I spoke with some SanDisk representatives at last night's "CES Unveiled" preview, last night in Manhattan. The company was showing off its Vaulter Disk prototype, a product that the company was, according to one employee, originally going to wait to unveil at CES proper, in January.
However, the CES folks gave the device a 2008 Innovations Design and Engineering award, which meant that if company wanted to showcase something last night, it would have to push the announcement forward by a few months.
The Vaulter Disk is an interesting take on the idea of hybrid drives--a combination of spinning disk and flash-based memory--though SanDisk was quick to repeatedly point out that the Vaulter itself is not actually a hybrid drive itself. The solid-state PCI Express module attaches to a standard hard drive, enhancing boot-up speeds and taking some of the strain off of the CPU by storing and running the computer's OS--the Vaulter itself has only enough memory (8GB or 16GB) to store the OS and a few more pieces of data.
SanDisk is working with OEMs to install the drive on new systems by the beginning of next year. I asked about the possibility of upgrading the OS--say, from XP to Vista--once the system had left the factory, and the SanDisk spokesperson looked at me a bit funny.
The assumption seems to be that all the systems that ship with the device will have Vista installed and won't have a long enough shelf life for users to worry about upgrading to the next version of the OS. I asked her if the same went for SP upgrades, and she seemed confident that those would be fine.
The company was also showcasing a solid-state drive with a 64GB capacity, currently the largest the company manufacturers. It insists that's more than enough storage for the road-warrior set, who are expected to be the largest adopters of the technology in its early stages.
More information on the Vaulter, including OEM partnerships, will be announced at CES.
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November 18, 2007 6:48 PM
This is a step in the right direction, although the flash memory is too low in performance to do enough good for my personal satisfaction.
I suggest a PCIe card based off low cost DDR2 memory that acts as an intelligent cache (both read and write) for hardrives. See these two posts
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2117909
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=83&threadid=2117910
December 2, 2007 11:13 PM
step in the right direction it is. For me, i really do like the concept. The chance of not installing a lot of hdd in my cpu is to die for. Well at least i drop one and substitute it. Cant wait to get my hands on this dismo