Pros and Cons
CAS storage works most efficiently on data that does not change often. It is of particular interest to large organizations that must comply with document-retention laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. In these corporations a large volume of documents will be stored for as much as a decade, with no changes and infrequent access. CAS is designed to make the searching for a given document content very quick, and provides an assurance that the retrieved document is identical to the one originally stored. (If the documents were different, their content addresses would differ.) In addition, since data is stored into a CAS system by what it contains, there is never a situation where more than one copy of an identical document exists in storage. By definition, two identical documents have the same content address, and so point to the same storage location.
For data that changes frequently, CAS is not as efficient as location-based addressing. In these cases, the CAS device would need to continually recompute the address of data as it was changed, and the client systems would be forced to continually update information regarding where a given document exists. For random access systems, a CAS would also need to handle the possibility of two initially identical documents diverging, requiring a copy of one document to be created on demand.
Further information: Copy on writeRead more about this topic: Content-addressable Storage
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“Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)