This is probably some of the biggest news for PC performance in the last 5 years. Bigger than the last 4x of processor speed, bigger than dual-core CPUs--speeding up the disk in this way can lead to some exceptionally fast implementations. This approach (using some NVRAM in front of the disk), btw, is one of the many techniques NetApps use to get their performance.
The link you post seems to relate to Flash-memory-only drives.
ReplyDeleteBut it's interesting what happens when you have a non-volatile log AND cheap storage. The netapp solution is to allow lots of small writes to happen incredibly fast, because they can be safely logged to NVRAM, without committing to disk.
In essence, you could do a lot more write-bound transactions without increasing the cost of storage much at all.