[Novalug] best hard disk setup for home file server?

[James Ewing Cottrell 3rd]

pardon me, i wasn't clear. i was comparing the time to read the actual 
bits off the magnetic media with the rotational and seek delays. and 
even if you had a disk with only one track that rotated infinitely fast, 
that would still be your limiting factor.

i expect things will get much better with both ram and eeprom. ten years 
ago i bought my first pc, and it had 13G disks for which i paid about 
$100. now i can buy a 16G flash drive for $40 or even less.

which would you want to run a small computer on as the only disk? i 
think the answer is still the real disk, but what will it be in 5 years?

heck, by then we might have some other form of flash drive than eeprom 
and will almost certainly have some access method better than usb 2.0.

jim

Bryan J Smith wrote:
> Actually, that's not true.  NAND EEPROM has it's latency issues.
> The disk rotation/seek is far more costly.  Hard drives, when written
> to sequentially, actually rival NAND EEPROM, depending on design.
> 
> NAND EEPROM has its overhead in random access, magnitudes
> worse than DRAM (let alone SRAM), but disk rotation/seek is
> magnitudes worse than it.  EEPROM technologies are not RAM,
> despite assumptions.  In fact, magnetic can best it in various ways.
> 
> ------Original Message------
> From: James Ewing Cottrell 3rd
> To: Bryan J. Smith
> Cc: Nino Pereira
> Cc: Novalug
> Sent: Oct 16, 2009 12:49
> Subject: Re: [Novalug] best hard disk setup for home file server?
> 
> Bryan J. Smith wrote:
>> NAND EEPROM compared to magnetic disk, yes.
>> NAND EEPROM compared to DRAM, hell no (let alone SRAM).  ;)
>> NAND EEPROM has its latency issues as well, just far less than disk.
> 
> i did indeed leave that complication out. it also takes time to rip the 
> bits off the magnetic media or out of the flip flops in memory, but in 
> the case of magnetic media that time pales in comparison to the 
> rotational and seek latency.
> 
> jim
> 
> 
> --  
> Bryan J Smith - mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
> Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile  
>     
> 
> 
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