[ExI] Small scale solar payback time (was Re: Planetary defense)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 03:40:35PM +0930, Emlyn wrote:

> I think my oldest machines are about 6 or 7 years old, but it's very
> hard to justify, given how ridiculously cheap new and newish hardware
> is, and how seriously it kicks the old stuff's butt.

The real problem is power. I'm still using Pentium 3 equivalents,
but in an embedded envelope now.

I still run dual-core Opterons in production. The real bottleneck
is I/O, and today's TByte SATA drives are just as fast IOPS-wise
as these of yesteryears. SSDs are sure better, but unaffordable for
~TByte and beyond volumes. Orkcackle killed the Solaris star, and
hybrid pools are not yet available for Linux. Nevermind you'd
need at least one real, battery-backed RAM drive.

In general, computing blows chunks.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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