Related to The Cost of Bulk Storage posting, Mike Neil dropped me a note. He’s built an array based upon this Western Digital part: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=336. Its unusually power efficient:
| Power Dissipation |
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5.4 Watts |
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2.8 Watts |
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0.40 Watts |
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0.40 Watts |
And it’s currently only $105: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136151.
It’s always been the case that home storage is wildly cheaper than data center hosted storage. What excites me even more than the continued plunging cost of raw storage is that data center hosted storage is asymptotically approaching the home storage cost . Data center storage includes someone else doing capacity planning and buying new equipment when needed, someone else replacing failed disks and servers and, in the case of S3, it’s geo-redundant (data is stored in multiple data centers).
I’ve not yet discarded my multi-TB home storage system yet but the time is near.
–jrh
Marcel, is latency a big deal with media?
I don’t think so. Large media files are generally accessed sequentially and stream well.
I agree that you can’t ignore the 2+ orders of magnitude difference in I/O completion times. The storage service is a LOT further away than local disk. But, local disk is a lot further away than local memory and the same rules apply: The application needs to manage the data it will need both prefetching and caching that which is needed most frequently.
Some applications, especially highly interactive apps, need to be near their users. And some applications need to have much of their data near the application but that still doesn’t prevent the use of service storage. It only argues that highly-interactive applications, need significant local caching.
–jrh.
Yeah, but the bandwidth/latency to the datacenter is not there (yet).
Of course, if your application lives on the datacenter, ok.
But what do fill your TB’s with? right Media…