Re:SSD Prices in a Free Fall
by icebraining on Monday June 22, 2015 @04:14PM
(#9760885)
if you address space is large enough, you could implement this as a virtual memory system that swaps RAM to disk, disk to slower disk, slower disk to tape, tapes to tapes stored offline, etc.
Funny to imagine,
- My program has been stuck copying a variable for over half an hour!
- Yeah, there was a page fault and the tape loading guy still hasn't come from lunchYes, but the other side of the coin is "why are those pages of the program still on disk? They haven't been touched in years". But such systems tend to keep parts under human control.
You rarely ever need your fire extinguisher, but that doesn't mean the LRU replacement algorithm that keeps your house clean can move them to the back of your attic.
Re:SSD Prices in a Free Fall
by JimmaDaRustla on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @02:07PM
(#9766465)
True.
Back in the day, before automated tape readers, tapes were stored in silos, like a library, and employees would find the cataloged tapes and manually retrieve and load them into tape readers. My company use to hire co-ops to do this back in the 70s or so.
I don't know what Amazon uses, either, but I expect Glacier data to be pushed out to some layer that doesn't need power while idle at all, heavily checksummed and also replicated across the globe. The relatively heavy prices tag for accessing it probably is there to keep contention on some relatively thin pipe low. For example, if they use blue ray, they may have only a few readers online for every 100 or 1000 customers, both to keep prices low and to differentiate Glacier more from their other products.