A hybrid hard drive demonstrated by Samsung at
Microsoft’s WinHec hardware developers conference last week could
herald more efficient notebook computers.
Samsung’s drive aims to significantly reduce the boot time of a
PC, as well as improve performance. It features solid state flash
memory as well as traditional hard drive platters and uses several
Windows Vista facilities designed to enhance system
performance.
One is Super Fetch, which stores at least 1Gbyte of frequently
accessed data in flash memory, and possibly more.
Another feature is Ready¬drive, which takes advantage of hybrid
hard disc technology.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said Super Fetch eliminates
bottlenecks caused by repeatedly returning to the disc for
information.
“Non-volatile memory allows us to improve performance fairly
dramatically in lots of cases, and even reduce power by letting the
disc spin down when we are able to get the storage mostly off of
that Ram/non-volatile memory combination,” he said.
One disadvantage of the hybrid drives are that the price per
gigabyte of a solid state hard drive is about 30 times higher than
that of a traditional hard drive. In addition, its capacity is
currently limited to about 30Gbytes.
Microsoft tool aims to avoid Vista security
clashes
A tool to help developers ensure their software does not clash
with security features in Windows Vista was unveiled at last week’s
WinHec conference.
The Standard User Analyser tool helps developers write programs
that will work with Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) feature,
which enables a PC to run with fewer user privileges to help
improve security.
During its early testing of Vista, Microsoft found that half of
the test programs it ran with the operating system could not cope
with the UAC feature.
The company said it aims to make sure the stumbling blocks are
removed before the operating system is released in November.