Resumen
The article focuses on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based data storage technology and how it can be applied to computer systems from the perspective of a prototype MEMS-based data storage system being developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Abandoning the rotating disk paradigm, simple miniature MEMS position probe tips over the storage media, potentially creating a new generation of nonvolatile rewritable mass storage devices, as well as support for multitude of "intelligent" gadgets. Decreases in disk drive access times have been minimal, creating a significant performance problem for common applications accessing many small pieces of data, such as those in transaction-processing workloads. In order for mass-storage devices to pierce both the access time and entry-cost barriers, researchers have turned to hybrid approaches leveraging the best of both semiconductor memories and disk drives. From semiconductor memories, the hybrid approaches have adopted the parallel wafer-fabrication process that keeps unit costs low. INSET: Device Characteristics and Data Layout.

Resumen
Relative fitness is a new approach to modeling the performance of storage devices (e.g., disks and RAID arrays). In contrast to a conventional model, which predicts the performance of an application's I/O on a given device, a relative fitness model predicts performance differences between devices. The result is significantly more accurate predictions