Thread: what drive capacity would suit you?

Originally Posted by Mario F.

In fact disk arrays are precisely a clear witness of how crude our computers still are.

I wouldn't call harddrives crude. They are probably one of the most precisely working mechanical devices in broad use. Sure I'd prefer an SSD drive anyday (if only because it's silent), but if I were to put the label "cool" on either SSDs or conventional HDDs it would be on the latter.

As for protein drives, this is from 2006/07 and it's still not here. Maybe people just don't like bugs in their computer

Well, a disk array essentially serves up to three purposes. Pick as many as you like: Storage reliability, high availability of data and data access performance increase.

The fact that we need redundancy to achieve this, tells me our single units are simply not on par with current demands. They are, as a consequence, crude. We still lack proper secure data storage units that doesn't involve backups to different media just to prevent against data loss. We still lack faultless (or even at least highly reliable) data storage that doesn't force redundancy to guarantee uptime requirements. And... arguably we need new improvements in access times under certain scenarios that don't rely on redundancy for "parallel" block access.

Certainly "crude" comes with a pinch of salt. I'm just stating that redundancy is not really an elegant answer to a problem. It's not even an actual answer. Instead just handling it through brute force.

But, I'm not arguing otherwise. I'm observing a fact. I'm not even complaining.

I do argue however that we can -- and will certainly -- achieve better results in the future.