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Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by wazoox on Monday August 22, 2011 @07:51AM (#2912151)
Paint me unimpressed. "eat my Data" was a way, way better and deeper presentation:

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3172

Get the presentation here: http://flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp

Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by Swannie on Monday August 22, 2011 @08:50AM (#2912265)
Thank you for that link. This is a far more interesting presentation than the OT. (Though it does assume some prior knowledge, like what fsync is, etc.)
Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by vimalg2 on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @12:35AM (#2915355)
Found the video if anyone else is interested (same talk, but from 2007) : http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/talk...
Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by CJefferson on Monday August 22, 2011 @06:43AM (#2912035)
This talk totally failed to properly discuss the issues of the various kinds of fsync, instead (it seems to me) just making a selection of vague comments. That is a shame, as really properly understanding file integrity is a really important issue, which is very easy to get very wrong.

When ext4 came out, I remember a large number of apps losing data, as the metadata and 'normal data' caches can get out of order, meaning that:

Write file B. Rename B -> A.

Can result (after a crash) in A being empty, as the rename can occur before the contents of B are actually written.

Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by Swannie on Monday August 22, 2011 @08:33AM (#2912228)
Agreed. These slides are like "Disks are not memory 101". I'd hope the talk went into more details.

After an hour or so reading semi-related material I have an understanding that goes beyond these basics :-/

Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by vimalg2 on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:53AM (#2911748)
Converted the Presentation PPTX to PDF for accessibility: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5137/pdf-link/What%20Every%20Data%20...
Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by ntoshev on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:27AM (#2911806)
Slide 6: "[Disk] throughput: 768 MB/sec on SATA 3" is misleading, consumer-grade rotating disks barely fill SATA 1 with ~70 MB/sec. SSD are faster in raw transfer, and if you have a RAID you are not limited by a single SATA channel any more.

Slide 13: "Laugh at MongoDB" is pretty stupid, mongo makes certain trade-offs that are not for everyone, but they are still meaningful.

The presentation doesn't explore the RAID options, which is a shame.

Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by mevodig on Monday August 22, 2011 @06:19AM (#2912000)
He's referring to the bus speed of SATA 3 as an upper bound -- but like you mentioned, if you throw RAID and such into the mix, I'm not so sure either that it's a very useful number.
Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by koopajah on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:56AM (#2911751)
Is there a video recorded of the presentation somewhere? This seemed really interesting
Re:What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by delta1 on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:53AM (#2911850)
I was really hoping for a video, actually. Audio would suffice too :)