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Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:47:53 +0000
From: James Mansion <james@mansionfamily.plus.com>
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CC: Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com>, Laszlo Nagy <gandalf@shopzeus.com>,
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Subject: Re: Planning a new server - help needed
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PFC wrote:
>
>> Why do you claim that 'More platters also means slower seeks
>> and generally slower performance.'?
>
>     More platters -> more heads -> heavier head assembly -> slower 
> seek time
Note sure I've sen a lot of evidence of that in drive specifications!

>     Gigabyte should revamp their i-RAM to use ECC RAM of a larger 
> capacity... and longer lasting battery backup...
You would think a decent capacitor or rechargable button battery would 
be enough to dump it to a flash memory.
No problem with flash wear then.
>     I wonder, how many write cycles those Flash drives can take before 
> reliability becomes a problem...
Hard to get data isn't it? I believe its hundreds of thousands to 
millions now. Now each record in most OLTP
tables is rewritten a few times unless its stuff that can go into temp 
tables etc, which should be elsewhere.
Index pages clearly get rewritten often.

I suspect a mix of storage technologies will be handy for some time yet 
- WAL on disk, and temp tables on
disk with no synchronous fsync requirement.

I think life is about to get interesting in DBMS storage.  All good for 
us users.

James