The Myth, Rumor, and Reality of the LifeDrive's Hard Drive

Day Two

By Michael Prost

The LifeDrive has only been out a week and it's already suffered more controversy than any Palm device in recent memory. Almost all of this controversy concerns the LifeDrive's hard drive and the reports that it's causing significant application delays and very long load times.

This has become such a large issue; we've decided to devote the entirety of our 2^nd installment to an examination and explanation of the LifeDrive's hard drive, memory, and the accuracy of claims that the LifeDrive is just not up to speed.

The LifeDrive has all sorts of storage, and keeping track of it all can be a little complicated. In a LifeDrive you'll find 16Mb of ROM storage, 32Mb of NVRAM, and a massive 4GB worth of Hitachi hard drive storage. Additionally you'll find 64Mb of "program memory", which isn't traditional Palm memory, as it resides on fastest sectors of the hard drive.

What you say? The LifeDrive has 32Mb less physical RAM memory than either of Palm's last 2 premium PDA's? Yes, it does. But hold you judgment for just a few minutes, because there is a lot more to this story than a bunch of storage numbers.

Some of you are I'm sure aware of an (in)famous review the LifeDrive recently received by one of the large New York newspapers. The reviewer suggested that each time a LifeDrive program was run, six full seconds would elapse before the application would start. This, purportedly caused by the hard drive having to spin up.

A six second lockout is serious business. And I've tried and tried to reproduce that reported delay. But in all my trying over the past week, I've not once experienced what I would term to be a hard drive spin-up delay. Many other reviewers haven't been able to reproduce this condition either.

Did the newspaper reviewer have a buggy pre-release version? I doubt PalmOne would send such a device out to a major reviewer. So why did that esteemed newspaper reviewer suffer those delays? I've got a pretty good idea what happened. But first we'll have to go through a few basics of how the LifeDrive handles memory.

In previous Palm devices, applications were stored in RAM. One of the LifeDrive's big differences is that it uses a "virtual" piece of (non) RAM in order to store applications. 64Mb of the fastest hard drive sectors are permanently assigned as program memory.

When accessed by the OS, this 64Mb is recognized as if it were RAM storage area, even though it's not. So when a standard program is HotSynced to the LifeDrive, it is actually copied to a portion of the hard drive instead of RAM. Of course, reading, writing, and everything else about RAM happens a lot faster than it does on a hard drive. So one can plainly see the LifeDrive's memory setup has potential for problems and delays

The LifeDrive doesn't rely entirely on the hard drive to run applications. In fact, the most important part of the LifeDrive's memory architecture isn't the hard drive at all, it's the cache. The cache is the 32Mb of real, honest to goodness RAM. Unlike previous Palm devices, the user cannot directly access this RAM. This RAM is used exclusively by the operating system as a fast cache.

This sort of memory and storage architecture has been around for years. It's called Virtual Memory and it's a part of nearly every personal computer operating system released in the past decade. Virtual memory can be good and it can be bad. When used properly, it can greatly speed a user experience. Used poorly, it can be the cause of massive delays.

In the LifeDrive's virtual memory scheme, each time a non-core application or data is accessed, it is copied from the hard drive to this 32Mb of RAM cache. And the application or data is kept there until the cache fills up. When the cache fills, the least used application is removed and replaced with the newer app. Of course, that removed application still resides in the program memory. But the next time that application is accessed, it will have to be copied from the hard drive back to the RAM cache once again.

So loading these applications the first time can create a small delay. And depending on the size of the application, I've experienced delays of 1 to 2 seconds. But once that application has been copied to the cache, it loads almost instantly. And if that application is used all the time, it's likely to stay in the cache until you shut off the unit, (more on this later.)

Lastly, there is another memory component of the LifeDrive; the 16Mbs of system ROM. This memory is read-only, and is used to store the Palm OS and some of the core applications.

Which brings us back to the New York newspaper review. The reviewer clearly stated that even core applications of calendar, contacts, tasks, and such were taking six seconds to load from the hard drive.

Well, that is quite an odd statement, as none of those applications are even stored on the hard drive. Each of those are in fact, stored in the very fast solid-state ROM of the LifeDrive. No drive access is necessary to load the applications themselves, although their data is stored on the hard drive, making it necessary to load that data to cache, once.

I have a heavily booked outlook calendar synced with my LifeDrive, and after a restart, it loads all of my meetings and such in under 2 seconds. After that initial load, navigating through the calendar dates is instantaneous.

So where do the big delays come from? I suspect they are not hard drive spin-up delays at all, but delays caused by applications. Specifically, a pair of applications included with every LifeDrive; each of which can occasionally cause just such a delay.

The first is LifeDrive's standard viewer for photos and videos, an application simply called Media. It is a newer application from Palm and does suffer a few teething pains. One of them comes to the fore when a very large number of photos or videos are present. In such a case, Media can take a few seconds to open. I gather the software needs this time to index the graphic files and produce thumbnails of them. I've even seen the thumbnail files when poking around in Drive-Mode. I am somewhat surprised anyone would find this delay surprising, a similar delay happens when viewing image thumbnails in virtually any desktop OS.

Was it the loading of thumbnails that caused the reviewer's delay. Well, in a video included with the review, there is only a single instance of the delay demonstrated. And not surprisingly, it shows a delay when entering the Media application . . .

Is this something Palm should address? Perhaps. But is it cause not to purchase a LifeDrive? Hardly. There are an abundance of other media players and viewers available for Palm devices, some of them, like TCPMP are completely free.

The other application that can cause occasional delays is Documents to Go. After loading some especially large Power Point presentations, I've noticed a multi-second delay while the application exits. I suspect this has nothing to do with the hard drive having spun down, but is just the nature of Documents to Go and it's real-time document conversion engine.

Documents to Go performs the amazing function of allowing users to store, load, alter, and save native Microsoft documents. Microsoft documents can get rather large, and when exiting multi-megabyte documents, I have noticed a 5 to 8 second delay when exiting the application. I gather the application is saving this large document to the drive. Once again, an entirely explainable delay, one which has absolutely nothing to do with hard drive spin-up.

Now I do share one gripe with the newspaper reviewer, he points out that the RAM cache seems to empty every time the unit is turned off. That's right, for whatever reason, when the unit is turned off, the RAM cache certainly seems to clear.

Palm suggests that the cache is made of the same sort of non-volatile RAM as is on the T5. NV RAM doesn't use power when the system is off, so why this cache would clear when the unit is turned off is a real mystery. I suppose it could be nothing more than the applications unnecessarily thinking they need to reload after a system start. Whatever the reason, addressing this issue should be a Top Priority for PalmOne.

I think the real problem we're seeing is that the nature of the LifeDrive's RAM cache makes torturing it rather simple. Just run 20 or 30 different applications in a row, never repeating any of them. And as the 20th or 25th application overflows from the RAM cache, each of following application will always have to load from the hard drive. Not that they'll take a lot of time to load, but they will take more time than a RAM based system.

Fortunately for Palm users, the LifeDrive works much better in real world scenarios with real users than it ever will in contrived torture tests. No, the LifeDrive doesn't have as much RAM as the last few Palm devices, and it may take 1 or 2 seconds longer to initially execute some applications. But the other features of the LifeDrive make it by far, the most powerful Palm OS device to have been released.

For those of you considering a LifeDrive, but still a little concerned with the potential for speed issues, I suggest trying the device out for yourself. More stores are carrying it every day, some won't even mind if you beam over a few files. I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Coming in part 3 of or LifeDrive review: LifeDrive Display Screen Problems, Issues with Audio, and More...