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Conquest FS: "The Disk Is Dead"

Posted by Hemos on from the long-live-the-disk dept.

andfarm writes "A few days ago, I sat in at a presentation of a what seems to be a new file system concept: Conquest. Apparently they've developed a FS that stores all the metadata and a lot of the small files in battery-backed RAM. (No, not flash-RAM. That'd be stupid.) According to benchmarks, it's almost as fast as ramfs. Impressive." The page linked above is actually more of a summary page - there's some good .ps research reports in there.

3 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Re:well and good by robslimo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've predicted and eagerly anticipated the demise (by replacement) of spinning media (magnetic and optical) for 10 or more years now... I've predicted it will happen, not when.

    As this new filesystem implicitly admits, the price/MB is still so much dramatically lower for HDD's than solid state memory, it will still take quite a will for this replacement to happen.

    I disagree that some small killer app must come along to make this happen. Yes, solid state media is coming down in cost and increasing in density, but both need to change by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude before the HDD is dead. What we're waiting for here is the classis convergence of technology and its applications... the apps won't some until the technology can support it and the tech is driven by our demand for it. Expect another 10 years at least.

  2. Re:well and good by CrosbieSmith · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It will happen when the price difference between solid-state devices and magnetic storage gets narrower. That's not happening.

    This was also pointed on Saturday's Slashdot Story

    A mere $US5,000 would be something of a price sensation by the standards of current large capacity SSDs, whose prices aren't dropping nearly as quickly as are those of magnetic media.
  3. Re:well and good by robslimo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    True, and that narrowing will have occurred by the time the cost/density ratio of SSM has improved by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.

    A couple of reasons I see the death of the HDD to be not-to-imminent:

    (1) Those damned HDD makers keep pulling new physics out of their as^H^H hats and keep pushing the storage densities to rediculous new levels.

    (2) the solid state memory of the future ainta gonna be Flash as we know it now (with slow and limit write cycles) and it also will not be battery-backed RAM (unless we go write it all back to disk for 'permanent' storage at some point). I bet on some variation on today's Flash without its limitations, but the tech has got some ground to make before this all happens.

    My other long-term prediction has been that CRTs (vacuum tube, for pete's sake!) will be replaced with LCD or similar tech and we're getting really close.