[vox] Why Linux FS doesn't need defragmenting

[Ryan]

On Sunday 10 September 2006 10:07 pm, Jimbo evesautomotive-at-charter.net 
|lugod| wrote:
> I have a question that, in a sense, is related to this article.  Forgive my
> ignorance as this might sound really, really stupid:
>
> From what I have absorbed in the past a hard drive is just a big floppy
> with a writing arm built in.  It is made of what appears to be a tape like
> material but a stack of them, right?
>
> Anyways...Why is it that this type of storage device is still used?  Seems
> crude in that we have gone a long ways with electronics.  Couldn't they
> just use some sort of electronic device?  It would seem that a large ic
> chip like device could be able to be read and rewrote with ease.

In addition to being signifigantly more expensive then magnetic media, flash 
memory has a much more limited life time in terms of write cycles then a hard 
drive does. As Bill noted, if you want fast access times, there are devices 
to adapt flash memory to IDE.  There are also devices to allow you to use a 
large amount of battery backed RAM as a hard drive.  The price to storage 
space ratio, however, simply cannot compare to traditional hard drives.

-- 
Ryan Castellucci - http://ryanc.org/
GPG Key: http://ryanc.org/files/publickey.asc