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What do we get from all this hybrid integration? Lower power consumption, for starters. Disk reads and writes from flash allow the hard disk to stay in a power-saving state with the spindle stopped. Samsung's Dan Barnetson estimates a 9% lower consumption overall. On a laptop, the power savings could add up to an hour of additional battery life.
Faster boot and resume is another advantage. The first 3 to 5 seconds after initially powering up a PC are spent spinning up hard drive platters and synchronizing heads before the boot process can begin. Booting straight from the flash cache eliminates this latency without sacrificing disk performance: Flash can nearly saturate the SATA protocol's 1.6 GB/sec throughput. Working models using Intel's Robson cache have been able to shorten boot time down to less than half a minute. It's the same story for resuming from either shutdown or suspend modes. Critical data is written to the flash cache before your laptop goes to sleep, hibernates, or powers off. Upon resume, it's available instantaneously.
