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back to article Dual flash and disk desktops

Desktop users want faster boot and app load times just as much as notebook users and dual flash and hard disk drive systems could provide both. Intel and Lenovo announced ThinkPad notebooks at CES last week, featuring both solid state drives (SSD) and hard drives (HDD) with 40GB or 80GB of Intel 310 flash used for storing the …

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  1. ben_myers
    Gates Horns

    Why are we all going nuts about fast boot times?

    Why are we all going nuts about fast boot times, and adding expensive hardware to make a fast boot happen? Has anyone, ANYONE, A-N-Y-O-N-E ever thought about the similarity between a laptop (or even a desktop) coming out of hibernation and the system boot process? What's the difference? Considerable. To load the OS, Windows (or Linux) has to mush though all manner of software modules, test for the presence of hardware, load drivers, and construct links from module to module. To bring an OS out of hibernation, a bootstrap routine needs to load the memory image from a contiguous (or nearly so) area of the hard disc. This is quick, usually just a few seconds. So why not write the same hibernation image to disk when the system is shut down, then load it into memory when the system starts up? An added bonus here is that whatever software was running when the system was shut down (hibernated) is the same software when the system boots up. Voila! Almost instant browser and word processor and spreadsheet. No need to wait for these to load, either.

    The only possible fly in the ointment is that the hardware has changed since the last shutdown. If so, the OS needs to patch up the hardware drivers, not a major deal. Actually, with Windows it may be a major deal, because Windows is such a shabby house of cards. And memory fragmentation plus other instabilities may cause Windows problems. Well, duh! Once the system loads from the hibernation image, clean up the memory. All of this is practical and do-able by software engineers with a modicum of common sense. And it requires no added expensive SSDs to store the OS... Ben Myers

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  2. Shaun 2
    Happy

    Why?

    It's a PC - Unless you've bought something tiny to fit under the telly, it's going to have room, power and ports for multiple drives. Why would you buy a 120GB SSD/Spinny disk, when you could get a nice SSD to boot from and a 2TB drive for storage.......

    Hell - you could get yourself a nice 8 port Areca SAS card with a gig of cache, 4 SSD's and 4 SAS drives, and be a very happy bunny - But few people are that silly................. :)

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    This isn't new...

    Plenty of people have been doing this since SSDs were made available. I have been running a set up of 1 80gb SSD (OS + applications) and 2 500gb HDD (data) for about a year now.

    Boot time is a minor benefit, but the main benefit for me is application loading times. Small apps like a web browser or office applications load instantly, and bigger apps such as Adobe Photoshop barely give you time to read the splash screen loading in about 1-2 seconds.

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