NFS, our file system. It's created by Sun for Solaris way back when I don't have the date, and it uses a client-server model and allows remote directories to be accessed as though they were local directories. Nothing new these days, it's been around for a long time. Runs over TCP/IP, and other cool things about it is the operating system and the architecture of the server can be different from the client. So, this might be a Linux server, it might be a shared volume on and /var/share0/ here. These might be arm CPUs in the server, they might be AMD machines and architecture in there, they might be IBM power series microprocessors in there, doesn't matter. Over here on the other side on the client, you've got a different OS and a different architecture, and this has worked very well quite a while until big data started to come along. Though, in this system, folder that contains files resides on a single server and NAS box network, stands for Network Attached Storage box. It may be arrayed system as well for data protection. Generally, not for access speed, there is one RAID version I don't recall off the top of my head that takes a file and splits it amongst a bunch of drives, and then when a read happens, a larger read happens, multiple drives can be read in parallel to get the data back to the application faster. That's the gist of NFS. So, give me an idea of transfer speeds. Hard drives can stream in about four gigabits per second, and this has to do with media channel speed, and you notice that you don't see Intel and AMD CPUs higher than four gigabytes. I mean, there's some gamers that go to extraordinary means to cool and then run to crank the voltage up and crank the clock up and have this huge fans and water cooling systems to keep it cool and keep the CPU from melting down. But as shipped, we've pretty much capped out at about four gigabytes a second or four gigahertz in a CPU. The running in a different but similar issues has to do with timing and slew rates and all of this. In any event, I don't know where the channel speed is on hard drives today. Maybe it's 4.5 gigabits or maybe they're slowly creeping up on five, but it was going up at a pretty good cook for a while, and then it's rolled off. So, they're capped out at about four gigabits per second or there about. So, translate in that megabytes per second, you get about 500 megabytes a second. Take a Gen4 PCIe NVMe drive, it can stream at almost 2,000 megabytes a second per lane. One of the cool things about PCIe is, when you design a device that can be one lane or two, four, eight or 16, adding graphic cards from AMD and NVIDIA, they use 16 PCIe lanes because they want to get in and suck outside of the DRAM in your system and do stuff with it, put them back. Initially, wanted to be really, really fast. So, you do the math on this four lane Gen4 transferring and about seven gigabytes a second, which is pretty fast in comparison to hard drive that 500 megabytes a second. This is of course assuming that you have enough NAND in the backend of the drive that can feed seven gigabytes a second.
