Interesting paper by the late Jim Gray and Bob Fitzgerald on flash disks

Granville Barnett — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:39:22 GMT

This paper which can be viewed in the July/August ACM Queue magazine I found quite interesting as I had noticed that both Apple (MacBook Air) and Dell (XPS range) now ship notebooks with solid state hard drive's. Granted they are a lot more expensive but consume less power and provide a lot more accesses per second. In the paper entitled Flash Disk Opportunity for Server Applications Gray and Fitzgerald state that accesses per second may be as high as 10 times more per second than that of a high-end SCSI disk.

Interestingly the 64GB and 128GB solid state disk upgrades to the Dell XPS range differ by only £10, the smaller being £300, the larger being £310. I guess if you were paying that much on a disk drive and didn't shell out the extra £10 then that would probably infer that you had just checked out of a mental asylum.

The July/August issue is littered with papers on flash drives, well worth a look. I'm in the market for a new laptop in the coming months, at the moment though one with a solid state disk is well out of my price range.

Granville Barnett : Research

Interesting paper by the late Jim Gray and Bob Fitzgerald on flash disks