Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
On Wed, September 27, 2006 3:53 pm, Bill Hacker wrote:
OTOH, we have decided to buy no more 3.5" HDD *anyway*.
2.5" are now large enough, fast enough, and reasonably well priced enough
to allow us to put the redundant arrays into 1U, and on less power,
that we now need a 2U to hold, power, and cool.
This isn't just 'green' awareness - there is a largish $$ jump in rack
rental per UPS power budget 'chunk', and all our gear is
upstream b/w-limited anyway, not HDD speed/capacity limited.
Along the same lines, I'm looking forward to the point where RAM is cheap
enough that you can create a multi-gigabyte disk from it. If there's a
battery backup, it'd be a darn fast/cool/light 'disk'. Hitachi, I think
it is, has 32G of flash available now.
There is a totally new (at silicon level) magnetic? phase-change? RAM just
coming out of the labs and going into sampling.
It has a longer write-cycle life than any current flash, and smaller cell size,
IIRC.
*Meanwhile* - my first personal HDD was a 5MB (mega, not giga), Rodime, and I
used 256 KB (kilo, not mega) RAMdisk on S-100 medical lab gear, 2 MB 'JRAM' on
my 386, so I have long been in the never-ending RAM-vs-HDD cycle.
If apps and file storage formats would just stop bloating, and a good
'projection' or direct-to-brain display come along, we could do all we need with
wristwatches.
And networked DFLY back to 'mothership' servers.
Meanwhile, I vote for acquiring a pleasant 'partner' with a nice personality,
giving *them* a computer and a cell phone to call you at the golf course of pub
when a decision is needed.
..Worked well for leaders of nations and industry even before cell phones.
OTOH, no computer I have ever worked with ever sued for 'palimony', quit to
become a fulltime housewife, or got pregnant, (though some seem to have shown
signs of PMS).
..so maybe we *are* better-off than Andrew Carnegie or Ivan the Terrible.
Bill
