Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Thu 24th Jul 2008 09:35 UTC, submitted by amjith
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has an interesting blog entry about how Sun Microsystems will start introducing Nand Flash with ZFS as an enterprise storage solution by the end of this year. With the price of Flash memory already plummeting this could be an economical alternative to the expensive NAS solutions.
Permalink for comment 324349
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2007-07-10
Doesn't harddrives require power in order to retain their data over longer periods of time? With flash, you can take a backup and store it for many years and your data is still there, unaffected.
By contrast, any magnetic storage will require you to re-magnetize them now and then, otherwise you'll lose the ability to distinguish between the bits.
Look at backup tapes for instance, iirc it's recommended to make use of the tapes atleast once a year, if you don't, you may lose bits of data over time.
We did a restore to disk of old tapes that hadn't been used for some 5-6 years and we lost some 20-25% of all the tapes. Even though we used the very same tape unit, the tapes had become unreadable over the years, probably due to not "excercising" the tapes and thus refreshing the magnetized areas.