IO Devices and Latency

IO devices and latency By Benjamin Dicken | March 13, 2025 Non-volatile storage is a cornerstone of modern computer systems. Every modern photo, email, bank balance, medical record, and other critical pieces of data are kept on digital storage devices, often replicated many times over for added durability. Non-volatile storage, or colloquially just "disk", can store binary data even when the computer it is attached to is powered off. Computers have other forms of volatile storage such as CPU registers, CPU cache, and random-access memory, all of which are faster but require continuous power to function. Here, we're going to cover the history, functionality, and performance of non-volatile storage devices over the history of computing, all using fun and interactive visual elements. This blog is written in celebration of our latest product release: PlanetScale Metal. Metal uses locally attached NVMe drives to run your cloud database, as opposed to the slower and less consistent netwo ... Read full article.