Flash is fallible. But you'd rather have an AFA than spinning rust We tend to think of flash as a solid-state disk – like spinning rust, only more expensive, consuming less power, and much, much faster. And yes, it is true that you can use it like that, but there is a lot more that flash can offer if you start to take into consideration what makes flash different in the first place. Simply …
Had to use a system with all the VM's on rotating rust storage the other day. Normally mine are on SSD and I don't notice that they are virtualised.
Everything took an age as compared to my system.
Yes using SSD's can most certainly speed up development. Isn't that sort of bleedingly obvious? Isn't the Pope a Catholic?
Why give up one for the other ? With today's prices, I took both.
An Intel i7 quand core is currently 350€, and for that price you can get a nice Intel 300GB SSD to boot your system on.
Add a 3TB spinning rust SATA disk to store you work data and you're good to go.
(The one caveat here is if your application must operate within a regulatory framework that requires data to be stored uncompressed, in the belief that compressed data is no longer verifiably original.)
Use two very reputable hash functions on the pre-uncompressed to validate the post-uncompressed from the drive. Then again, I've never had to work with such a regime, so what do I know? [I can see it in the context of forensic evidence, especially for trial if proof of authenticity is required which gets into whose experts are telling the truth about pre-/post- and whose obfuscating, especially at the costs of expert testimony.]
With 3D NAND hitting the market and bringing flash and SSD pricing down fast, we can expect capacity parity early next year and price parity by the end of 2016...and that's parity with bulk SSD. In fact, SanDisk projects having 16 TB SSD next year
There are already SSD cheaper than "enterprise" HDD at perhaps 60 percent of the price!
As the spinning drive makers say: "Winter is coming!"
SSD that can even displace my current spinning rust (regardless of cost)?
I will believe it when I actually see it.
Zero seek times are nice and everything but there's still reliability and failure modes to consider. Will it fail gracefully and allow me time to order a replacement or will it just suddenly kick me in the balls. SSD brands haven't been around long enough to really establish a track record either way here.
I will use whatever makes sense and gets the job done. I don't have this apparent desperate need to see one or the other fail like a notable chunk of the peanut gallery here does.
Flash stills cost around 50 times as much to make per TB than spinning rust. The SSDs that are presently cheaper than enterprise HDDs are not enterprise grade; their lifetime is measured in terabytes rather than petabytes. That's is fine for consumer-grade, but will fry out in 6 months in my file servers. And since data projections keep increasing just as fast as storage increases, I wouldn't expect price parity ever, really; Flash will be replaced before it gets cheaper than HDD.
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