Wade Curry wrote:
I've heard that solid state drives were the rage in the past, in the mainframe shop I was in at least. But in the end they ditched it because it wasn't nearly as reliable as the SCSI disk packs they had been using.
Really? When? Were those just RAM with batteries? I don't ever recall flash even being remotely in the running until this year.
Any remarks about the reliability? At this point I don't see it as a particularly attractive feature quite aside from the astronomical price.
I don't know what the reliability numbers for laptop hard drives are, but I would bet they're several orders of magnitude lower than for server hard drives.
Flash drives have way faster read speed than physical drives. They also have no power up/power down delay and burn much less power when being read. I believe that flash drives are currently slower on write than conventional hard drives.
Flash obviously wears out after some number of cycles. The way around that is a copy-on-write file system like ZFS.
Personally I would bet that flash is likely to be more reliable than a laptop hard drive over the long run. Hard drives are sensitive to physical shock, and laptops get a lot of that. Flash has no such limitation.
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