[HN Gopher] What if mass storage were free? (1980) ___________________________________________________________________ What if mass storage were free? (1980) Author : dwenzek Score : 44 points Date : 2023-02-15 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (dl.acm.org) (TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org) | tpmx wrote: | We now (2023) live in a time where storing years of text and even | audio is essentially free. Storing years of video is still | actually costly. | | Btw: You need about 12 TB for a 1 year video stream at 3 Mbit/s, | so it's certainly doable, but it's not cheap. | Hooray_Darakian wrote: | > Optical discs promise to come one to two orders of magnitude | closer to the limiting case of free mass storage than ever | before. Other features of optical discs include improved | reliability and a single technology for both on-line and archival | storage with a long shelf life. Because of these features and | because of (not in spite of) their non-deletion limitation, it is | argued that optical discs fit the requirements of database | systems better than magnetic discs and tapes. | | Wild view from where we sit today, but CDs were ~700MB in 1982. | Seagate launched a 5MB hard drive in 1980 so.... not entirely | absurd to think that `just don't delete things` could be the way | of the future. We sorta adopted `just don't delete things` anyway | though not with respect to RDBMS systems. | | Thanks for sharing! | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | 1988: Schlumberger Cambridge Research takes possession of a new | 1MB drive to be added to its VAXcluster. The drive is the size | of ... a small refridgerator. It was quite a day! | WalterBright wrote: | At Aph we had 10Mb drives in 1978. | gruturo wrote: | In Winter 1987 I had an Amstrad PC1640HDMD with a 20MB MFM | hard disk. I opened the case many times, the disk was just a | 5.25 inch device, certainly not like 20 small refrigerators, | or even one. | | Bonus: I got an RLL controller and turned it into a 30MB hard | disk! Couldn't believe it. But getting the interleaving right | was time consuming.. | berkut wrote: | I suspect that was really 1 GB? | | 3.5" HDs of over > 20 MB for IBM PCs were around in IBM PCs | at the time. | ta1243 wrote: | Did you really mean Nineteen-Eighty-Eight? | | In PC Magazine from July 1988 there is an advert for a 15MHz | XT for $575 with an optional 30MB Segate ST238 5.25" scsi | hard drive inside for an extra $295 [0] | | The price hasn't dropped much since, it's now $206 for the | drive [1] | | [0] https://archive.org/details/PC- | Mag-1988-07-01/page/22/mode/2... | | [1] https://www.amazon.com/ST238R-Seagate-3600RPM-Internal- | Drive... | joering2 wrote: | I recall the 10MB ad more. | | https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0d/b3/b6/0db3b67dcdd2edbedd5c... | | Classic! | ocal5 wrote: | Isn't the way of _Glacier_ ? | bob1029 wrote: | If mass storage were free, then everything would be append-only | by default. There would be no excuse to not do this. | | A major benefit of append-only is that your writes are always | ideal for whatever storage medium. Especially magnetic or tape. | Combine append-only with batching of transactions (i.e. across | 1-10 milliseconds at a time), and you can write multiple txns per | disk I/O operation (assuming txn size < storage block size). | kragen wrote: | what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your | nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage | sharkjacobs wrote: | Then you would delete it | | > everything would be append-only by default | | doesn't mean everything is permanently etched into stone or | written on the blockchain, it just means that "by default" | everything you write is written to a new block[1], instead of | having to free up old blocks to reuse and keep track of which | blocks of storage are available | | [1]"block" is just meant as a generic unit of storage, I'm | not trying to say anything about actual drive blocks and | implementation details | sn0wf1re wrote: | Even if it is etched in stone (or laser blasted into | crystal), nothing a chisel and a hammer can't undo. :) | bitwize wrote: | The blocks with those would be scribbled over and | invalidated. | | Do you know why ASCII 0x7f is DEL? Paper tape is write-once. | To indicate a deleted character, it was conventional to punch | holes in all bit positions -- 0x7f on a 7-bit punch. | pclmulqdq wrote: | It's interesting that we have almost started to live in this | world. I have a half-written blog post on this phenomenon but I | guess I'm 45 years too late. | | Interestingly, Google and Facebook seem to have basically done it | right with their exascale filesystems. The same with object | stores. | fmajid wrote: | Leo Szilard's solution to the problem of Maxwell's Demon was that | the acto of deleting data the demon must perform is the | thermodynamically limiting factor. Deleting selective data | efficiently is in fact one of the greatest challenges in large | production databases, and in an era of increasing privacy | restrictions like GDPR's right to deletion, an increasing | challenge for database operators. | MisterTea wrote: | Plan 9 implemented this concept in the worm cached file server, | one of the on-disk file systems used in plan 9. The idea was you | have a disk based cache and a WORM (write once, read many) dump | consisting of optical juke boxes. Writes to the fs are stored in | the cache until the fs is dumped to worm, manually or on a | schedule (hard-coded to do this 2am every night.) | http://man.9front.org/4/cwfs | | The idea was to reduce the cost of storage by removing long term | data from costly hard disks and storing it on cheap magneto- | optical disks which like CD's could be stored in an automated | juke box. Write all the data you want to the cache, then commit | to worm. As the worm fills, you just buy another disk and put it | in the jukebox. The history(1) command then gives you a files | history as a set of paths you can bind over another path to use | an old version of a file instead of copying it. Its really a file | system for programmers. | http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/fs/ | | This idea was expanded on with Venti/Fossil which allows you to | build file systems from arbitrary venti data sets. | http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/venti/ | usrusr wrote: | Reminds me of the various "what if all memory was non-volatile" | that made the rounds when Intel Optane entered the stage. A bit | like the inverse of this, but the caveats might turn out similar: | in one case you'd still want a well-defined resettable area, in | the other case you'd still want to avoid having to deal with | arbitrarily long addresses which would at some point become as | bad as seek times even if hypothetically seek times in the | stricter sense did not exist. | [deleted] | dwenzek wrote: | I just found this quite old paper and it came as a surprise to me | to discover that the idea of append-only storage is not 20 years | old but more than 40! | | The older work I was aware of is on "The design and | implementation of a log-structured file system" (1) | | So this is with pleasure that I learned that these ideas was | around in the 80: | | - Deletion considered harmful | | - A non-deletion strategy using timestamps | | - The importance of accessing past data | | - A non-deletion strategy can improve both integrity and | reliability | | (1) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/146941.146943 | mouse_ wrote: | I'm fairly certain data and records have been sewn into | tapestries for thousands of years. | kragen wrote: | the idea of append-only storage is surely older than pacioli | 082349872349872 wrote: | Paper-based accounting was append-only, so I think the idea's | always been there but was uneconomic in machine readable media | for a long time. | | (in particular, "new master = old master + updates" card/tape | jobs were in principle append-only but --due to finite number | of tapes-- in practice overwriting) | cperciva wrote: | Not at all! Medieval documents were routinely washed and | reused. | dmurray wrote: | And wax tablets, slates, etc. Pedantically, I suppose | neither these nor parchment is really paper. | anamexis wrote: | I don't think that was their point. If you went to a bank | in the 1940s and made a withdrawal, they wouldn't pull your | account slip, erase the balance, and write in the new one. | They would add a new line to the ledger noting a new | balance. This is by design. | WalterBright wrote: | Double-entry bookkeeping was a great advance. | ezekiel68 wrote: | And -- in keeping with the flow of this thread -- a | complete luxury until the implements | (paper/pens/tape/disk/silicon) would become abundant and | ubiquitous. | itsmartapuntocm wrote: | More recently, movie studios regularly destroyed old film | to make space for new ones, causing old pictures, | especially silent era ones, to be lost forever. | | Even NASA wiped the original Apollo 11 tapes to reuse them. | zwirbl wrote: | A reused manuscript page is called a palimpsest and often | the scraped off text can be recovered. Some of Archimedes | writings actually survived this way | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest | unwind wrote: | Obligatory shout-out to the novella of the same name, by | HN user (and, obviously, Actual Author) Charles Stross. | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella) | refset wrote: | The topic dealing with history in databases seems to go most of | the way back to the beginning of the field. I'm still hoping a | copy of "Bubenko (1977) The Temporal Dimension in Information | Modelling" turns up on the web eventually as I'd love to read | it. | | The 1980 paper you linked is touched on briefly at the | beginning of this Strange Loop talk on "Light and Adaptive | Indexing for Immutable Databases (2022)": | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px-7TlceM5A | codemac wrote: | Sadly 1992 is 31 years ago. The authors pushed for log | structured filesystems in an earlier paper in 1988 : Beating | the I/O Bottleneck | https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1988/5760.html . | It was inspiration for many storage appliances, NetApp probably | being a very strong example. | | Though many were thinking about these ideas in the 88-92 | timeframe, as Tape storage systems are roughly speaking append | only, so lots of the ideas of a logged filesystem are around | the increased random read from disk drives. | oakwhiz wrote: | A non-deletion strategy should consider including an encryption | and key management strategy to enable retroactive secure | deletion without impacting availability, reliability, and | performance. This seems to be missing from a lot of systems | that deal with personal information. | spelunker wrote: | also called crypto shredding! We had this issue trying to | square GDPR-type things with an append-only store. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-02-15 23:01 UTC)