One might think about the paradigm shift when hard disks became so cheap that tape drives no longer made sense.
• Tape drives still make sense, to some people that store insanely large data sets with extremely infrequent (or never) access.
• I do not mourn my tape based backups for a single instant when using my rsync based backups. Life is good.
• Despite tape being dead for most of us, we all know a program called "tar". We still make tape archives, just on other storage.
The paradigm survives on virtual tapes because it is a useful cognitive model. Sure I could make a block file be a virtual disk and put a filesystem in it and send you the files that way, but you'd rather have a good old "tape" archive.
Likewise, disk filesystems are not going to go away if disks go away. They are too useful for reasoning about problems.
Scratch the surface of an iPad. It is full of files, yet empty of disks. Go to Linux, land of speciation, try to find a persistent storage system for flash memory which does not treat it as a disk. You will find some filesystems optimized for flash, but you will come up (nearly) lacking for a completely new way of looking at storage.
Persistent full speed RAM should be enough of a change to spawn that new thing, but I'll bet people keep the "real" copy in a filesystem for a long time. When that alpha particle corrupts a bit and trashes your clever RAM based data structure, what are you going to do? I'll reload from my file.
• Tape drives still make sense, to some people that store insanely large data sets with extremely infrequent (or never) access.
• I do not mourn my tape based backups for a single instant when using my rsync based backups. Life is good.
• Despite tape being dead for most of us, we all know a program called "tar". We still make tape archives, just on other storage.
The paradigm survives on virtual tapes because it is a useful cognitive model. Sure I could make a block file be a virtual disk and put a filesystem in it and send you the files that way, but you'd rather have a good old "tape" archive.
Likewise, disk filesystems are not going to go away if disks go away. They are too useful for reasoning about problems.
Scratch the surface of an iPad. It is full of files, yet empty of disks. Go to Linux, land of speciation, try to find a persistent storage system for flash memory which does not treat it as a disk. You will find some filesystems optimized for flash, but you will come up (nearly) lacking for a completely new way of looking at storage.
Persistent full speed RAM should be enough of a change to spawn that new thing, but I'll bet people keep the "real" copy in a filesystem for a long time. When that alpha particle corrupts a bit and trashes your clever RAM based data structure, what are you going to do? I'll reload from my file.