Facebook Engineer: Cut Power by Slowing Hard Drives

The New York Times (Aug 19 2011) Storage

1. The latest idea from Facebook on how to revolutionize the data center is elegant in its simplicity: Put a switch on hard-disk drives that slows their speed when their data is no longer hot. I’m not aware of any vendor actually doing this, which makes me wonder if Facebook will just take up the cause itself. More News From GigaOm Facebook Engineer: Cut Power by Slowing Hard Drives YouTube Hangouts: Google+’s Secret Weapon Against Facebook Early October iPhone 5 Release Date Gets More Support Foursquare Finds Opportunities in the Past Electric Car Maker Fisker Valued at $2.2B? Writing on the Open Compute blog, Facebook Engineer Eran Tal makes an astute observation. Essentially, he says, HDDs must remaining spinning even when their data is no longer accessed often because should someone need something, the 30 seconds it might take for disk to resume spinning might seem like an ... (Read Full Article)

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