Hoarding for a Hierarchical Storage Architecture

Despite recent increases in the processing power of handheld computers, often called palmtops, the devices continue to function primarily as personal information organizers. We believe adding mass storage to handheld computers will expand the usefulness of the devices. We propose a storage hierarchy, involving a hard disk and large software controlled flash memory cache, that lowers the power cost of accessing the data from the disk, but retains the storage capacity benefits of the disk. We investigate how the hoarding of files into flash memory during a power abundant docked state can drastically reduce the power consumption of the hard disk.