Alfio Puglisi wrote:
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Nick Reinking wrote:
Hmm... 4GB Compact Flash cards would be:
Too small (4GB is not enough space, we would need a couple hundred cards)
Wait a sec, those two hundreds cards total 800GB. Are you sure that wikipedia needs that kind of storage? I thought that current articles are a few gigs, and history a few tens of gigs.
Too expensive (4GB cards cost approximately about $1100, or around $330000 for enough space) Too slow (fast access, but only a 5MB/sec read/write) Limit read/writes (they would last about one week, and need to be tossed out)
I agree, Flash cards are not OK for our needs. A server with lots of RAM is much better. Geoffrin would be really optimal, if it worked :(
Here's a crazy thought: Is there a way to make a server identify itself as a *harddrive* on the SCSI bus? If so, we could take a machine with lots of RAM which does nothing else than holding most of the DB in cache (cheaper and faster than Compact Flash:-) and occasionally write stuff to its hard drives. Probably won't need much of a CPU, and maybe not even SCSI drives, just cheap IDE ones, as all it does is caching.
Then, we could plug that thing into the "real" DB server, which just sees a really fast HD.
Well, one can dream...
Magnus