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Why use RAM? You can get a 500GB SSD for $1000. 100 PB would cost you $200 Million, which is peanuts to Google. Or you could use PCIe SSD drives. You can ge
by iamelgringo 16y ago
Why use RAM? You can get a 500GB SSD for $1000. 100 PB would cost you $200 Million, which is peanuts to Google.
Or you could use PCIe SSD drives. You can get a TB of PCIe for $3000, and a 5 PCIe x16 mother board at Fry's costs around $300. You could get 100PB of PCIe SSd storage for around $300 M.
You could use RAM for very fast cache, and SSD storage for faster than HDD indexing and retrieval.
- houseabsolute 16y ago$200M is still a quarter of their capital expenditure in 2009 not including the other parts of the machines. And before 2009 flash was much more expensive and not as fast as it is now. It would surprise me greatly to hear that they had gone this route.
- robk 16y agoSsds aren't reliable enough for Google scale. The rater number of writes before failure for Flash would make replacement a constant effort for them and ruin any economy. You need Ram for the reliability as well as the random access speed.