UMPC Dream Feature: Suspend to Flash

While at CES, I had the pleasure of talking to Super Talent: Makers of quality memory and flash storage devices. They were on my "to see" list as potential storage solution providers for ultra-mobile PCs. Samsung and Sony already are looking at SSD (Solid State Disk) technology for their upcoming super-portables, but 32-64 gig SSD drives come at a very high premium. I started thinking....

What are the marked disadvantages of ultra-mobile PCs as go-everywhere devices?

• Speed: CPU power must be cut for heat and power needs.
• Battery life: Small batteries offer small power durations.
• Boot-up time: To use a UMPC, you must wait a while to get to a prompt.

SSD equipped UMPCs offer greater speed, greater battery life, and faster boot-up time but are VERY expensive and offer lower storage ceilings. For example: Samsung's Q1 SSD comes with a 32 gig Flash drive and retails for $2430 whereas it's cousin has a 40 gig spindle drive for only $999.

Then it occured to me: Why not make a hybrid? To understand the advantage of this, we must first know more about power saving modes The choices are:

• Off. The system is powered down and must enter a full boot-up cycle to resume operation. The boot-up cycle takes time and sucks down battery life with random reads across the disk. Batteries can be changed during this state.
  
• Standby: The computer is in a very low power state where power is still applied to the RAM. The computer's state is saved in RAM so resuming from Standby is very fast, but power loss "crashes" the computer which then must go through a normal boot-up cycle. Potential data loss is high.
• Hibernate: All the computer's RAM is written to the hard drive so the state is saved. The computer then "tags" itself as "in hibernate" and powers off. On the next power-up cycle, the computer reads the hibernate tag and reads the contents of the previous system state back into memory. When a computer is in hibernate mode, it takes no battery power and only has the long disk read and write and the beginning and end of that mode as battery drain. The hard drive must have free space equal to the contents of the RAM in order to enter this state. During Hibernate, batteries can be changed without data loss.

My dream: A UMPC with a gig of RAM and a gig of dedicated high-speed FLASH would only cost dollars more on the component side and maybe $100 more on the retail side. The integrated flash will allow users to quickly enter and exit hibernate mode. In addition, users would have the option of cheap mass storage hard drives and still not worry about having to maintain free space for hibernation mode. The Flash drive could even be used for Windows Vista ReadyBoost, if the user so desires.

The "instant-on UMPC" is, of course, the ultimate solution. However, the solution above can be accomplished with existing components and technology and the retail cost would be far overshadowed by the feature. Thoughts?

*edit* One commenter mentioned that hybrid HDDs (hard drives with a gig of NAND Flash memory) are about to be released and that these drives save commonly accessed data in the Flash memory. He also suggested that the above will be accomplished by Windows Vista SuperFetch, ReadyDrive, and ReadyBoost. This is not quite accurate:

• SuperFetch pre-loads commonly accesed files into memory and will be wonderful on "large-RAM" desktop machines, but of limited use on the ultra-mobile. It also has nothing to do with the post above.
• ReadyDrive is a function that allows PCs with hybrid drives to boot up faster by using the NAND flash on the hybrid drive, but only if the boot information is stored in that NAND Flash. The drive makes the decision on what is stored in that Flash. For information stored on the drive, the seek time is greatly increased because the drive must spin up again.
• ReadyBoost is a caching system in which an external flash storage device (USB stick, CF card, SD card) can be used to store commonly accessed data from the hard drive. This can be used in conjunction with the post above (while the machine is operating, the internal "suspend to Flash" memory is used as ReadyBoost storage) but not as a replacement for a sleep state.

While SuperFetch, ReadyDrive, and ReadyBoost are great technologies and worth watching, they do not dedicate Flash memory specifically for a "sleep state" for the machine. It would be nice if it could be configured to do so.