Next time I will be more precise and call it "storage device"...that should make everyone happy. :)

-Shades (June 24, 2015, 08:30 PM)

I was further confused by the "SSDs are already old hat" because the PCI-e mounted SSDs are SSDs. That, combined with "hard disks that work according to SSD principles" made me think this was some new technology I hadn't heard about before.

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just trying to explain why what you said confused me. :)

It's all good though. The miscommunication has been cleared up.

-Deozaan (June 25, 2015, 01:02 AM)

It could have been this technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM

Surely you guys have heard of the 'core memory' from the 1960s that was literally a woven grid of wires and cores, and ended up setting the standard geometry and behavior for main ram for decades to follow.

Ferroelectric RAM is technology going full circle like it has done in a lot of markets lately. It reimplements effectively core memory on silicon, creating a non-volatile memory that is fast enough to serve as a main system ram while also being sufficiently stable to operate as a mass storage device.

Though there are currently density limitations that have kept it from becoming used in the mainstream, once those limitations are overcome this is a technology that could blow SSDs and the now commonplace DRAM out of the water.


I'm still not too sure on SSDs for long-term reliability. Though they do offer great improvements in performance and the price tag is now comparable for applications not requiring large capcacities. I've been deploying workstations based on 120GB SSDs in place of 320GB HDDs for a couple of years now with good results, and am considering the possibility of using one or more SSDs in my next server build as either a filesystem cache or as the actual primary storage device.

Pricing for larger capacity devices is still a sore spot, but it has gone down considerably since they were first introduced.


Oh and Renegade, you DID mismatch the two devices right? RAID1 of SSDs is not safe if you ordered both devices around the same time and they have been together in the raid the whole time. The result is that they will die by way of media wearout within a few days of one another usually.

To counter this, order each device separately from either a different vendor or a few weeks apart. That way you aren't as likely to run into SSDs from the same manufacturing batch or design revision. The manufacturing variation between batches makes enough of a difference in the actual usage life to expand what could be only a few days window between failures to be several weeks- enough to install a new device and rebuild the array.

There's actually two even bigger problems with https than just the cost of getting certs. Also I use self-signed certificates for most of my stuff, which provide the same encryption bonus free of charge. Tradeoff is you then no longer can be sure of what server you are talking to unless you've made your own certificate authority and have traceability to your own root certificates.

The first is IPv4 depletion. SSL only allows one site per IP, and sites with it have always had an additional overhead cost in provisioning the dedicated IPv4 required to make it work. IPv6 would help mitigate this, but all too many ISPs are behind the times and haven't even looked at IPv6 rollout on their networks. After all IPv4 is still working, why should they spend their precious profits installing new IPv6 capable infrastructure when its not broken yet.

The second is caching, which really helps keep the internet bandwidth-efficient especially in the Americas where people are still using Dialup here in 2015. By definition, https cannot be cached because that would require the proxy to be able to decrypt the content in order to make the decision of if it should keep it or not. And a properly functioning encryption the data will change each time the page loads, completely defeating any possibility of caching it without having to trust the proxy with unencrypted data. Browsers will do some caching though, but a lot less of it is possible on https.