On 07/03/07 13:03, Merlin Moncure wrote:
On 7/2/07, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 06/18/07 08:05, Merlin Moncure wrote:
[snip]
>
> That being said, it's pretty clear to me we are in the last days of
> the disk drive.
Oh, puhleeze. Seagate, Hitachi, Fuji and WD aren't sitting around
with their thumbs up their arses. In 3-4 years, large companies
and spooky TLAs will be stuffing SANs with hundreds of 2TB drives.
haven't we had this debate before?
I don't know if you've been paying attention to what's going on in the
storage industry...Apple, Dell, Fuji, Sandisk, Intel, and others are
all making strategic plays in the flash market. At the outset of
2007, flash was predicted to decline 50% for the year...so far, prices
have dropped 65% in the first two quarters. Right now it's all about
the high end notebooks and media players but the high margin, high
rotation speed drives are next.
Technological nay-sayers have been wrong before, but I just can't
see a *database* server full of static RAM in the next 10 years.
I admit the high density low speed
cold storage d2d backup systems will be the last to fall and will be
quite some ways off.
note by, 'next', and 'last days', i mean that pretty loosely...within
the next 5 years or so. 'dead' as well...there are many stages of
death to an enterprise legacy product. I consider tape backups to be
nearly dead already, although there are many still in use. d2d is
where it's at though.
Mainframers (and various other oldsters like me) think about
1) shock resistance,
2) media costs,
3) Iron Mountain,
4) media longevity.
You can drop a SuperDLT tape from "man height" and recover the data
(even if it has to be restrung into a new housing). I wouldn't drop
a disk full of data and have any expectation of survival.
A 160GB ("320"GB compressed) SATA drive is about $60 plus a $10
carrier. That comparable very well to tapes, I think.
An Iron Mountain delivery truck will drive over some nasty bumps.
How shock resistant is a disk drive in an external carrier? Not as
resistant as a drive in a padded shipping box. But is it resistant
"enough"?
"Enterprise-level" tapes can sit in storage for 7-15 years and then
still be readable. Can a disk drive sit un-used for 7 years? Would
the motor freeze up? Will we still be able to connect SATA drives
in 7 years?
--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
