Woodhouse on flash storage

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> wrote:
> To solve a hard problem to the level where you can ship the result
> requires money

Not particularly controversial with me at least. The community is made
of many interests, and the commercial interests are a significant
part. Big tent and all of that.

The corollary here I guess is that there isn't significant money in
the advantage that an "open stack" FTL would provide, at least now.

I wonder whether the Flash vendors that fail to "win" in the FTL
driven market you (convincingly) describe will open up a bit, offering
a lower cost raw-access device, one that will only be usable with a
passable wearlevelling-smart FS.

Such scenario will take some time to play out though. I'll probaby be
married with kids by then.

> We have a lot of company - the entire market is waking up to the problem
> that the previous generation of FLASH-based storage was dodgy.  The
> controller vendors have already made great strides toward fixing it.

Yes, but other buyers are testing (and bargaining with vendors) each
on their own. Granted, if you are smarter buying your Flash device,
you have a market advantage.

Anyway, we aren't going to hear from them anytime soon. The trick we
can try, I guess, is to make sure the needs for SD testing becomes
widespread knowledge in the tinkerer & FOSS crowd.

cheers,


m
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