The “Break it Down” Blog

Ars is reporting that Mcell, is releasing hard drives that instead of having Flash memory on them, include a 1GB stick of DDR ram and a on-board controller to manager the ram as a cache.

Something interesting I was reading about with hybrid/flash HDs, is that the on-board memory isn’t just used as a cache, and instead needs direct operating system support to be utilized (the OS needs to see it, and use it as a intermediate storage area). (un)fortunately Vista is the only OS I’m aware of right now that supports it, which may explain why there has been such a slow rollout of hybrid drives with only Samsung and Seagate offering middle-of-the-road drives (1 or 2 models) with Flash memory on them.

My hope is that these Mcell drives automatically manage the on-board memory and just treat it as a giant cache so when requests from the OS come in for files, and it’s a cache hit, load times can max the SATA channel’s bandwidth getting it loaded.

Unfortunately the drives don’t offer much better performance than what is expected, and not as close to the insane performance of SSDs.