War of the disks - Hard disk Vs Flash drive.

[kavinraja]

Recently we have witnessed myspace changing all its server hard drives to flash drives...

This is just an example as both of these storage devices have their own advantages and disadvantages...

Which one of those two will prove to be the best...

[url=http://www.storagesearch.com/semico-art1.html] Read out an article about it.

[tangomouse]

soild state drive have been around quite a while now ,just the price is a bit high but thay will replace standard hard drives when the price comes down ,there more reliable than normal hds as theres no moving parts. cant wait till the price drops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

[hellnoire]

I can't wait for the 1 teras to come out... music on my laptop that I knew would be hard as heck to fail would make me sell my server!

[newprouser]

what abt the life time of Flash drive. Isn't it supposed to last for less time than Magnetic disks - based on no. of R/W cycles ?

[hellnoire]

That's what I understand, that they will last longer then the standard HDD disks.

[rnbv424140]

i still prefer HDD. bigger looks more reliable

[safeguy]

The important word here is *looks*...it need not necessarily be so. Sometimes Smaller is Better.

[kavinraja]

what abt the life time of Flash drive. Isn't it supposed to last for less time than Magnetic disks - based on no. of R/W cycles ?

If you are asking about "life" time, then flash drives have longer life span than hard drives...

If you ask for read and write time, flash drives reads/writes faster than hard drives...

The concept behind is the memory elements of hard disk are arranged in a linear manner on the disk, while for flash drives, it is made of an array of memory elements...

[newprouser]

If you are asking about "life" time, then flash drives have longer life span than hard drives...

If you ask for read and write time, flash drives reads/writes faster than hard drives...

The concept behind is the memory elements of hard disk are arranged in a linear manner on the disk, while for flash drives, it is made of an array of memory elements...

NO i meant this , read-write cycles.

Flash-memory cells have limited lifetimes and will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC.Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device, called wear leveling.

[kavinraja]

@newprouser:- i am just seeing this problem with flash drives now... Thanks for this info...