Apple recently introduced optional flash hard drives for its Macbooks. Flash drives, called Solid State Drives (SSDs) these days, are silent and energy saving, but expensive and not very big by today’s standards. However, these drives are the future…
I don’t know much about these drives (from Samsung). But my previous experience with big flash drives makes me think that we may have a way yet to go with this new technology. One thing that I suspect would help today’s operating systems would be a good filesystem like XFS along with some nice features from the drive vendors (by the way Samsung has got a good start on some of the features required by modern laptops by putting encryption onboard as a drive option).
Since the slow demise of Moore’s Law, architecture has become the important force in hardware design. The same is becoming true of OS design. For decades software vendors have been building under the assumption that more CPU, disk and network power was just over the horizon. Not so much anymore.
So now, if you want to edit High Definition (HD) video you just deal with bad performance, or spend a bunch of cash getting a huge desktop system. Those big systems are unnecessary, if notebooks were designed a little more carefully. With a good file system you could inform the disk of your intention to use a hoard of HD video data, much like QofS does for networks. The disk could reserve its cache to provide the correct buffer size, the operating system could arrange to then deliver the data direct to your editing program, instead of first storing the data boatload of little Jane’s first birthday party in expensive kernel memory.
So as I often rant, design and architecture are important parts of future technology. It was reasonable when industry was chasing the greased pig of Moore’s law to run quickly, don’t worry about the details and ship it quick! However, those days are drawing to a close. Tech companies are going to need to look at how to construct their systems to work better by design. Apple could get a nice head start by simply licensing XFS, I suspect.
Update on MacOS X Filesystems (July 8, 2009)
I recently found out that Apple had been interested in another high performance file system that would have likely included flash-drive specific features: ZFS. Snow Leopard Server is due out in September of 2009. From the web it looks like ZFS didn’t make the cut. Here are some links that I found documenting Apples apparent lack of effort (but possibly, you know, they have secret plans, we hope).
