Jon Klaus remembers when flash storage become affordable as a performance tier back in 2012. Since then, we’ve seen all-flash arrays becoming increasingly common, but the spinning disk remains for a variety of reasons. At Storage Field Day, VAST Data demoed how their novel architecture is designed to finally kill the spinning disk. They are able to do this by using cheap low endurance QLC flash, which doesn’t wear out quickly thanks to 3D Xpoint SSDs used as a write buffer. Jon runs through more fo the technical details of VAST’s approach, but he thinks its a radical rethink of storage based on the latest emerging technologies.