FUD about CGD and GBDE

[Peter Jeremy]

On Fri, 2005-Mar-04 16:37:05 -0600, Jason Young wrote:
>Why not put a flash chip into the drive's onboard electronics, of the same 
>size as the drive's cache, or the max possible size of all outstanding 
>cached writes?

That seems to be a better idea.  ISTR that once upon a time, vendors made
chips that had RAM shadowed by EEPROM which gave you the non-volatility
of EEPROM with the read/write performance of RAM.  Since the EEPROM was
written at once, you only needed 10-20 msec hold-up to preserve your RAM.

>At least some modern drives (seen this on HP/Compaq servers, etc) already 
>have flash-upgradeable firmware. It's just a matter of adding a little 
>more. You would use it only when power fails, so it's not like you would 
>wear it out.

I think that most modern drives have very little firmware in ROM  - just
a bootstrap - with most of the firmware stored on the disk itself.

-- 
Peter Jeremy