You're showing your ignorance of how a technical paper is written, not poking holes in the paper itself. They're referencing a 10 year old paper to show that "flash-based SSD's are relatively new".

I keep all my important data on 8" floppies 'cause that's what Jerry said to do in Byte.

_________________
--
Chris Bryant

My work still has some data on Travan 4 tapes. At least we think it's on there, we don't have a working drive to read them.

I keep my data on the USS Enterpise

The problem with that article is:

1) 13 of 15 drives suffered failures after cutting the power 3000 times. Not a single time, but 3000 times. When is that last time your Linode suffered an unexpected power failure-based shutdown? It seems to only happen every few years. 3000 is an insanely high figure even for consumer use, let alone datacenter use.

2) Of the problems reported, only one failed entirely, others merely suffered some sort of problem, such as data corruption. How much of this was because of the SSD, and how much was because of the filesystem/OS?

3) They don't appear to have performed a similar test on magnetic HDDs as a comparison. For all we know, if you took 15 HDDs and subjected them to the same tests, you'd see similar results.

EDIT: Actually, reading the paper, they do some limited testing on HDDs (a single 5.4K RPM and a single 15K RPM model). One of the HDDs (the 5.4K RPM one, I believe it was) didn't suffer failure (similar to one of the SSDs), and the 15K RPM one did suffer failures. Still, none of their test results differentiate between physical errors and filesystem errors. It seems like the vast majority of errors suffered would be solved by a copy-on-write filesystem with per-block checksums and some sort of redundancy (even if it's a single disk with ditto blocks).

Have been using DO for over a month now and so far so good. Automated backups are free, although they are planning to charge a minimal sum for it starting from June.

It's always good to have alternatives. I am glad DO came about, gives Linode more reason to be competitive with their offerings.

I use linode for some non-critical apps and I gotta say I am getting really tempted by DO's offers, unless they significantly upgrade the memory in the last phase of their upgrades I don't have much of a reason to stay

Just saw this: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... italocean/

Not so good for DA

Whoops

Linodes used to have the same problem - if you created a raw disk image it would be full of other people's data. I haven't tested it lately, but they say it isn't so anymore. I'm still paranoid enough to zero out partitions myself before deleting them.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=6705&hilit=Deleting+disk+zeros+it+out#p36510

Someone should tell this Kenneth White about cat abuse

cat /dev/vda | strings > /dev/shm/dump.txt

Totally and utterly pointless use of cat. It should be:

strings /dev/vda >/dev/shm/dump.txt

And maybe don't store massive files in a tmpfs.


And he doesn't seem to know the difference between formating and blanking either.

Back when Wired was a real magazine, they had real science/tech writers.

Now that it's online - it's complete drivel, written by fops that are clueless (at best).

Wired is now up there with "the Sun" and "the National Enquirer", just targeted at hipsters instead of the blue hair crowd.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Since when don't they have a real magazine? I've still got a ton of Wired magazines that I haven't read yet still in their plastic wrap from when I had a subscription.

OK, so I've been procrastinating that for a few years now.

For what it's worth I created a 4GB droplet in Amsterdam and ran strings on the disk. The only password hashes or private keys I could find came from my newly created filesystem. It's looks like they really have fixed the problem.

I'll try the same on an EBS volume from amazon just for fun.

EDIT: Amazon EBS volumes contain nothing but zeros.
EDIT2: Amazon Instance storage contains nothing but a filesystem over zeroed blocks.