Comment by orf
10 years ago
Surely filesystems are going to go through a massive change when SSDs push standard spinning disks into the history books? They must carry a lot of baggage for dealing with actual spinning disks, much of which is just overhead for super-fast solid state drives. Hopefully this will allow interesting features not possible on spinning disks, like better atomic operations.
"IotaFS: Exploring File System Optimizations for SSDs"
Our hypothesis in beginning this research was simply that the complex optimizations applied in current file system technology doesn’t carry over to SSDs given such dramatic changes in performance characteristics. To explore this hypothesis, we created a very simple file system research vehicle, IotaFS, based on the incredibly simple and small Minix file system, and found that with a few modifications we were able to achieve comparable performance to modern file systems including Ext3 and ReiserFS, without being nearly as complex.
http://web.stanford.edu/~jdellit/default_files/iotafs.pdf
Yeah btrfs 'ssd' mount option does less for the same reasoning, but still does include checksums for metadata and data because SSDs have at least as much likelihood of non-deterministically returning your data as spinning rust. So even if it doesn't fix the corruptions (which requires additional copies or parity), at least there's an independent way of being informed of problems.