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by deelowe
3890 days ago
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All I'm saying is that we work closely with drive vendors and test tons of drives at work. Most of what you're claiming here seems like speculation. For example, the remapping you talk about isn't constant. It happens somewhat frequently, but reads and writes aren't constantly reordered. Also, drive vendors spend tons of R&D on bin packing both on the physical disk and the data stream to try and eek out the most performance possible. Given how much the mechanical disk vendors are threatened by solid state technology, if there were a simple way to increase performance on drives, I'm sure they would provide it at this point. Even if they didn't do it for retail, their big customers would have access to it. I'm not aware of anything of the sort, so I doubt this is as big an issue as you claim. Open firmware would be great for various other reasons like being able to have confidence in a secure erase solution or being able to have better telemetry to predict failures. That said, I wouldn't put some huge secret performance gains at the top of that list. |
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the remapping I'm talking about happens when a sector goes bad. if sector 5 fails, it's remapped to the bit of disk set aside as spares, no? no secret there. but when my computer reads sector 1 through sector 10, my computer thinks it's reading sequentially... but really there's a big random seek right in the middle of it. By my understanding, that happens every time I go to read sector 5.
>Given how much the mechanical disk vendors are threatened by solid state technology, if there were a simple way to increase performance on drives, I'm sure they would provide it at this point. Even if they didn't do it for retail, their big customers would have access to it. I'm not aware of anything of the sort, so I doubt this is as big an issue as you claim.
The point here is that it's not simple, and it's not a conspiracy or anything... and a lot of this wouldn't be a win for computers running windows with a single disk, and the big customers do have access to this sort of thing; like I said, emc and netapp and the other big vendors have their own custom firmware.
My guess is that the vendors don't want to do anything that requires the user to run special software, and all the changes I'm talking about would end very badly for the user if they weren't running a filesystem/raid system that was built to handle that sort of thing.