Facebook eyes 'cold flash' to store those old baby pictures

August 14, 2013

Facebook is looking for some really bad flash. The social networking behemoth already relies heavily on NAND flash for many of its services, taking advantage of its high performance to quickly give users the latest from their friends. Now it wants to use a new type of flash for long-term storage of data such as photos and videos, which are hardly ever changed. With the new technology, which Facebook calls “cold flash,” the company wants to take flash in the opposite direction from where most users and vendors are looking for it today. Flash gives faster access to data and takes up less power and space than hard disk drives, but it tends to lose capacity over time as new data is written on it. Most flash storage vendors are working to make the media faster and increase its longevity. By contrast, cold flash would have low endurance and low performance, according to Jason Taylor, Facebook’s director of infrastructure. He spoke on Tuesday morning at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046604/facebook-eyes-cold-flash-to-store-those-old-baby-pictures.html#tk.rss_all