Hmmm - after reading up on the new storage bays offered by SUN and plunging into even more detail into the architecture possibilities of ZFS I was struck by an idea for next generation notebooks.
ZFS offers the ability to designate specific volumes as read and write caching devices and while the bigger SSD devices are beyond the budget of mere mortals for primary storage, prices are falling on some of the original devices in the 16-64Gb capacities.
It would be very interesting to take a 64Gb SSD as an embedded option, partitioned into two volumes. Then using ZFS you designate one for read caching, the other for write caching. Now instead of the paltry on disk cache measured in megabytes, you have say 16Gb for each. With the bonus that this is utterly transparent to the OS. Which means all of your applications get a speed boost, yet you don’t have to sacrifice raw capacity as you would still use a regular SATA drive (spinning rust, as Tim Bray calls them). Again, everything is transparent, no fiddling with Photoshop scratch disks or carefully portioning out some data for flash and some for magnetic, just plug and run.
Now I think that this is in some ways similar to the Vista Speed Boost technology that uses USB memory sticks, but that’s only good for read caching as the write performance tends to be pretty pitiful. I don’t expect that Vista will ever permit booting from ZFS so they’ll have to roll their own solution again if they want to offer this kind of performance boost to Windows.
Obviously this will take some space, rendering it all but impossible on the MacBooks but the Pro models share the same basic component set and are physically larger so there might be room to squeeze in a memory card, presented on a SATA interface somewhere. Failing that, there’s always the Optibaysolution. Coupled with a 32Gb OCZ SSD ($130!!!), you have a reasonably priced serious performance booster.
If Snow Leopard permits me a bootable ZFS volume, that’s the first thing on my purchase list as soon as it comes out. Enterprise level storage performance optimization will soon be at hand in your portable.
Wow.
Update: just before drifting off to sleep last night, I just realized the perfect add-on for this would be a mini SSD on an ExpressCard. You pop in an card, the system wakes up and asks you à la Time Machine, “Do you want to use this drive to accelerate your disk performance?”
Update 2: While this is similar to the hybrid drives we’ve been hearing about for some time (but not seeing on the shelves), I prefer this approach since you don’t pay a premium for a complicated disk mechanism and you can easily upgrade portions of your storage without throwing away part of the investment. Running a 250Gb drive today? Upgrade to a 500 Gb model without losing any onboard memory. Plus you can bet that the hybrid approach will be more expensive than a roll your own, and you get to decide just how much you need.