“The issue is simple enough: if we had started with NAND flash – instead of disks – in the late 1950s, would our storage devices and software stack look like they do today?” Robin Harris reports for ZDNet. “No, of course not.”
“Over the last year, researchers have been teasing out the problems with making flash look like disks,” Harris reports. “While these problems are less of an issue for notebook and desktop users, they are a big problem for servers.”
“Recent academic research has found that the SSDs used in many all flash arrays have surprising performance issues. For example, researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Facebook and recently discovered that placing sparse arrays on SSDs cause premature wear and failure,” Harris reports. “It is also well known that SSD performance drops as the drive ages. The number of I/O threads accessing an SSD can also have large performance effects.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Much less of an issue for notebook and desktop users than for servers.
Our 11-inch MacBook Airs with PCIe-based flash storage are our favorite Macs ever! We could never go backwards to mechanical hard drives.