I bet you're going to see some new file systems designed to run well on SSDs 
coming up, given there's no cost to a seek.

For example, right now, under Windows, when you write to a file and you have 
one or more snapshots active, the previous block of the data is copied into 
the snapshot and then the data you're writing is put into the file.

If you have no seek costs, it would seem trivial to simply write to a new 
spot on the disk and then adjust the master file records to assign the old 
block to the snapshot and the new block to the file. It's like renaming a 
file rather than a copy/delete.

I bet you'll start to see novel stuff in file systems that wouldn't be 
performant enough to implement on spinning media, just like having 
directories on a spinning disk was infeasible on linear media like tape.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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