[Nottingham] HDDs, SSDs, system speedups (Was: Nottingham Digest, Vol 300, Issue 8)

[Martin]

Richard Ward wrote:
> tony atkins wrote:
>> boring
[---]
> 
>> 64bits + sata drive and you are cooking
> 
> Now, sata drives *are* brilliant. When I got my first it felt like the 
> biggest single jump in speed I'd experienced from upgrading a part since 
> I first bought a Hardware T&L graphics card. Though its possible the 
> drive I had prior to that was just rubbish. Also the cables are much 
> nicer than the horrible old grey ribbon cables. And no finger hurting 
> molexes (molices?) to worry about.

The next big jump is to go all solid-state with SSDs or whatever 
incarnation of flash storage or whatever.

Note that the first generation of SSDs were crap. The present generation 
look a bit better. The way to go is with a revamped SSD controller that 
*transparently* implements RAID0/1/10 across multiple flash chips and 
with intelligent wear levelling. A big plus will be gained when 
filesystems also report to the SSD when sectors become free for reuse.

The next jump is to have a really clever controller that directly 
implements the filesystem on the SSD for you...

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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