Details have emerged this week that Microsoft may be planning to make it mandatory for laptop manufacturers who want to support its operating system to install hybrid flash drives. A Microsoft document specifying requirements for flash storage led to speculation that hybrid storage would be mandatory for all Vista laptops, from June 2007, but this has been denied by Microsoft.
MS killing every momentum it ever had?
But at the sametime, it’s forcing the technology forward toward reliability and acceptance by increasing the demand and the need. What need do consumers have for these drives? They would have to normally trickle in very slowly through the Alienware machines and high end VAIOs, but instead Vista badging will mean much wider availability.
Actually, laptops with all flash or with flash/disk have already been announced, and I believe at least one will reach the market this year, before Vista ships.
If I had any modpoints to give out (whatever happened to those anyway?) I’d mod you up.
I’m surprised to see this rumour gain ground, really, as the document in question specified IF hybrid is included, THEN there are certain requirements on the hybrid drive.
The OSNews summary should be appended with this information as it is clearly misleading now.
I believe it’s a requirement to be certified, like “Vista Premium” or something along those lines. It is not a requirement to be able to use Vista itself.
Out of curiosity are you familiar with what the certification process entails, ie . from the vendor and MS point of view? Also I have heard Microsoft charge a lot to certify computers “Vista Ready” or something not too dissimiliar.
I was just wondering do people who go out and buy “Vista Ready” hardware end up paying a cost for Vista tested even though they may never intend to use Vista.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/6/14/4328
This new hybrid drive technology seams to be a good thing, less power consumption, less sensitive to chock,.. but as being new technology, it will most likely be expensive in the beginning.
This could be a problem to Microsoft. Today larger share of all computers sold for office use are laptops. This means that prices need to be kept down. Its very different thing to buy a few overpriced laptops for the excecutives and top salse person than to buy them for the whole work force.
This means that companies might increase their interest for less expensive hardware. Depending on how expenisve these new hardrives will be, that less expensivie hardware might well come from Apple, and they are not going to run Vista.
I recall reading a number of times that flash memory “wears out” quickly if you do an excessive amount of writing to it (reading from flash memory apparently does no harm).
Considering how “busy” a modern operating is writing scratch files, I wonder just how long these hybrid flash drives will last?
This is different from writing to dynamic RAM. RAM chips do not wear out from writing, though unlike flash memory, RAM loses its data when the power is shut off. So from a durability standpoint, wouldn’t a better approach be just to have more RAM and use it as a cache?
Edited 2006-06-16 23:08
———–Considering how “busy” a modern operating is writing scratch files, I wonder just how long these hybrid flash drives will last?————
I don’t see this as being an issue, regardless of the OS. They will take into account for that, and the software will be smart enough to recognize the cache from the disk and the virtual memory won’t be placed on the cache.
Count on it. It’d be bad business to do it any differently. MS is bad, but they’re not that bad. 😛
although they keep referring to it as flash it isn’t these drives have sticks of regular memory with battery backup.
We heard a while back that vista needed to be re-written and MS denied it. After a few weeks, it was confirmed true.
Why wouldn’t this be the same?
Also, have you seen Vista’s requirements? This thing puts a whole new meaning to the term bloatware. MS is gonna have a hard enough time getting Vista out the door as it is without optimizing this thing, and on anandtech.com they are showing how vista boots slower than XP. So it makes sense.
If they can bully the market in this fashion, it’s just one less thing they have to do.
“increase boot speed” has just been scratched off of the to-do list for windows vista.
Maybe if they bully a few more people they could actually meet the current deadline, no?
You mean in 2004? I don’t remember hearing about it before hand. I only remember the rumor that 60% of it needed to be rewritten that turned out to be false.
They could only require this for the logo program.
Meaning if you want to have the Vista logo on your laptop, you must have a hybrid drive.
It is not required for install.
It’s not even required for the logo program. The linked story points this out, in fact.
…but what happened to MRAM? If that technology came to the rescue, none of this hybrid crap would’ve been necessary, and you’d have a much bigger space to work with.