Hybrid-Disk Drive Technology Class presented by KnowledgeTek

August 18-20, 2010: Longmont, CO

This course provides an in-depth look into the technology of disk drives and how they are designed, manufactured, and used. Much more than an overview, the course teaches the issues and tradeoffs involved in increasing the capacity and performance, while lowering the cost, of today’s rapidly evolving drives. The course discusses the latest state-of-the-art disk drive engineering techniques - including the recording process including perpendicular recording, heads and media, read/write channels, servo systems and the use of flash in hybrid drive architecture. The course material is drawn from textbooks, industry specifications, and extensive practical experience, and provides valuable details and information unavailable elsewhere. If you need a better understanding of the technology behind this exciting industry, this course is the place to get it.

In this class we will look at the performance of flash memory, compare it to hard drives and see how it is being utilized in hard drives (hybrid drive). Flash performance will be compared with hard drive performance and the issues that affect that performance discussed. We will cover the structure of flash memory and how basic functions like read, write and erase are performed and how data moves in and out of the flash memory. We will also cover the physical characteristics of this type of memory and how improvement in terms of capacity/cost as well as performance and reliability will be achieved in the future. Vista is the first operating system to develop specific features to maximize performance using hybrid drives. Those features will be discussed in detail. The interface (ATA) has added a new command set to utilize the capability of hybrid drives. These new commands will be discussed as well as the type of ECC that is used. In summary, hybrid drives offer the potential for significant improvement in system performance. The amount of improvement achieved is dependent on how well the operating system takes advantage of these capabilities and the type of data that is being processed. We willexplore those issues as well as issues that impact reliability.