Innovations in Notebook Technologies

Continued from page: 1

Saturday, March 10, 2007

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Hard disks
About two years ago, the first solid state hard drives meant for notebooks and other mobile computers made an appearance. The first one was from
Samsung and boasted a capacity of 32 GB. This came in two form factors: 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch.

The Centrino Duo platform for dual-core Intel notebook processors includes additional power states to control and switch electrical state for each core individually

These disks used SLC (Single Level Cell) and MLC (Multi Level Cell) NAND Flash technology. The speeds of these drives are currently 57 MB/s read and 32 MB/s write with a 1ms latency. Using SSDs (Solid State Drives) like these, one can expect lower power consumption in mobile computers as well as completely avoiding damage or loss due to vibration and shocks. It also reduces the size and weight of the unit compared to a conventional hard drive of similar speed and capacity. The current Samsung SSDs are PATA based and SATA versions are expected soon. SanDisk has also introduced 32 GB 1.8-inch versions of SSDs, and claim to boot Vista in as fast as 35 seconds.

An HHD (Hybrid Hard Disk) is a combination of conventional magnetic hard-disk technology with Flash-based cache to provide both long term and longer-short term storage. The HHD has a non-volatile compact-flash cache 128 to 256 MB buffer that can be accessed faster than conventional volatile cache memory when the disk is powered on. The larger cache (conventional HDDs have a cache of 16 MB or less) allows for more data to be accessed faster, reducing power consumption as well as HDD wear and tear. In HHDs, data is read from and written to the cache memory rather than the magnetic part till the file is finally closed, or the cache fills up and the disk logic removes less used content back to the disk. Vendors can also 'pin' applications or data to the Flash (making sure they are protected from erasure) letting them come up faster. Windows Vista includes a new technology called 'ReadyDrive' to take advantage of such features, letting the system resume from a hibernated state from cache memory rather than the hard disk. As of now, HHDs will work only with Vista. HHDs are scheduled to ship as you read this. This doesn't mean traditional hard disks are vanishing. Vendors are now upping the ante with capacity battles with a flurry of high-capacity releases over the past year. The last time we checked, notebook HDDs could hold 300 GB of data in a 2.5 platter, with the honors going to Fujitsu.

Data protection
Three technologies stand out of the cloud when it comes to mobile data protection-EC2, TPM and anti-shock hard drives. Anti-shock is now standard fare on quite a lot of branded notebooks from the likes of Lenovo and HP. Air-bag cushions guard the hard drive from shocks and violent movement while sensors park the drive heads to prevent physical damage.

TPM is old and has been talked about a lot. There is a chip on the system's motherboard that contains a private key and this is used to encrypt all content on the system's hard disks. You remove the drive and it becomes useless anywhere else. If you try to debug the chip to get the key out, it blows up in defense.

EC2 is from HCL and works on the same lines as other snapshot-based data-recovery systems. There are two forms of EC2 available, one requires
hardware and the other is just software. The hardware version is available only on HCL notebooks and desktops, requiring the bundled EC2 software to take a snapshot as well as recover data. The USP is that EC2 takes just a few seconds to snapshot an 80 GB hard disk with a reasonable amount of data, and it can restore everything back to the last snapshot in less than a minute! Snapshots are taken of the raw hard disk and are independent of any hard disk partitions created. When data goes corrupt or you end up with a system that just does not work, reboot and just after the POST screen, hit the key to start the EC2 Recovery Console. The types of loss it can deal with include deleted files, corrupted files, deleted or corrupted registry entries, deleted and formatted disk partitions, unbootable systems. EC2 cannot currently protect systems with more than one physical hard disk. It can also not protect externally connected storage like USB disks and DAS (Direct Attached Storage) at your systems.

Biometrics
Several kinds of biometric security are available for notebooks today-finger-print, face recognition, retina scanners and even palm vein scanning. Finger print recognition is nothing new. Face recognition and retina scanners work using a standard (though plus 1.3 Mega-pixel would be preferable) Web camera that's attached to the notebook to. Software on the notebook will attempt to locate key points in the photograph taken by the Web cam and match it with previously stored photographs. But, this is only as reliable as the lighting conditions and software quirks as we found when
reviewing the Lenovo 3000 Y500 (in the Reviews in this issue) with face recognition abilities. Similarly, the size of the eye can affect how well a retina scan works for granting access to a notebook. Palm vein scanning is yet another tool of Biometrc security that aims to be better than the rest. While inconsistencies in face recognition, retinal scan and finger printing have been discovered, palm vein scanning is by far the safest.

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