New Hybrid Disk Drives, Ps3 Compatible?

[ShadowMagios]

I searches and found nothing mentioning the MH80

Article:
[reveal]

Samsung said Wednesday that it had begun shipments of its first hybrid hard drive to select OEMs, and that retail shipments would begin "soon".

The new MH80 2.5-inch hybrid drives for notebook PCs will be available in 80-, 120-, and 160-Gbyte capacities, with either 128 Mbytes or 256 Mbytes of onboard flash memory, for caching purposes.

Samsung representatives weren't immediately available to answer questions on the drive's retail availability or pricing.

Although Microsoft has touted flash drives as a means to improve the performance of its Vista operating system, there are two types of flash drives. The first, more common form is known as ReadyBoost, where a specially formatted USB flash drive stores Windows system files, making boot cycles and restores from hibernation faster and more efficient.

Samsung, meanwhile, is part of the Hybrid Drive Alliance, which uses flash memory as a type of write cache for a hard disk drive. DRAM is commonly found in virtually all disk drives, as a means to cache data being read from the disk, and burst it across a Serial ATA bus to the main PC. User-generated data, generated much slower than a machine, requires non-volatile memory to gather it, store it, and then burst it to the disk. The result is that data is written to the disk in a concentrated form much less frequently than a non-hybrid hard drive, resulting in significantly less power being used in a notebook PC from spinning up the hard disk.

Acording to Samsung, its MH80 drives feature Samsung's "ReadyBoot" (not ReadyBoost) technology that offers up to a 50 percent reduction in boot and resume times from traditional magnetic hard drives. In addition, the drive consumes 70-90 percent less power than a traditional hard drive, which extends the battery life by 30 minutes before a recharge is needed, the company said.

In a ReadyBoost flash drive, flash caches of 2 Gbytes or so are considered ideal. But at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in January, Seagate engineers showing off their own hybrid hard drive prototypes said that 256 Mbytes had proven to be the peak of the cost-vs.-performance ratio.

[/reveal]
Link

SATA 1.5Gbps
80, 120, or 160GB
Buffer DRAM Size -8 Mbytes
OneNAND Flash - 128MB-256MB


HHDD Tech Specs:
[reveal]

160GB Formatted Capacity Per Disk
TuMR head with wireless suspension design
Serial ATA 1.5Gbps Interface Support
SATA Native Command Queuing Feature set
Device Initiated Bearing Spindle Motor Technology
Load/Unload Head Technology
ATA Security Mode Feature Set
ATA SMART Feature Set
ATA Automatic Acoustic Management Feature Set
ATA Device Configuration Overlay Feature Set
Multi-Burst On-The-Fly Error Correction
FlashON
NVC Command Set(T13 ATA8 Extension)
Quick Power On Ready
NVC Power Management

[/reveal]
Link



This is awesome
Now if they can pump the on board flash up to 1 or 2 GB

[badz_ps3]

maybe its cause its almost 5am, or maybe its cause im starting to fall off my "tech horse", but i am having some trouble connecting the dots from these drives to the ps3. would someone share to enlighten me>?

[ShadowMagios]

Well its a 2.5in SATA drive, that the only thing needed to work on the ps3.

But this has the Embedded NAND Flash. and can DRASTICALLY improve load times, and the loading of games that use the Hard drive

EX:
Games that use the HDD to cache data like:
Oblivion - Caches data to the hard drive, 4.5GB to be presice, the 2-5 second load times could be seriously cut down, with a vengeance.

Improves Any Downloadable games, be it Online Game or not.

If theres a game that uses the hard disk repeatedly to call up data from the disk, its nice to know that the data is in the flash cache and ready to be sent without the Drive Head even moving to look for the data, and flash is like 1,000x faster than Hard Disks in looking for lots of different files and sending them.

[Gothalamide]

maybe its cause its almost 5am, or maybe its cause im starting to fall off my "tech horse", but i am having some trouble connecting the dots from these drives to the ps3. would someone share to enlighten me>?

You can swap out the HDD in the PS3 with any standard 2.5inch Serial-ATA HDD like the ones described in the story.

So if you wanted to you can put the 160GB HDD into your PS3 and seriously up the HD space. I'm guessing the interesting bit of the story is that with the on-board flash it'll use less power and take less time using the HDD which will be better overall for your PS3.

[ShadowMagios]

Bad thing is i want one but i want it to have like at least 1GB, 2GB would be the SniShSiight (its hard sayng that huh)

[nico1982]

Well its a 2.5in SATA drive, that the only thing needed to work on the ps3.

Are you sure? IIRC, Vista need a dedicated driver. Unless the flash memory operation is trasparent to the disk access, the PS3 need those disk to be supported in the firwmare.

Bad thing is i want one but i want it to have like at least 1GB, 2GB would be the SniShSiight

Would be a waste, IMHO. Frequently accessed data is limited in size anyway, and the streaming of large chunk of data would benefit form the NAND memory very little if at all.

BTW, flash mass storage will be a viable option, capacity- and price-wise, sooner than most pople can think of.

Ciao

[Jikoo]

can you find anybody like sony or samsung to swap the hdd'S?

[ShadowMagios]

@Jikoo
Swapping th HDD is very easy its even in your ps3's instruction manual

Are you sure? IIRC, Vista need a dedicated driver. Unless the flash memory operation is trasparent to the disk access, the PS3 need those disk to be supported in the firwmare.

I thought that was to use the ReadyBoot. So Windows Dumps the start-up info in the cache and when you next turn it on windows boots up lightning quick.

Il have to do some research to make sure im not mistaken tho...

Would be a waste, IMHO. Frequently accessed data is limited in size anyway, and the streaming of large chunk of data would benefit form the NAND memory very little if at all.

I dunno ... For Oblivion to use 4 GB of CACHE makes me think other wise and i be theres thousands of files in there not just one BIG one.....

[Beodude123]

Sounds like it could be pretty sweet, but would it matter if devs programmed for it? It sounds like it would be able to function without special programming. Is that correct?

[Dj-X]

Hey i found a 100 2.5 in. Mobile SATA Hard Drive.......Will this work with the ps3 or will it not work because it says mobile?

[Gothalamide]

Hey i found a 100 2.5 in. Mobile SATA Hard Drive.......Will this work with the ps3 or will it not work because it says mobile?

Check the specs for it. As long as in the specs it calls itself an "Internal" disk drive, then you should be fine.

I'm not sure specifically what the 'mobile' in the name relates to when talking about these drives.

Also, the other thing I think you've got to be careful of is the spin rating of the HDD. PS3 will only accept certain RPM's (5400 I think is the best one although I think it will work with 7200).

[chartwel]

this is great, i just want to see pricing. i am getting ready to add a 160 GB HD to my ps3, but now it looks like i need to wait a little longer.

[Organic_Shadow]

Hmmm, dunno if I should be very excited about this drive. Sounds like it's a normal hard drive that has NAND flash for the caching.

The good thing is yes, the NAND flash is super fast, the bad thing is that these drives are going to be pretty expensive, and the performance increase may not be drastic enough to warrant the extra cash over a normal 160gb 2.5" SATA.

If anyone can dig up some prices it would be appreciated.

[badz_ps3]

You can swap out the HDD in the PS3 with any standard 2.5inch Serial-ATA HDD like the ones described in the story.

So if you wanted to you can put the 160GB HDD into your PS3 and seriously up the HD space. I'm guessing the interesting bit of the story is that with the on-board flash it'll use less power and take less time using the HDD which will be better overall for your PS3.

thanks gothalamide, but that much i did know. i was more curious about the actual tech in the article that made these drives superior to your "standard" 2.5 sata.

Hmmm, dunno if I should be very excited about this drive. Sounds like it's a normal hard drive that has NAND flash for the caching.

The good thing is yes, the NAND flash is super fast, the bad thing is that these drives are going to be pretty expensive, and the performance increase may not be drastic enough to warrant the extra cash over a normal 160gb 2.5" SATA.

If anyone can dig up some prices it would be appreciated.

yea thats the other thing i was thinking. i know these 2.5" guys dont usually come too cheap so im curious to see the price point on these new drives will be

[ShadowMagios]

When they release the price or when i can find a retailer selling it il post again with the price....

[Billybobbean]

There was an article in this months issue of the Official playstation Magazine where they take out the default HDD for the PS3 and replace it with a 120GB model, its very easy to do so I would figure that it was made so that drive would easily be changable since in the future there is no doubt that more space will be required. I wouldnt be surprised if "official HDDs" are released to help people choose

[Dj-X]

ok guys i dont know if this will help anyone but the 2.5 in hard disk i found runs about 74 dollars to 119 dollars the website i found them at is.. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...Sort=3&Recs=10 ... hope this helps someone and if it does please also tell me if these certain ones will work with the PS3

[nico1982]

I dunno ... For Oblivion to use 4 GB of CACHE makes me think other wise and i be theres thousands of files in there not just one BIG one.....

I'll try to explain further. The problem is how you access data. I bet most of those 4GBytes are needed once or twice per session, or in a streaming fashion: once you read a data, it's unlikely that you need it again anytime soon, so there is no point of putting it in the buffer. The rather small amount of data you have to access very often, will comfortably fit on those 128-256 MB, if they are not already in main memory. You will see little benefit from larger amount of memory. All-flash storage would be absolutely better, but this is not what those flash modules are.

Moreover, the use of the flash memory in those hybrid disk seems to be limited to a WRITE cache. If this is the case, they are even less useful.

Ciao

[takuya]

@Jikoo
Swapping th HDD is very easy its even in your ps3's instruction manual


Quote:
Are you sure? IIRC, Vista need a dedicated driver. Unless the flash memory operation is trasparent to the disk access, the PS3 need those disk to be supported in the firwmare.
I thought that was to use the ReadyBoot. So Windows Dumps the start-up info in the cache and when you next turn it on windows boots up lightning quick.

Il have to do some research to make sure im not mistaken tho...

ReadyBoost is entirely different. ReadyBoost is a USB 2.0 highspeed flash drive system that is used as a pagefile replacement. Frequently used data is copied to the flash drive (while also written to the HDD pagefile - for duplication in case the flash drive is removed). When in place, the frequently used data from the flash drive pagefile is used because its faster than reading from the HDD when the PC is under high load situations. This allows program launches and other data to be grabbed quicker than waiting for the HDD to read it. It requires a specific set of performace requisites from the flash drive and Vista (obviously).

These new hybrid hard drives are slightly similar in operation, in that frequent info is cached on the flash area, but that flash area is small in comparison to a dedicated ReadyBoost USB drive. They also take drivers and compatibility with the OS in order to work. In short, these drives will not bring anything to the table in PS3 drive performance. If they are 10k RPM drives, then sure, that will be great for increasing the read speeds over say a 7200 RPM drive, but without the PS3 OS supporting the flash portions of the hybrid drives via drivers and such, there will be no performance gains over a regular drive.

[ShadowMagios]

I did more research on the HHDD and they require a driver to put the NAND Flash to use ... That blows...
Changing Thread name...

[Beemer]

Anyone know the price of one of these drives? Are they going to be cheaper or more expensive then the ones on the market now? I'm guessing more expensive but ya never know.

[Major Ocelot]

*Bump*
I would also like to know if these are recommended by hardware buffs as it sounds like they decrease loading times by a lot. But to clarify, would this mean that Motorstorm would load a lot faster than its slow self? If so then I am sold. Also on the price what would be the price range for the best of the best of these, or should I wait until they are improved upon.

[ShadowMagios]

If they make a HHDD that runs the Cache technology invisibly to any OS (doesn't require a special driver), then yes. and i dont know if MotorStorm uses the HDD to cache info.

[kuku]

You're thinking of the wrong thing.

it doesn't really decrease load times. It's mainly a power saving technique.

These drives are main going to be used in laptops where it can save you as much as 10% in over all power usage, and 20% in heat generation.

There is really no way to increase the speed very much because the amount is too small to be effective.

It can increase bootup times. There's a difference there. It's like the old ram disk trick. Only on the HDD.

But you are not going to beat any old cheaper model HDD.

I'm not sure how this whole thing became an OMFG, I can double my speed hype...it's unrealistic. It's like having more RAM only slower. It's an old trick used in a new way.

[Cloak]

being that it is a SATA, chances are, it'll work...