

Think of solid-state drives as multi-core storage - mwsherman
http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/Think-of-SSDs-as-multi-core-storage.aspx

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spudlyo
This article is too fluffy to be worthy of the HN front page. It's 267 words
that explain that SSD drives are good at random I/O.

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coffeemug
No, not just random IO, but parallel execution of requests. Rotational drives
_cannot_ pipeline the requests - they _have_ to execute one request at a time.
With SSDs you can send multiple requests (via NCQ), and they will be executed
_in parallel_. The drives can literally satisfy multiple requests at the same
time (at the moment, about four requests in practice, from my testing). That
means that a single SSD drive is similar to having a striped RAID of four
rotation drives, _plus_ the benefit of no seek latency.

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gojomo
I've often wondered why spinning hard drives don't have multiple heads per
platter. For example, two heads spaced out on the same arm could conceivably
cut seek times in half. Or, a second arm on the opposite side could offer
similar benefits.

The head-positioning firmware would get more complicated, yes, but for the
fixed cost of getting those algorithms right many multiples of increase in
seek times and transfer rates would be possible, by adding arms and heads.

Perhaps the competition from SSDs will trigger some new approaches in
mechanical drives, as well.

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freakwit
I've wondered that too (mostly about extra arms). Then I wondered how much it
would cost to add an extra arm versus the cost of the drive itself. Eventually
I stopped wondering.

