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Getting Rid of the Disks
Kneht writes "Dan's Data has an interesting article on what it would cost to get rid of your HDDs and replace them with SSDs because hard drives suck. Several aspects are examined, such as required UPS, compact flash, etc. Read the article and you may get a new appreciation for your lowly 7200rpm drive."
Funny, I was just thinking that I should start using 120GB disks as my removable media.
Right now, hard drives are the right cost/benefit compromise. Could they be better? Yes. Would it cost a lot more? Yes. When the second changes, let me know.
I don't understand the hard drive bashing. Sure, it isn't as fast as DDR, but it's faster than any other storage media... It's not only faster, but cheaper as well.
In addition, I've had many power supplies and entire motherboards die in the same period as my hard drives have been operating. The best part of all is that they have very obvious signs when they are beginning to die, as well.
Hard drives are not the fastest or most reliable piece in you computers, but they are definately not the worst or slowest. Who here can find ECC DDR RAM for anywhere near $1/GB?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But quoth the article, "If your operating system's virtual memory management isn't all that it might be (...)".
So if your OS sucks (I'd insert an example, but it's too obvious), then RAM based swap files could speed things up. If you OS does not suck, then it would be utterly stupid.
And speaking of OS that don't suck, I upgraded to 512mb ram half a year ago, and Linux hasn't done a disk write since. Love that cache.
Seriously, I have IDE and SCSI drives that are about 10 years old (capacity is obviously small - in the 200 - 500mb range) and have almost no bad sectors; they still do a reliable job in routers and other boxes that don't require a lot of storage. Meanwhile, newer drives of 2Gb or larger regularly require replacements. Then, there's the problem of recent drive capacities being too large for the BIOSes of my "deprecated" computers, not to mention SCSI connector standards that change more often than the MTV Top 10.
The real problem, for an end-user, though, is the excessively generous storage capacities; as Cringely once pointed out, unless you are a graphic artist, your personal data probably fits well within 500Mb of storage. Why the hell is it that the smallest drives I can purchase nowadays are around 30Gb (120Gb for SCSI), at a time when my data storage needs still have not exceeded that 500Mb per user quota? And, no, my workstations do not suddenly have a use for larger drives either.
One cannot help but notice how manufacturer warranties reflect the lower quality, as well. Where we used to have 5 year warranties (which, in practice, meant that the drive actually performs well for about 10 years), current offerings are guaranteed for 1 year and last exactly that. There's been several recent cases e.g. with IBM's glass drives, where a replacement is required within 6 months from purchase.
I don't know about you, but I have better things to do than constantly wasting money on purchasing replacement drives and time on reinstalling everything on the new drive, only to find out that the BIOS cannot use such large drives, and cursing that I had to purchase a drive whose capacity is exactly 100 times what I can use.
Message to drive manufacturers: Gimme reliable and quiet 2 - 4Gb drives, using the good old 50-pin connectors in both IDE and SCSI flavours, but providing all the modern refinements of Ultra DMA100, etc. and guaranteed for 5 years or more. Make them affordable too. We don't want any more stinky throw-away media storage, thanks you.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
My personal data?
Let's list some common consumer appliances that offload data to the home computer:
mp3: 1MB/min of audio
video from digital video cameras: Lots of GB here
digital photos: getting bigger all the time.
DIVX video: almost a gig per movie.
Video Game: 2 gigs of space, easy.
PVR: the more space the merrier.
So seriously, what are you smoking?
In the old days, there were all kinds of ide incompatabilities.. some drives just would not work with other drives in master/slave configurations. Bios issues, etcetera.
Nowadays, any modern computer (by modern, I mean from the last 4 years or so) can use any hard drive out today, with no problems at all.
My mom eats 30 gigs for breakfast.
That said, I'm looking at a DVD-R drive. While the rewritable DVD's don't work everywhere, the non-rewritables work almost anywhere, and DVD-R discs can be as cheap as $0.70 each (DVD+R's are several times more expensive). This falls well below the $1/Gig for HDD storage, and they are very conveniently removable.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
The basic principle is more or less the same for both technologies, but since FRAM is made on an IC, it doesn't need millions of hand-wirings to put together. Fast, small, cheap, mass-producable core memory. I like it.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
This idea has been used for decades. The C64 had ramdrives of up to 8MBs available that did just this, even though the base system could not have more than 64K of system RAM onboard.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Ouch - come on man quit teasing us. This is EXACTLY what we want, although I would suggest supporting ATA-133 on down. The reason people want to add a SSD is to make an existing computer a LOT faster ... if they have to buy a new computer (that has SATA) simply to use your SSD then the price isn't just the price of your hardware, it is the price of your hardware PLUS the price of a new computer. A hundred million PCs are getting sold this year without SATA support and that means there are a hundred million computers (customers) out there you are insuring you can't sell to if you only support SATA.
...
Secondly, rather than planning your first release to be the superduper box in 18 months, how about a 'pretty good' box that supports regular IDE (ATA-100 on down) in 6 months, sell some to generate some cash flow, learn from the feedback of your early adopters, adapt the engineering changes into your superduper box v2 that is still getting released in 18 months.
Maybe the first generation skips SATA, no battery backup, uses PC100 SDRAM, make it full height (two 5.25" bays) instead of half height if you need the room, perhaps see if a SCSI interface might get you out the door sooner (much less intelligence on the drive in a SCSI implementation)
Lets face it, the first generation of anything usually has pain - so plan on your uber release being v2 in 18 months and release (sell) your first generation in 6 months.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
In theory, the PCI bus would limit the peak sustained throughput to 133MB/s IIRC, but the number of transactions per second would be through the roof. The combined seek times on a zillion little file transactions is what kills traditional hard drive performance, these would be pretty much eliminated in a vDisk.
:)
Plus if the cards will run on the new 3.3v PCI-X architecture systems you could run a few in parallel (software raid, drive spanning) to seriously increase the throughput. I have no clue if they do, however.
Right now if I want more than 4G of RAM I am going to have to wait for the price of RAM to come down, or for my income to go up. Heck my beefiest box only has 1G of RAM so I could bump that one to 4G and make a 3.5G RAMdisk simply for the cost of the memory (and the RAMdisk software, natch.) I have been thinking about it too, if I could only find a good use for a 3G RAMdisk besides coming here to brag about how fast it is
I shoulda loaded it up when Frys had the ECC/Registered 1G PC100 SDRAM on sale for $100 apiece (it isn't my newest box, merely a 1.2GHz Celeron that likes ECC/REG PC100 memory.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
FORGET THE GigE save yourself 200-500$ and use 1394
biotch
It's interesting to run data on solid state components but it's not very practical. SCSI simply rules the roost in terms of speed and pragmatism and puts the solid state idea in the very distant future. Gigabytes are almost the same price as eggs on IDE and very affordable on SCSI.
Who wants a volatile drive? I'm really not sure what this guy was getting at and, quite frankly, neither was he.
If that makes me a troll then this moderator has abused his privilege to moderate.
Laws are for people with no friends.
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...