Brian's Brain

Two years ago, when I first saw Microsoft's flash memory-inclusive Hybrid Hard Drive concept at WinHEC, I was skeptical. Last year, when I saw it again, I remained skeptical....not of the approach's power-saving and performance-boosting technical merits, mind you, but of the business ramifications. It looked like a great deal for Samsung, the most visible champion of the approach, who not coincidentally has both HDD and NAND flash memory product lines in-house. But what of the other HDD suppliers....how would they cost-effectively gain access to the memory they'd need to translate the Hybrid Hard Drive concept into reality?

Flash forward a year, and I admit I'm more bullish on the Vista-only approach (due to enhanced ATA command set requirements), now called ReadyDrive. What's changed? Supply and demand, for one (big thing). In my year-ago writeup, I failed to point out that, of course, Samsung isn't the only HDD supplier with captive NAND flash capacity. Toshiba's a big player in HDDs (notable in small form factor units for laptops). I'm not sure if Hitachi, who several years ago spun out its now-suspended AND flash memory program into Renesas, still has captive access to the technology or not. Fujitsu's HDD group, similarly, may have preferred access to Spansion's capacity. And a number of other suppliers have also entered the NAND space, notably Hynix, the Intel/Micron partnership, and STMicroelectronics.

Lots of supply has come on line, with more coming soon. And with iPod growth rumoured to be slowing, those suppliers are aggressively cutting prices and courting new business opportunities in order to keep their fabs humming at full capacity. Plenty of supply for all, apparently; Seagate (who just acquired Maxtor) was also showing off a ReadyDrive prototype at this year's show. ReadyDrive isn't the only flash cache approach; Microsoft's SuperFetch algorithms intelligently and on-the-fly place frequently used information into the fastest-available memory; the speediest areas of a HDD platter, for example, or (notably for this example) a USB flash drive (in conjunction with Microsoft's ReadyBoost technology).

And then there's Intel's 'Robson' technology, first demonstrated at last fall's Developer Forum. Instead of placing flash memory in the HDD or within a removeable USB module, Robson employs a flash cache that's located on the motherboard and is directly-acccessible by the system's core logic. Helps explain Intel's recent NAND embrace, doesn't it?

Finally, Samsung's pushing the flash envelope to the limit, kicking out the rotating magnetic storage platters and unveiling fully solid state up-to-32 GByte HDDs (reminiscent of the early-90s project I revealed in last year's post). The drives will first appear in Samsung's Q1 'Origami' tablet PC and Q30 12.1" subcompact notebook beginning next month. They won't be cheap; switching to a SSD (solid-state drive) will boost the Q30's pricetag by $900, for example. But the ruggedness, form factor, power consumption and performance improvements will be compelling. And using my prior experience as a probable guide to Samsung's aspirations, the SSD will allow Samsung to ship bad-bit, bad-block, multi-level-cell and other 'marginal' NAND material that it might otherwise need to discard.

The degree to which high density flash memory muscles its way onto the PC platform, and from there into PC-derived embedded systems, will be fun to watch. How are you placing your bets?