Having fast storage nodes and slow storage nodes differentiated

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There was talk on the mailing list about having “cold storage” for files that were accessed less often. I don’t know if there was ever any progress made on this front, but today I was looking to build the twister (http://twister.net.co/) just to help along another decentralized project (though I think maidsafe will replace this). I placed this on my network mounted drive - my 14 TB media server - because I’m not overly concerned about it’s speed. It dawned on my that this would have a huge impact on my GET speeds in the maidsafe network.

I have a ~4TB raid on my local tower, and my ~14TB media server on my network mount. Obviously my network mounted drive is much slower. I would like to be able to dedicate my larger, slower media server to files not used as often as a “cold storage” while using my faster local drives for medium access files, and allocate a chunk of my 18G ram for cache. Is something like this even possible? Will this happen naturally based on access rates?

I want to the most productive node I can in the maidsafe system. If there is no prioritization between my faster speed drives and my slower ones, I think it will downgrade my node as whole.

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At the moment, we haven’t even started roughing out the cold storage/archiving mechanism, so I can’t really give too many pointers there.

What I think is safe to assume - we’ll try and make life as easy as possible for users. Not just to be nice, but because the network should be able to calculate better than us users what would make a good archive vault. So, eventually I expect the network will be able to identify your media server as a good candidate for archive data and use it as such.

As for your RAM, we’re not planning on taking too much initially. Long-term cache data is copied to disk, short-term will be memory-only. Again, once we get the basic functionality nailed, we’ll look at improving it so that the amount of RAM and disk space dedicated to cache can be dynamically updated.

Some or all of these attributes might well become settable via an “advanced user” interface. Just now I think the only one we’re planning on being user-settable is the amount of disk space to be given to the network.