Future storage technologies and Linux [LWN.net]

Future storage technologies and Linux

Posted Apr 6, 2011 14:14 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020)
In reply to: Future storage technologies and Linux by NAR
Parent article: Future storage technologies and Linux

This is easily the worst idea I've seen lately. I realize that the drive manufacturers are stuck interfacing w/ Microsoft, but guessing about how to handle the data is really a bad idea.

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Future storage technologies and Linux

Posted Apr 6, 2011 15:48 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

SSDs do that already for NTFS... It will wait until the disk is idle for a while, then parse the partition table, and then the actual filesystem on the partition itself, to find out which blocks are no longer pointed to by any files. And then, it will erase those blocks. That seems like a really really bad idea to me, but then, nobody asked me.

All this, just so that the OS doesn't need to support TRIM...

Future storage technologies and Linux

Posted Apr 7, 2011 19:18 UTC (Thu) by eds (guest, #69511) [Link]

Can you link to some place with evidence of this? (Drives parsing filesystems to auto-trim blocks)

Future storage technologies and Linux

Posted Apr 8, 2011 1:30 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

It was from a paper exploring the data forensics ramifications. This one, I think:
http://www.jdfsl.org/subscriptions/JDFSL-V5N3-Bell.pdf

Quick google search also finds:
"Samsung controllers with recent firmware take an entirely different approach. Without any interaction from the OS, the Samsung firmware is able to 'read' the drive data in the background. When the drive has been idle for a period of time, the firmware reads any NTFS volume bitmaps present and automatically frees up flash blocks not allocated by that partition."

http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=7488