121–130 of 166 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i believe there is an opportunity in the market for an advanced data storage technology to support writing huge volumes of information to a single 3.5" floppy, provided the legacy constraint of offering a read operation can be dispensed with.
Easy! Once you've written to the end just seek back to sector zero and continue writing. It's a like data-layer-cake.
I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison. They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the inter…
You've got to wonder how it would work if taken to the extreme: rack after rack of floppy drives filling an entire data centre providing a glacially-slow S3 service.
Can you imagine the noise? It would be... glorious.
The linked article used these compact drives: https://www.amazon.com/External-Floppy-1-44MB-FDUSB-M-V1/dp/...
They're 5.75 x 4.25 x 0.75 inches. So if you mount them vertically like in high-density storage arrays, you can fit 25 of them into the width of a rack, about 7 rows from the front to back. So... about 175 per layer that is about 4 RU high including the space for the controller board. You can fit 10 of these layers in a standard rack, for 1,750 floppy drives total per rack.
Let's see... that's 2.52 GB per rack! Seek times are variable depending on the floppy drive model, but 250 ms is approximately correct for the average. So about 7,000 IOPS total per rack. Not too shabby!
A decent sized data centre might have 1,000 racks. So a "cloud-scale" floppy drive object storage system might have 2.52 TB of raw storage. However, you have to divide that by three for the redundant copies, so we're back to 840 GB of usable storage capacity per floor, but with an impressive 7M IOPS.
To put things in perspective, that's directly equivalent to a single modern laptop SSD drive in terms of both capacity and IOPS. Except that the latency of the SSD is 5000x lower.
A really nice touch is the case study they use, which shows a nonexistent MothersInLawPhotos . com ( http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/MotherInLawPhotos.p... ) with all the images broken
If you look closely, you’ll see it’s not actually a page at all, but a screenshot of a page… with all the images broken. Top marks for the jokes within jokes and whoever put this all together. It’s definitely given me a really good chuckle tonight!
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I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison. They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the inter…
I believe they have overestimated the cost of using 3.5" floppies, probably to make themselves look better by comparison. They give the cost as $211,172, but that's the cost to buy a 1 TiB pack of floppies. Their own storage cost is per-month, so to get the equivalent cost for floppies you need to also divide by the expected useful lifetime of a floppy disk. I did a web search for "floppy disk lifetime" and the inter…
But a 1 TB HDD and an associated Linux system would probably cost about 300 USD.
Assuming a lifespan of about 7 years, monthly cost comes to about 3 USD per month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look closely, you’ll see it’s not actually a page at all, but a screenshot of a page… with all the images broken. Top marks for the jokes within jokes and whoever put this all together. It’s definitely given me a really good chuckle tonight!
Lets see who’ll have the last laugh! (Full disclosure: an early backer of S4)