drive]…and that Microsoft hadn't been on board, there would be skepticism.
"One of the things I'm doing right after WinHEC is to go out and engage on campaigns with the Dells, the Sonys, and the HPs of the world," Greenberg added.
According to Greenberg, Longhorn still uses a technology called "SuperFetch" to read ahead and anticipate what information will be needed by the user. Instead of reading this information directly from the hard disk, this cache of information will be read into RAM.
When the PC is booted either from hibernation or on a cold restart, the operating system is read out of the flash memory. When placed into stand by or hibernation, the data residing in the flash buffer is written to disk. In 2004, Microsoft officials said they had not solved the problem of the possibility that power would be cut during the writing sequence, possibly resulting in the loss of data.
Greenberg said the company's own internal studies have shown that the even the relatively limited number of read and write cycles that flash memory allows will still permit a drive to last longer than today's estimated five-year lifespan, he said. The 2004 example only used a 128-Mbyte flash memory, to boot.
In related Samsung news, a WinHEC demonstration involving AMD, Microsoft, Newisys, and two other server companies will attempt to show the increased scalability of the new 64-bit versions of Windows. Using the x64 versions of Windows Server 2003, high end AMD Opteron processor-based servers will be linked together to allow up to thirty-two 4-Gbyte registered DIMMs to be combined for a total of 128 GB, the company said.
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