MSFT specs for new hard drives

Interesting article in Infoworld: bq. Not content with telling hardware manufacturers what they must do, now Microsoft Corp. is informing disk makers that they have to make read and write speeds faster. It even tells them how to do it -- add flash memory cache. bq. The problem is processors wait for disk data reading/writing to end before embarking on their next task. The main delay is waiting for the disk head to be moved to the right part of the disk. By trying to anticipate which data is going to be needed next and pre-fetching that into cache memory in the drive unit the disk wait can be radically reduced. Another cool thing is here: bq. An added benefit for notebook users, the software giant adds, is that writes to disk could be batched up and done every ten minutes or so. Microsoft has produced its own tests which show average notebook users wrote under 100MB of data every ten minutes. So by doing what it says, it could possibly reduces notebook power needs, and so increases the life of a drive. Looks good. I would be a bit worried about the lifetime for the Flash memory (they have a limited number of read/write cycles) because I do a lot of disk intensive work but if this was able to be field-replaced, I would be very happy. Current disk caches are in the 2MB to 8MB size - peanuts. It would be cool to have a gig or two.