“SSDs were built because there are billions of SATA and SAS disk ports available,” Robin Harris writes for ZDNet. “Filling some of those ports with SSDs promised to be quite profitable – a promise fulfilled in the last 5 years.”
“But now that non-volatile memory technology – flash today, plus RRAM tomorrow – has been widely accepted, it is time to build systems that use flash directly instead of through our antique storage stacks,” Harris writes. “The various efforts to decrease latency – SATA 3, NVMe, and others – still add layers of software between our applications and our data, creating complexity and wasting CPU cycles.”
“SSDs are obsolete in an architectural, not functional, sense,” Harris writes. “We need to incorporate flash and, soon, byte-addressable NVM memory, as they are, rather than making them seem like disks. This is no small effort, but with the slowing of processor performance increases, systems need to find performance elsewhere. The storage stack is ripe for disruptive improvement.”
Read more in the full article here.
