Intel’s Robson Boosts Hard Drive Performance

Anytime hard drive performance can be improved, geek ears go up all over the world. Well, better put those ears up, kids. Because Intel has one option that is going to give back some performance vs taking it away.

Accessing a disk drive is hundreds of times slower than accessing main system memory. Flash memory is slower than the DRAM used for system memory, but it’s still far speedier than pulling data from rotating magnetic media. If you’ve ever waited for a large game level to load, you’ll know what we mean. There you sit, with the hard drive light flickering, staring at a progress bar on the screen. For this, you’ve paid $50?

But it’s not just a matter of loading applications faster. One of the major sources of battery drain in a notebook PC is its spinning media. If you could get data from a large flash memory cache instead of spinning up the hard drive, you’d save a lot of power. Boot times would speed up substantially, too. Since a flash cache is nonvolatile, powering up from hibernate would be quicker and use less power than coming out of hibernation using the hard drive. Add the fact that hibernation uses less power than standby mode, and you can see the potential for big power savings. Source: ExtremeTech

[tags]hard drive,flash memory,cache,intel’s robson,main system memory[/tags]