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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.
I'm finding that the lack of a universal DVD standard has left me looking at HDDs as my removeable media of choice as well. CDRs are nice and cheap, but I have files that would span multilpe CDRs. It's a little bit of a hastle to have to WINRAR up my data into small chunks, only to have to UNRAR it back into oen big chunk. DVDs aren't readable everywhere. I'd love to see faster solid state storage available at a price competitive with today's HDDs, but alas, it's just no there. I already have a great deal of respect from my 7200RPM HDDs
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
SSDs are good for research purposes and Software Developer Kits. I think Intel's Explorer 2 SDK used to have 128 MB on board, which is useful for Assembly programming.
I remember when we used to program Motorola 6800... hehe...
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I find it amusing that it mentioned using a RAM based swapfile. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a swapfile???
Right now, tape drives are the right cost/benefit compromise. Could they be better? Yes. Would it cost a lot more? Yes. Why are you using hard drives over tape, when tape holds so much more for the cost?
Speed matters. Just because one is more expensive than the other doesn't rule it out, if they're both relatively affordable for the performance.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
This guy mentions that compact flash dies after 100,000 to a million rewrites... and that you'll reach that surprisingly quickly if you put your swap file on it.
It seems highly unlikely that any sane person on any desktop system would choose to spend money on compact flash to use as swap, when they could spend less money and buy dram instead - which shuld be faster.
Anyway potentially you only need fast solid state diskspace for your operating system and main applications, since few people need that sort of speed on their 'data files'. I could build a bootable linux box that ran off a 256Mb compact flash - doesn't seem like it'd be too bad at all.
The tandy sensationII had a 212 hard drive while my current system has 512 megs of ram. If I upgraded such a beast with my current amount of ram I would have twice as much ram as hard drive space. I still have my old 3.2 gig and 540 meg hard drives in a drawer in my room. I am thinking of using these again in a FreeBSD server. With ram the way it is today I can just put a shitload of ram on the server and set it up to load the whole hard drive in memory.
I remember a 3 year old maximumPC magazine which mentioned something about a ramdisk. Its an external scsi device that had 2 gigs of ram and a powersupply to keep its contents from being erased. Basically the computer saw it as a fast hard disk. It was very fast but got poor remarks because in a castrophic power outage your whole virtual disk is gone. Also the store space is very tiny. However with my comments above about specific servers this might make sense. With a price close to 30k it was very expensive and it was this that created the poor review.
A web server that does not containt a database does not need alot of disk space. Just apache, the os, a java2EE sdk, or javascript, or perl and thats it. All the content is created automatically by cgi scripts or java depending on what the webadmin uses. A ramdisk might be used for a highend website if the disk is the bottleneck. My old 3.2 gig drive has the same amount of ram as these 2-4 gig ramdrives. I can easily create a workstation or webserver with this.
A ramdisk today might be perfect because ram is so cheap and it would be alot cheaper.
http://saveie6.com/
Until SSDs get an order of mangitude cheaper, HDDs will continue to rule! For the thousands that SDDs cost, you can built a huge striped RAID of quick 120 GB drives that will perform more than fast enough for any existing applications. Paintbrush and minesweeper will run like they've never run before.
We create tons of video and always are hungry for backup. What we've done is to simply save our old hard drives as we upgrade and put the old ones to use in those $6.00 IDE removable cartridges as backup media. We mostly have 2-3 year old 20-40GB drives. We also have bought 5400rpm 120GB drives for incredibly cheap on Pricewatch as well...
We figure, as a backup, HDDs last just as long as any other magnetic medium. Because they mostly sit unused on a shelf, we're not that concerned about MTBF of the drive mechanisms. When we do use a backup, we still copy to our RAID/Server before using the files. The backup drives rarely see much use.
We have CD/DVD writers, but really only use them when sending stuff to clients. With the price of hard drives, it's hard to justify anything else as a backup medium.
I have noticed a performance increase when I have a seperate hard disk or partition for my operating system/programs. It seems to me that a lot of geeks do this. Have a fast hard disk for applications and a slower bigger hard disk for data. Memory is cheap enough now that I don't often even need to use virtual memory. I find the only time I need more system memory is for real time video processing. I don't even need it for audio anymore.
Wouldn't there be some benefit in having about 2 gigs of memory just for running the operating system and a seperate/cheaper storage for your large files? I seem to recall google running everything on DRAM.
Could someone explain to me why we don't have a portion of non-volitle memory for our operating system/programs?
-Rob
He obviously knows his stuff but a few more drafts and an editor would have done wonders for this article.
Laws are for people with no friends.
http://saveie6.com/
The price per meg on current harddrives is RIDICULOUSLY low, we're all spoiled.
It's basically a dollar a GIG, or less... a 200 gig HD costs 200 bucks.
I'd be willing to pay $200 for a TWENTY gig solid state drive. Ten times the cost, but worth it... too bad no such thing is available.
~Berj
Should use intelegent drive management.
Since solid state memory is cheaper now than it was, disk drives should use giant amounts of cashe... Perhaps 512MB... let the OS put the common stuff there.... that way boot time, and such could be quicker.
Kind of like auxilary ram. The OS can put stuff there based on what it thinks should be there... for example commonly used apps (in most cases a webbrowser and email client)..
Can also expand on the idea and use solid state as a form of backup, since it's so reliable. Have the system automatically compress data on the drive from specified directorys, and backup to solid state memory.
There are so many potential uses. We rely on hard drives to much.
Option three : buy a spare computer with a TON of hard drive space to dedicate as 'offline' storage. It isn't particularly expensive anymore (although no where near as cheap as tape) but it doesn't take a week to do a system backup either. Doesn't have to be a fast state of the art computer, just have a lot of drive space.
: ...
Do a system image once a month of your entire OS, apps, etc... stored to that machine, then just back up your data once a week. If it takes you a week to back up a system now you are only backing it up once a week anyways.
If you were creative you could probably come up with a 1TB server (IDE drives) and a GigE network card for under $1,500.
Notes on your post
Under option 1), if you do RAID5 you always lose the capacity of one disk. If you want to minimize costs use bigger drive sets (ie. in a 6 drive set you lose 17% (one drive), but in two 3 drive sets you lose 33% (two drives.) Granted it is a little difficult to do a 6 drive set using IDE, and SCSI drives are still a little pricey when they get big
Under option 2), if you store the offline drives in a quiet, cool, dry, clean place (those mylar bags they came in when you bought them, for example) I don't think you are going to experience hard drives demagnetizing themselves much.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I find them pretty similar per gig. The difference comes in that tape
scales better. Do you really want to power 10,000 hard drives along
with the wiring to connect them all? How about 50,000? Think of the
floor reenforcement you'd need to support those. They're also
off-line most of the time, so they aren't as easily destroyed by a
hacker or an SA screwup.
why do they use one moving set of heads when several stationary (or less movable) heads would be much, much faster?
.1 seconds, and if you had a better bus than IDE or SCSI, like PCI or something, you could REALLY speed up the disk access rates.
i remember a very old 10 meg disk i had that had an 18 inch platter on it, and about 200 or so STATIONARY heads. the seek time was determined by the platter spin rate, and it wrote and read data as fast as the disk spun under the heads.
it couldn't be that hard to build a small (10gig) prototype drive with one platter, and many, many stationary heads. you could probably format the thing in under
I'm not in the hard-drive paradigm, I don't know the ins and outs of harddrive operation, but this seems like something to think about.
ciao
Still amazes me how many people refuse to believe that a LOT of people would rather rip their CDs to mp3. You know ... convenience?
Ever heard about the demo scene? I didn't think so.
Congrats on your h4rdc0re 64K intro/extro collection d00d.
"500MB should be enough for anyone" ... Oooookay Grandpa.
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Power to the Peaceful
Well, CompactFlash is up to 6GB now, just give them a few years to get affordable at that size.