In his latest blog post, Anything But a Flash in the Pan, Jonathan Schwartz. touches a good point… We have RAM memory for “on the fly” memory and hard drivers to have persistent storage. Yet flash memory could (let me stand corrected; WILL) be used as a middle way option. Put apart the commercial notes (links towards Sun & ZFS), and you’ll probably find it an interesting read like me.
There are only two kinds of storage devices – those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That’s the view most data centers have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as “spinning rust.” All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.
Karim Vaes 