a little ludwig goes a long way: The Exploding PC?. Another smart post by John. He’s right that you want to take the long term storage bank out of the PC.
It happened with LANs long ago with SANs and NASes. I’ve been trying to get this to work reliably in my own house for two years. First a Windows server that would actually shut down and then when the network request comes in, it would wake up.
I could never get that to work because Windows never shut down fans properly in standby and wouldn’t wake up fast enough so the thing would disappear from the network.
Current experiment is with the Linksys NSLU2 and soon the Wifi enclosure thing. Main problems here have been the reliability of these cheap things for Connie et al.
The right answer IMHO given the low cost of hard disks is that you really want lots of caching. Right now, all my music, video and photos are cached across all the machines at home and there isn’t a center to the system. I have to hand manage this with Beyond Compare, but it actually works pretty well.
Lacking a single reliable file server, this is where I live right now. BTW, I don’t think that this means PCs are diskless, disks are so cheap and fast that they should just be caches.

2 responses to “Deaggregation of storage”

  1. Solitary Bird Avatar

    Decentralization of the PC…
    Interesting post from the Tong Family blog (great site, btw) on the trend towards storage moving out of the PC and becoming a shared resource. When I made this earlier post, I hadn’t explicitly thought about decentralization happening at…

  2. Smakofs Avatar

    To me, this is the future.
    My current setup is a 1TB server in the closet (RAID5) that houses all my music, photos, videos and important files. My living room has a Tivo, my ‘theater’ room has a Media Center, and the bedroom a UPNP DVD Player. All get content aggregated from the server.
    Desktop? Sure I still have one, but why? The only reason I haven’t completely dumped it and gone to my laptop only is when at the desk, I like dual monitors. But, I’m working on a solution to get rid of that too.
    I found the NSLU2 too slow. The Asus HD enclosure just arrived on Friday, so, I havent had much time to explore, but, i’m not happy the interface uses the browser (ok) with lots of popups (not ok – XPSP2 kills em).

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