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.
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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.
Member since:2006-07-30
I still think he shouldn't have mentioned HDDs and RAM in the same breath. It's more than just a little misleading since the amount of energy needed to keep the information differs by many orders of magnitude.
Actually, I think he was alluding to the fact that you have to spin up a HDD in order to read data from it and that requires energy. I don't work in a datacenter but I'd imagine they keep the platters spinning 24/7 to guarantee low latency and avoid wearing out the drives too fast. IIRC, a spin up/spin down is far more harmful to a HDD than running continuously.
Member since:
2006-07-30
Well, I found these sentences rather odd:
"Flash is very fast at reading and writing data, like DRAM [...]But unlike either alternative, Flash requires no power to remember data."
Last time I checked RAM was about 100x faster than Flash and HDDs still had higher burst speeds and didn't require power to keep data - only for reads and writes.
I guess he could have said "For the typical use case (lots of small, random writes and reads) Flash is faster and more efficient than HDDs".
Of course, that doesn't sound nearly as snappy