Bigger Drives, Bigger Buffers
28 Nov
2017
28 Nov
'17
12:08 p.m.
What caught my eye about this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/toshiba_10tb_surveillance_drive/ was
But the new drives have a doubled buffer, at 256MiB, ...
Why should hard drives have large “buffers” in them at all? Their job is to read and write the data specified to them by the OS driver, no more and no less. Bigger buffers increase latency, and 256MiB seems absolutely massive and unnecessary. And then there’s the issue where the drive tells the OS that the data has been written, but in fact it is still sitting in a memory buffer. So it could still be lost if a power outage happens in the next few milliseconds.
Telling lies like this seems to be all about looking good in benchmarks, and to hell with safeguarding data integrity.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro