Henry Newman may know SSD drives but he doesn't know enterprise storage. Henry, enterprise shops don't talk about MB/s unless they are streaming video or working on their laptop.

All IO in the a storage networked enterprise are random. Most important IOs are usually small block (databases). There is no concept of MB/s of bandwidth except to gauge channel capacity. Any one who does enterprise storage works in IOPS. SSD drives smoke for random IOPS to the tune of 50x for writes and 200x for reads (MLC vs same size 15k RPM drives). These are significant numbers. Even if we lost 1/2 the write IOPS to wear leveling, that would be 25x faster. Want your database to scream.

RAID controllers will only be able to do RAID 10. Most RAID controllers can do RAID 10 in their sleep. The bottle neck will now be the channels in and out of the controllers. The first roll out of SSD storage in the enterprise will be direct attached SSD trays to bus attached controllers with the most external channels (bandwidth).

SSD drives are going to choke SAN channels. In a couple of years when administrators want to network their SSD drives there will be a really big push to get better pipes in the SAN. I wonder if inifiniband will get back in the mix?

This kind of disruptive technology keeps us employed.

If the hospital is tax payer funded, then you have every right as a taxpayer to take this memo to the board.

I would suggest that you gather a number of like minded taxpayers (and voters) and make a visit to the board to explain your stance.

You might want to do some research and find that your IT director got a free beer (golf trip) out of this. Fodder for the meeting.

George probably has it right.

This is low level non-ionizing radiation, so the only real effect is body heating. Generally body heating is dispersed (except in the eyeballs and testicles) by the flow of body fluids. It takes a lot of power to heat a human body (even eyeballs). There probably isn't enough heat being generated in your body by radio wave absorption to be measured.

However you do sleep in one position. These types of antennas are highly directional and they could have hotspots. Cell towers operators don't care about RF hazards except to satisfy the FCC. If you are worried, you could put some grounded foil on the wall between your bed and the antenna and make a modified tin foil hat.

WTF,

MS still hasn't fixed the storport driver with an OS release:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968675.

Nor does MS make it easy to write 3rd party drivers. There documentation is usually incorrect and the samples inoperative. If MS can't get their drivers to work, how is a vendor suppose to do it.

As for beta drivers, forget it. This guy expects every vendor to spend hours of dev time making drivers for a growing tree. No. No. No.

Nobody even tried to write a driver for 2008 until it was RTM, and that isn't much of a window.

Kevin has this right, what an obtuse article.

Henry Newman is talking about PC storage not enterprise storage. He discusses all disk IO performance in MBs/sec, meaning sequential. When in reality, very little (disk level) IO for the enterprise is sequential. The numbers here are flawed as is the characterization of storage.

Storage is where we keep our data. Keeping data is a central requirement of information technology. It will never be a peripheral feature.

Presently the real IO bottleneck is the spinning platter and the requirements of getting a read/write head to the right place quickly. Newer solid state storage devices will alleviate this bottleneck in the very near future. Perhaps PCM is the solution, but I for one will wait for a GB/$ threshold at which time the winning solid state storage will be available to everyone.

Mr. Newman talks about inter-computer bus speeds as not keeping up with CPUs and memory, when in fact they keeping up. The place where data transport still can't keep up, is serially on a single transport, (wire or optical). Networked (switchable) data needs to be serial single transport for a number of obvious reasons. Like the platter, this is a physical limitation and not easily surmounted.

If and when we get +10GB/sec consumer networks, storage networks (transporting SCSI blocks) will become a thing of the past as we pass and store all our data in an application aware protocol.