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From: johnw@astroatc.UUCP (John F. Wardale)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Disk Striping (really RAM vs disk)
Message-ID: <419@astroatc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 15:54:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: astroatc.419
Posted: Mon Aug 24 15:54:00 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 06:05:54 EDT
References: <cV=3A8y00UoB0qA0AT@andrew.cmu.edu> <414@astroatc.UUCP> <18018@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: johnw@astroatc.UUCP (John F. Wardale)
Organization: Astronautics Technology Cntr, Madison, WI
Lines: 27

In article <18018@amdcad.AMD.COM> phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai) writes:
>In article <414@astroatc.UUCP> johnw@astroatc.UUCP (John F. Wardale) writes:
>>  that moderen disk designs must compete with RAMs and/or RAM-disks
>
>Come on John, don't be stupid. <flaming comments deleted>
>You must have temporarily forgotten the difference between volatile
>and nonvolatile storage. 

Sorry Phil (and others via e-mail), but I *DO* know that RAMs are
volatile.

I didn't say that disks will die tomorrow, but in 2-4 years I
assume RAM disks (with *GOOD* power backup systems) will easily be
trustable for days!  (Anyone who doesn't backup his/her disks (RAM
or magnetic) to tape (or preferabely optical-write-only-disks) is
really asking for trouble!!!

I think that in 3-5 years the common trend will be optical (WO)
disks for source, binaries, and backups, while all of /tmp and
most development will use RAM disks.  Likely the RAM-disks will be
on semi-private workstations and the optical-WO's on some kind of LAN.

-- 
					John Wardale
... {seismo | harvard | ihnp4} ! {uwvax | cs.wisc.edu} ! astroatc!johnw

To err is human, to really foul up world news requires the net!