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| hdd / hard disk drive news |
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reaching for
the petabyte SSD
Editor:- March 16, 2010 - previewing the final
chapters in the long running
SSD vs HDD wars -
StorageSearch.com today
published an industry changing new article -
SSDs - reaching for
the Petabyte.
What will the PB SSD look like? When will it appear?
What technology problems do
SSD designers have to
solve to get there? What about the
storage architecture
that the PB SSD fits into? How much electrical power will it consume? And...
you may be curious - how much will it cost?
All these questions and
more - are discussed and answered in this article which - I anticipate -
will inspire product managers and company founders to create completely new
types of SSDs. ...read
the article
Imation renews RDX license beyond HDD afterlife
Editor:-
March 10, 2010 - Imation
today
announced
it has extended its RDX (removable
hard disk) license
agreement with ProStor
Systems through 2020.
Imation also announced that it has
invested $5 million to help advance ProStor's
disk backup technology.
Editor's coments:- RDX was unveiled in
November 2005.
Today's announcement takes the license agreement to
beyond the expected
lifetime of the hard disk market. However,
SSD backup will also be
viable in the same form factor.
Seagate adds 2TB SAS track to
18 years grooving 7,200 RPM HDDs
Editor:- February 22, 2010 -
Seagate today
announced
it's shipping 2TB 3.5" 7,200 RPM hard drives with a 6Gbps SAS interface.
The
new
Constellation
ES includes host-selectable power reduction options - upto 35%
for slow or idle periods.
Editor's comments:- coming 6 months
after 2TB SATA
enterprise hard drive shipments from other hard disk oems - (Hitachi
- Ultrastar A7K2000 and
WD
RE4 ) - the distinguishing feature about this is the
SAS interface. But
the "6Gbps" part is vanity rather than substance - because (like all
hard drives) the magnetic media delivers lower throughput and
IOPS than
you can get from many common 3Gbps
2.5"
SATA SSDs.
On
a historical
note Seagate started shipping the world's 1st
7,200
RPM HDDs in 1992.
Toshiba Spins 600GB SAS Drive
Editor:- February 16,
2010 - Toshiba
today
announced
it's sampling a 600GB 2.5"
10K
RPM HDD with 6Gbps
SAS interface.
This
results from the integration of
Toshiba and Fujitsu's
HDD business last year. Some of the new models include drive-based
encryption.
Good Blogs from Xiotech
Editor:- February 15, 2010 -
the Great Shrinking Disc Drive
is a new blog by Rob Peglar at Xiotech.
In
this context - I have to clarify that Peglar is talking about the enterprise
market shrinking towards 2.5"
hard drives - and not
the kind of shrink I had in mind when I said the whole hard drive market would
shrink to nothing.
I've
only just started to read through his back catalog of articles today. My
favorite so far is his January 2010 article -
Performance (Still) Matters -
in which Rob Peglar says - "...there's only 24 hours in a day, and that
is the inexorable limit we all battle."
I often think that if I
had 25 hours in each day - but everyone else was limited to just 24 - I'd do a
better job. And while we're on this subject - if I could be in 2 places at
once... |
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| Flash
Memory Basics - for enterprise SSD buyers |
Editor:- February
3, 2010 - a new article -
Flash
Memory Basics - posted today by blogger Brad Diggs looks like it
could be part of an educational series laying the groundwork for Sun Microsystem's
PCIe SSD product
family.
I noticed it because it cites one of my own favorite articles
- Are MLC SSDs
Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?.
WD Reports Results
Editor:- January 21, 2010 - Western Digital
today
reported
financial results for the quarter ended January 1, 2010 - revenue of $2.6
billion up 44% compared to a year ago and up 18% compared to
$2.2
billion, in the same quarter 2 years ago.
I said - a few days
ago in the case of Seagate - that you get a better comparison by comparing
revenue with the peak year for the HDD market - rather than the worst quarter
affected by the Credit Crunch.
Doing that - by summing the results for
the 2 biggest hard drive companies - shows zero revenue growth for the
hard disk market compared to 2 years ago.
Most revenue shifts
in this market in 2010 will in my view be due to shifts in market share - and
effects due to other companies which have exited the HDD market - rather than
organic growth in overall hard disk revenue. It will be easy for hard disk oems
to continue reporting double digit percentage revenue growth compared to a
year ago - because that was dip in the market.
Interpreting Seagate's Results
Editor:- January 20,
2010 - Seagate
today
reported
financial results for the quarter ended January 1, 2010 revenue of $3.03
billion up 32% compared to a year ago but down 11% compared to
$3.4
billion in the same quarter 2 years ago.
Seagate is positioning
these results as a strong recovery for the
hard drive market -
because they shipped a record 49.9 million drives in the quarter.
However, another way to view it is simply a rebound from the lowest point of the
Credit Crunch quarter - back to a position which is not as good as it was
before.
New edition - the Top 10 SSD Companies
Editor:-
January 7, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published the 11 quarterly edition of the
top 10 SSD oems -
ranked by search volume in the 4th quarter of 2009.
This is always
one of the most popular articles on our site. I know that many SSD companies
themselves are nervous and eager to see how they've fared in this important list
which predicts future winners in the market based on the world's leading SSD
focus group. I've tried to be more direct with my own analytical comments too -
even if it means repeating some things I've already said in other places -
because I know that most of you don't have the time to read hundreds of SSD
articles. ...read the
article
Digital Video Cameras get 250GB Adapter
Editor:-
December 2, 2009 - Maxell
announced imminent availability of a new digital video camera adapter ( $1,500)
- the iVDR VC102 designed to operate with its
Firewire compatible
250GB iVDR EX rugged drive ($289).
Operating
off a rechargeable, internal battery, it will operate for up to 90 minutes of
nonstop recording.
"Our first-generation iVDR was successful with
the Panasonic P2 cameras," said Patricia Byrne, senior marketing manager
for Maxell. "Our new iVDR VC102 utilizes technology from CitiDISK (Shining Technology)
for its intelligent acquisition, allowing for vastly expanded support of
professional video cameras. The iVDR VC102 allows any camera that utilizes the
DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO100, DVCPRO HD or HDV formats to record
simultaneously to an iVDR drive. Footage can later be off-loaded directly into
an assortment of editing programs, such as Final Cut Pro, Edius or Adobe
Premiere." iVDR news |
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| Hard
Disks Need Not Apply - Google's New OS |
Editor:- November
19, 2009 - Google
opened its doors to developers who want to work with
Chrome OS - a new operating
system for web notebook products that will ship next year.
In the
opening video of the
Chrome
OS blog we learn that the architects of the new OS are "obsessed with
speed". Therefore the new netbook OS is designed from the ground up to
support only flash
SSDs as the default mass storage. Google says - there is no room in
this OS for outmoded 50 year old
hard disk technology. |
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| Toshiba
Ships Leanest 120GB 1.8" Hard Drive |
Editor:- November
4, 2009 - Toshiba
announced volume shupments of the industry's most power-conservative SATA
hard drive - the
1.8", 5mm high,
120GB, single platter, 4,200 RPM
MK1235GSL.
Significantly
surpassing 2.5" HDDs in durability it can tolerate up to 1,500Gs of
non-operational shock and 500Gs of operational shock.
WD Ships 2.5" 10K SAS HDDs
Editor:- November
3, 2009 -
Western Digital
announced volume shipments of its 1st
2.5" 10K
RPM SAS hard drive.
The WD S25 provides up to 300 GB of
high-performance storage suitable for both mission-critical enterprise server
and enterprise storage applications, such as high-I/O-driven applications and
configurations, as well as data centers and large data arrays.
"Our entry into the traditional-enterprise market continues the
strategic expansion and diversification of WD's broad market and product
portfolio, and significantly increases our addressable revenue opportunity,"
said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. "As with our previous market
expansion and diversification efforts, WD will approach the traditional
enterprise space with the same focus on quality, customer service, technology
and value that has earned us strong positions in every market we serve."
Editor's comments:- 15K RPM hard drives are obsolete for new
designs - because if you want acceleration - you get more server bang per buck
using 2.5" SSDs.
But in the 10K area HDDs can still deliver high capacity with tolerable
performance and lower cost than SSDs.
In order to optimize overall economy,
reliability and
performance - the well architected enterprise storage systems of the near term
future will lean towards using more 10K RPM (and slower)
hard drives - for bulk
content - and towards using various levels of SSDs for performance. In the long
term it will all be solid state - but that's still 10 years away.
SSD Data Recovery Company Secures $18 million series C funding
Editor:-
November 2, 2009 -
Link_A_Media Devices
has secured $18 million series C funding - enabling it to bring its products
to market sooner.
"I am very pleased with Link_A_Media's ability to attract new
and previous investors to this round. The interest we generated from the
investment community
is a direct reflection of the huge opportunity for the company in the storage
markets based on our technology leadership," said Dr. Hemant Thapar, CEO
and chairman of Link_A_Media. "Over the past 2 years, we have begun
deploying our leading technologies into custom
SoC products for our
customers to enable their next generation products. Strong customer interest in
our technology is validating the imminent transitions in
data recovery
technology trends for peripheral storage devices, both
HDDs and
SSDs."
RDX QuikStor Now 640GB
Editor:- October 27, 2009 -
Tandberg Data
now offers a 640GB model in its
RDX
QuikStor cartridge "10 year data life"
removable disk archive
product line.
This is 28% more than the previous maximum 500GB
capacity model. Tandberg Data has shipped more than 150,000 RDX QuikStor drives
and more than 450,000 compatible cartridges worldwide. disk to disk backup
Editor's
comments:- You may not be impressed by the capacity - but
reliability is more
important than density for backup
applications.
Originally launched in
November 2005 - "RDX
uses a patent-pending error correcting format, which makes the data 1,000x
more recoverable than in a standard
hard drive. This means
that RDX-stored data will be readable even after the cartridge has been archived
and non-operating more than a decade."
In comparison - if you use
standard hard drives for removable disk archiving my own experience is that
50% are unreadable after 4 years and 80% are unusable after 6 years.
USB 3.0 SSDs Coming Soon
Editor:- October 5, 2009 -
Active Media
Products today announced imminent shipments of its
Aviator
312 line of bus powered fast
USB 3.0 external
SSDs with R/W speeds upto
240MB/s and 160MB/s respectively.
Measuring less than 3" long and
only 0.2" thin, the A312 is smaller than a credit card and is designed to
fit in a pocket. Capacity options include:- 16GB ($89), 32GB ($119) and 64GB
($209).
Strong Views About SSDs at DISKCON
Editor:-
September 29, 2009 - a lot of raw (and sometimes emotional) SSD soundbites
emanating from DISKCON
are quoted in an article written by Stephen Lawson and published
yesterday in Techworld.
These
colorful phrases are not the kind of toned down polite things which appear in a
typical press release. There is real passion here.
My take is - when
companies haven't braced themselves for a new market they are more likely to
be disturbed by the waves which hit them. Human nature hasn't changed in the 97
years since that
unsinkable ship
went down - so why should hard diskophiles (lovers of hard disks - a new word
I invented - so no need to look it up) be any different?
Will Flash Torch Hard Disk Market? - Reprise
Editor:-
September 21, 2009 - 2 years ago StorageSearch.com
published an article -
How Solid is
Hard Disk's Future? - in which I looked at - what impact would the fast
growing solid state disk
market have on the overall hard
disk market?
Readers had asked - "Is SSDs' gain really HDDs'
loss?" - My analysis concluded - "In some segments yes. But it's not
a zero sum game."
This theme is revisited in a new article
published today by - Coughlin Associates
-
Flash
& HDD - Symbiosis, or Survival of the Fittest? (pdf).
The new
white paper, written by esteemed
storage analysts -
Tom Coughlin, Jim Handy
and Roger
F. Hoyt shows how many hard disk drives are sold because of digital
storage required to support flash
memory consumer electronics applications such as digital cameras,
camcorders, and music and video players. The paper makes the case that there
is more symbiosis than competition between hard disk drives and flash memory for
consumer electronics applications.
...read
the article (pdf)
Sonnet Launches Camera to Hard Drive Transfer Module
Editor:-
September 10, 2009 - Sonnet
Technologies today announced the
Qio
professional universal media reader/writer.
It's a convenient
high speed alternative to stand-alone card readers,
SATA controllers and
various adapters, combining their functionality in a compact rugged case, and
fulfilling the data handling needs of videographers with multiple cameras using
different memory card formats.
We talked to many customers who had combinations of Sony, Panasonic
and Red cameras who wanted some way to transfer the data from any of them at
full speed to hard drives,
needed drive-to-drive copy capability, and desired a compact, portable, rugged,
and battery-operable package," said Robert Farnsworth, CEO of Sonnet
Technologies. "The Qio does this and more!." Removable Storage |
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| DataSlide
Says Revolutionary HD is Closer |
Editor:- June 15,
2009 - Dataslide
announced it was close to
productizing
its revolutionary hard drive technology.
DataSlide says it leverages
LCD and HDD processes to create an ultra thin massive
2D head array which
enables symmetric read and write performance of 160,000 random IOPS with
transfer rate of 500MB/s.
"DataSlide's Massively Parallel
architecture with 64 heads per surface could saturate a 32 lane
PCIe bus," said
Charles Barnes, CEO of DataSlide. "The Hard Rectangular Drive has the
industry reliability and cost advantages of
Hard Disk Drives with
superior performance and lower power then
Solid State Drives. The HRD
is over 60% lower power then HDD and during idle the media has zero power
dissipation making it the GREEN storage winner."
Editor's comments:- This journey started 7 years ago - and
there are still many marketing hurdles to cross before you can expect to click
and add such drives into your shopping basket.
Dataslide made its début
in the pages of StorageSearch.com in 2002 - when it announced it had
filed patents for a
revolutionary design of hard drive.
In 2004 - Dataslide
announced it had demonstrated
a prototype (under NDA) with the equivalent of 72,000 virtual RPM and the
potential to reach the mechanical equivalent of 12 million RPM.
Is
there a place today for such a new technology in the enterprise storage space?
Most hard disk makers have now accepted that SSDs will provide the
performance part of heavy transactional loads - while HDDs provide economies of
scale for massive content.
Meanwhile - within the SSD space - there
are many new technology pretenders promising to claim flash's throne at some
time in the future.
Until more is revealed publicly about capacity and
price - the competitiveness of Dataslide's technology can't be judged. And even
if that looks promising
reliability remains
a key question for any new storage technology. | |
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| Nibble
- Re: Hard Disk Drives...... |
IBM invented disk storage and shipped
the first HDD in
1956.
With
a 24" diameter it stored 5M bytes.
Until the late 1990s hard
drives were commonly called "Winchester" drives - named after the city
where the original hard disk designers were based.
Hard disks use
magnetic recording media on one or more spinning disks (also called platters).
That's where the magnet allusion in our
HDD Megabyte image
comes from.
A read write head moves in a straight line along one half of the
platter similar in concept to (pre CD era) linear audio (vinyl) record
players.
The seek / access time of the disk is determined by the
rotation speed. That can take as long as 1 complete revolution of the disk.
The hard disk capacity depends on how many platters there are, whether data is
on both sides, how big they are (diameter) and the current state of the art
regarding megabytes stored per inch.
The throughput of the disk
depends on the spin speed, recording density and where the head is on the
surface of the disk. On the outer edge the data throughput is higher than on the
inner edge. Drives with multiple heads and platters can deliver more
throughput - but the added mechanical complexity and heat reduces reliability.
Over
90% of the disk drive manufacturers which
existed
in the 1990's have gone bust, or merged , or have been
acquired by other disk
companies.
The number of HDD oems shrank to a low point at the turn
of the millenium, and overall HDD market revenue was on a downward slide for
many years. That's because the cost of an average hard drive was reducing at a
faster rate than the growth of drive shipments. Improved technology and
competition was shrinking the value of the industry.
But since about
2004 new high growth markets have emerged for HDDs (both inside and outside
the traditional PC and server markets) which reversed the revenue slide.
The prospects of multi-billion dollar segments with double digit
revenue growth within the hard disk market has attracted new entrants and new
competition from products like solid
state disks and hybrid drives.
In 2008 the worldwide hard disk
market revenue grew to over $35 billion.
In 2008 the
highest capacity shipping drives were:-
- 3.5" - 1.5TB - from Seagate
- 2.5" - 500GB - from various oems
- 1.8" - 250GB - from Toshiba
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| Are MLC SSDs Ever
Safe in Enterprise Apps? |
This is a follow up
article to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, a year earlier demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into
hard disk form
factors. |
 |
It starts down a familiar
lane but an unexpected technology twist (which arrived in my email while
writing this article) takes you to a startling new world of possibilities.
...read the
article | | |
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Hitachi
Celebrates 50 Years of Hard Disks
SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 4, 2006 - Hitachi today published some
historic reminiscences and market data to celebrate 50 years of the hard disk
drive market.
Hitachi holds the privilege of preserving the legacy and
upholding the innovation heritage of the hard drive, having acquired the IBM
hard drive business in 2003.
IBM invented the hard drive in San Jose, California and brought it to market in
1956 as the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control).
- Over the past 50 years, areal density - the
measurement of how many data bits can be stored on an inch of disk space - has
increased 50 million times.
- RAMAC, the first hard drive - delivered on
September 13, 1956 - stored 5 megabytes of data. Today, the highest-capacity
hard drive holds 500 gigabytes.
- In 1956, the RAMAC cost $50,000 or $10,000 per
megabyte. Today, a gigabyte of storage on a 3.5-inch hard drive can cost less
than 50 cents.
- Today, 92% of all new data created reside on
magnetic media, primarily hard
drives.
The demand for hard drives is expected to
increase multiple-fold. In a recent paper, the University of California at
Berkeley projected the worldwide data stored on magnetic media to be 99.5
exabytes in 2005, as compared to 7 exabytes in 2000. (An Exabyte = 1,024 x 1,024
x 1,024 x Gigabytes = just over 1 billion Gigabytes. - from
Megabyte's Storage
Dictionary)
Today Hitachi also announced two new 3.5" hard
drives. The Deskstar T7K500 and Deskstar 7K160 feature 7,200 RPM spin speeds and
3Gb/s SATA interfaces
for high-performance PCs, gaming systems and low duty cycle servers. The new
drives use 160GB+ per platter technology to deliver up to 500GB of storage
capacity in a one-, two- and three-disk design.
...Hitachi profile,
storage history
See
also:- article:- Hard
Disks - on Wikipedia®
timeline:- 5 Decades of Disk
Drive Industry Firsts - on DISK/TREND
Hard Drisk Market Chronicle - Upto
1997
Hard disk
reviews (1998 to 2001) - on StorageReview.com | | |
The Perils of Early Hard
Drives
Editor:- there were a great many stories published in 2006
related to the 50th anniversary of the
hard disk drive.
But here's one with a different spin - about the dangers
posed by early mass storage devices. It came from my brother in law
Peter Downes.
"In 1964 I was a programmer / operator at
Pilkington Glass in St
Helens. At that time Pilkington had one of the largest commercial computer
installations in the UK. It included
ICT
computers, countless card punches and readers,
Ampex tape drives, and, I think,
CDC disk
drives.
"One night in the main computer room I witnessed the
internal cylinder of a hard drive break out of its cabinet. It was several
feet in diameter and spinning at high speed.
It bounced when it hit
the floor, then as if deciding which way to go, it hovered and raced through
the glass partition, and sped along until it hit the solid wall of the
building at which point it exploded. The computer room was sprayed with glass,
but luckily it was safety glass and I wasn't hurt.
I couldn't help
thinking that if it had come for me it would have killed me. One thing I'm not
sure about is why it bounced when it first hit the floor and only exploded when
it hit the concrete wall. There was a lot of energy in the cylinder - and it had
a horizontal spindle."
Storage History | |
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