Linus Torvalds is known around the globe as the genius behind the Linux operating system. He has been fairly vocal when it comes to citing his opinions. And this time, his axe has fallen on traditional hard disks. In an online chat in Slashdot, he recently denounced hard disks comparing them to Satan and said that it makes no sense to use them in PCs and laptops.
Naturally, Torvalds prefers flash drive to HDD. Flash drives are faster, quieter and slimmer. For someone who is known for his heavy-duty programming skills, it makes sense to use machines which use the faster flash drives rather than traditional drives.
Chatting at the forum, Torvalds wrote, “Rotating storage is going the way of the dodo. How do I hate thee, let me count the ways.The latencies of rotational storage are horrendous, and I personally refuse to use a machine that has those nasty platters of spinning rust in them.”
Torvalds admits that when it comes to data centers where huge amounts of data needs to be stored, it may still make sense to use traditional drives since using flash drives can significantly bump costs. In regular computers, however, he says there is no sense in using hard drives.
According to him, “Sure, maybe those rotating platters are OK in some NAS box that you keep your big media files on (or in that cloud storage cluster you use, and where the network latencies make the disk latencies be secondary). But in an actual computer? Ugh. Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Interestingly, Torvalds wrote that he wants his computer to be so quiet that he could hear his cat purring near him. He doesn’t want the heavy whirring sound which usually comes from the regular hard drives and that’s one other reason why he uses flash drives.
Source: Slashdot
Courtesy: Wired
[ttjad keyword=”kindle”]
