Friend of mine got a model to test with vista recently. It's actually a SATA extension with a bunch of extra commands to talk to the flash. I couldn't get him to cough up specs...

OMG, Brad, you're in Moscow now, what are you writing about? 8-)

I remember WAY back in the day you making a post about not making bigger faster CPUs, but making them smaller and cooler. You said the same thing about HDs too. It made sense back then it makes sense now. Seems pretty silly that SOMEONE hasn't done something like this before. Especially with the cost of memory at an all time low.

It doesn't even have to be super FAST memory, just enough to keep the heads from having to spin around those platters.

Shouldn't it have more memory before it's fun? I can see it might help startup a little, but how often do you startup the computer anyway (vs just going to sleep). Flash memory isn't that fast *and* wears out too fast to update frequently anyway. I can see the potential for spinning down the disk for longer, but come on. Boring.

The article somewhat confuses the traditional (fast) cache memory on the disks with the new flash memory too, so let me also point out how more real (cache) memory would be a waste because the bandwidth to the disk is much faster than the disks anyway.

I largely agree - for desktops - the main potential seems to be in power-saving for laptops, that can leave the HD spun down most of the time, spinning up only to flush the flash cache.

I fear that you answered your own question.

why has it taken so long?

I bet the "HHD" just shows up as two SATA devices, one typical disk, and one flash, and all the magic is in Vista, not in the drive's controller.

Though actually you might be mistaken on the seecond point - that would be the Right Thing, but I bet that for backwards compatibility they've put the smarts in the controller where they can't be upgraded.

Ideally it'd do both somehow.... do the magic itself for legacy OSes, or expose it as two devices if the OS can do it smarter.