The personal computer is a remarkable piece of evolutionary engineering, isn’t it? The latest PC on my desk, clocking its Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 processor at over 2 GHz, fills my bill for fast Web surfing and Photoshop artwork manipulation, and even makes short work of small circuit simulations. Best of all, it set me back less than a kilobuck. By all commercial standards, a PC like mine is rather up to date and state-of-the-art.
Or is it?
Just like the 8088-equipped personal computers most folks cut their teeth on back in the 1980s, the Achilles Heel of this machine is its rotating machinery. The box is endowed with a 3.5-in. floppy disk (for office-to-basement Sneaker Net runs), a CD-ROM/DVD drive that sounds like a banshee at midnight when it revs up, and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive.
The Seagate drive, spinning at 7200 rpm, offers huge capacity, low head seek times, and splendidly fast transfer rates. I must admit I get an indescribable sort of fulfillment and corporeal feedback as I listen to its internals as they smoothly shift gears. But, all those moving parts are -- ultimately -- worrisome.
This Core 2 Duo machine isn't all that much different from my old 8088 machine with its 10-Mbyte drive. Sooner or later (hopefully the latter) that ol' hard disk is destined to crash. It's not a matter of if, but when (fortunately its MTBF spec is phenomenally long).
What I'd really like on my desk is a PC with no moving parts. USB and FireWire Flash memory sticks are a move in the right direction. Some of the newest so-called hybrid hard disks are pretty cool, too.
These disconcertingly quiet storage subsystems use a combination of Flash and rotating machinery. Seagate and Samsung Windows Vista ReadyDrive drives come to mind. ReadyDrive is a feature of Vista that enables hybrid drives and Flash caches (such as Intel's Turbo Memory) to rapidly boot, power-up after hibernation, and cut dissipation.
Seagate and Samsung SerialATA ReadyDrives operate with a minimum of 128 Mbyte of Flash R/W cache coupled to the actual motor-driven storage medium. The Samsung hybrid uses a system-on-a-chip, too. The SoC packs both the HDD and SDRAM controllers, a NAND Flash controller, and Agere's read channel silicon IP. The Samsung SoC additionally integrates the smarts to make it all play together, in the form of a dual-core Advanced RISC Machines ARM7/ARM9 controller and firmware. Very nice, especially if you're a vertically-integrated company like Samsung that makes both hard disk drives and the chips for them.
Yes, the price per Mbyte of rotating disk versus Flash, and the file sizes that can be accommodated by each, are factors to be considered when comparing hard drives to solid-state memory. Yes, the cost of Flash will continue to drop. Yes, hard disk drive technology will always get cheaper, too. But wouldn't it be great if all the circuitry in a PC were static, and all of the storage were solid-state?
If so equipped, you could turn your machine off at any time, and return to a point in the processing where you left off, without re-booting, initializing, or any other such power- and time-consuming manipulation. Kind of like the endearingly friendly Kyocera-designed Radio Shack Model 100 portable of the mid-1980s, with its 32-kbyte of battery-backed SRAM, eh? Remember, everything old is new.
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