In January, EMC released its Symmetrix system, which incorporates a combination of spinning disks and solid-state drives built by STEC.

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Decoupling refresh cycles lets data center customers purchase server compute nodes, which are essentially very small motherboards (processor, system memory, boot environment, management, and connection to a local network fabric), separately from rack-level data center network interfaces (1GbE and 10GbE), separately from mass storage (hard disks and solid-state drives).

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Apple, for example, has also frustrated hard-disk drive makers by featuring solid state drives across its line of notebook computers and eliminating spinning disks in the MacBook Air, its thinnest, lightest model.

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Schiller pointed out some of the downsides of the technologies it's removed or downplayed: rotating hard disks, for instance, use more power and are more likely to have reliability issues than solid-state storage.

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