Thought experiment: HDD with flash read-cache?

[GullLars]

I see i partially answered you there audienceofone whitout seing your post :P
What Intel did to it's G1 customers can be simplified as burning them, you don't get away with that many times before people start to boycott you...


Regarding the timescope in wich this type of cache/hybrid sollution (not really a hybrid though with a single chip, a hybrid would be more like 4 chips with NCQ for 20K IOPS read and 160-240MB/s seq read), it will depend on what segment it's done in.
It can have a 5 year lifetime in "green" drives as a power-saving meassure while at the same time increasing average random IOPS. (3-5 generations/versions of drives)
For "black" drives it will likely have a 2-3 year lifespan for higher capacity drives as a IOPS boost for capacities that are too expencive as pure SSDs. (2-3 generations/versions)
Used as a f.ex. a more real SSD-HDD hybrid with 4 NAND chips in parallell with NCQ it could have a lifetime of 2-3 years as well. (2-3 generations/versions) Such a device could also do random write caching, and/or burst write boosting, as well as seq read boosting of large hot files.


EDIT: @anvil, if i remember correctly, it used only a small amount of flash, and required OS support, wich was not ready for it. What i'm talking about here are "true" cache/hybrid drives that are "plug n play" under any OS.