| hdd / hard disk drive news |
|
|
Storage Visions
Calls for Sponsors
Editor:- June 24, 2009 - the 9th annual Storage Visions Conference is
now open for presentations,
sponsors and
exhibitors.
It will be held at the Riviera Hotel Convention Center
in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 5 & 6, 2010. |
|
| 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.
New Notebook SSD Market Overview - is not pretty
Editor:-
June 15, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
published a new article today called -
Overview of
the Notebook SSD Market.
There's a simple way to summarize
the complex view of the SSD Notebook / Netbook market.
Lots of
initial hype and optimism that the market would deliver an astonishingly
new product experience to users, followed by dismay and disillusion due to
a flurry of poorly conceived, badly designed and ineptly executed products.
...read the
article
Addonics Enters Disk Duplicator Market
Editor:- June
10, 2009 - Addonics
today announced a family of
hard
disk duplicators for 2.5" and 3.5 SATA or PATA drives..
Prices
start from $249.
Editor's comments:- Addonics's
Zebra
disk duplicator is the 2nd Zebra in my menagerie directory -
Animal Brands
in the Storage Market.
The
disk duplicator market
is not, frankly a great market to be in, at a time when
hard disk market
revenue is declining by double digit percentages year on year. Addonics says
you can use these duplicators for
SSDs too. But that won't
boost demand because most oems are just going to redeploy the under utilized
equipment they've already got - rather than buy new stuff.
FalconStor Claims Fastest Disk Backup
Editor:-
June 1, 2009 - FalconStor
Software today
claimed that
it now delivers the fastest backup
and deduplication
time in the industry.
Using a 100TB test bed connected to a single cluster of 2
FalconStor VTL nodes the total time to backup and deduplicate data was under 14
hours, yielding an average of 2GB/s per second.
Physical tape production can
be achieved directly through 4Gbps
Fibre Channel links by
exporting tapes from FalconStor VTL to the physical
tape library without using
a separate media server. All hardware components used for the performance test
are commonly available standard parts, including standard
Linux-based servers and
low-cost SATA-based
storage subsystems.
Editor's comments:-
Record Breaking
claims are often hostage to editor research. We've certainly run stories about
faster backup and restores before (10TB/hour in 2003 for example) but that
didn't include dedupe. Let's see if this one passes the test of reader
scrutiny.
WD Sells Disk Substrate Plant to Hitachi GST
Editor:-
May 20, 2009 - WD
announced it has
agreed
to sell the assets of its media substrate manufacturing facility in Sarawak,
Malaysia, to a subsidiary of Hitachi GST.
The
employees of WD at the facility will become employees of the purchaser. Acquired storage companies,
Hard disk drives
WD Ships 2TB Surveillance Drive
Editor:- May 19,
2009 - WD
announced availability of a 2TB model in its
AV-GP
line of hard drives
designed for the surveillance market.
Designed to last in always-on
streaming digital audio/video environments the new
SATA compatible
drive (MSRP $299) supports playback of up to 12 simultaneous HD streams.
Editor's
comments:- SoleraTec
has a whitepaper on its site called -
the Video
Surveillance Marketplace (pdf) which provides a good introduction to this
market.
Toshiba Takes the High Ground in Notebook SSD Wars
Editor:-
May 14, 2009 -
Toshiba announced
today it is offering
512GB SSDs
as an option in notebooks for the Japanese market.
The new,
Toshiba-developed 512GB SSD employs a 2-bit-per-cell
MLC flash memory -
which gives 4x the capacity of SLC flash used in industrial and
enterprise SSDs for the same silicon wafer footprint.
One of the
failures of the SSD
market in 2008 was the low performance of SSDs integrated in notebooks.
Toshiba's new notebook seems to address that market failure . The company says
its new SSD controller
boosts data throughput figures of 230MB/s reads and 180MB/s writes.
Data Analyzers Invests in New Data Recovery Facility
Orlando, FL - May 12, 2009 - Data
Analyzers is moving into a newly acquired class 100 clean room.
The
clean room environment at Data Analyzers is used to disassemble malfunctioning
hard drives for
data recovery
purposes.
"Despite the economically difficult times, we have
invested in a more efficient clean room environment and are reforming our
business development strategies" said Andrew von Ramin Mapp, founder of
the company.
New Guide for SSD Wannabies
Editor:- May 1, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com
published a new article this week called -
"3 Easy Ways to
Enter the SSD Market."
Nowadays it seems like everyone wants
to get into the SSD market. This tells you how to do it. And gives real
examples.
So if you're a
hard disk maker, or
RAID controller company
or flash memory maker who
still doesn't have an SSD product line here's my advice. Stop giving the
press interviews about how you're still - "looking" at the SSD
market from the sidelines and evaluating what you might do next year maybe..."
Some of these storage manufacturers (and you know
who I mean) - have been
singing the same old song for years. And it just sounds pathetic. They should
shape up, shut up, and
get in the game.
I've had early feedback from senior VPs in several SSD companies
already - who think it's a very interesting article.
Seagate Anticipates Another Flat Quarter for Hard Disks
Editor:-
April 21, 2009 - Seagate
reported
results
for the quarter ended April 3, 2009.
Revenue was exactly in line with
the guidance issued last week. So no surprises there.
But what does
make today's announcement interesting is Seagate's views about short term
prospects for the hard disk
market. Among other things, it says...
"For the June quarter,
in light of the company's view of the current market environment, the company is
planning for the overall demand for disk drives to be relatively flat as
compared to the March quarter."
WD Ships New 2TB Enterprise Hard Drive
Editor:- April
20, 2009 - Western
Digital - announced details of a new 2TB 3.5"
SATA
hard drive - the
WD RE4-GP.
Features include time-limited error recovery for use in
RAID systems, and lower
power consumption than older hard drives. MSRP is $329.
Editor's
comments:- this kind of drive is optimized to provide high capacity at low
cost, rather than high performance. Typical applications include
disk to disk backup and
video or other massive
content storage.
Seagate Not So Pessimistic as Before
Editor:- April
14, 2009 - Seagate
updated its revenue forecast (for the quarter ending July 3, 2009) in
guidance
published
yesterday.
Seagate expects to report revenue of approximately
$2.1 billion. Although that's 27% lower than the
year
ago period - it's 31% better than the low end forecast which the company
had issued before.
Neither of the words "WD" or "SSD" appeared
anywhere in the text of this press release as pertinent market factors.
This
text did appear - "The company's leadership position in the enterprise
market remained substantially unchanged from the prior quarter; however,
the TAM for enterprise class products decreased by an estimated 20%,
sequentially..."
Seagate's SSD Apologia?
Editor:- April 8, 2009 - Seagate has
effectively published an apology for not being in the enterprise
SSD market - in an article
published yesterday on TechCrunchIT
called -
Solid-State
Drives in the Enterprise: Raising Standards.
It's a nicely written
article by Alvin Cox, a senior staff engineer at Seagate. The plausible
sounding line he argues is that Seagate has been taking a cautious stance re
SSDs, waiting for standards,
not being fooled by hype about
performance claims
etc.
In an article published over a year ago I analyzed
Why Seagate
will Fail the SSD Challenge. Seagate's problems are marketing, business
and management related - not technical. I'm sure they employ many world-class
engineers. But they will still fail. You can see the analysis and what-ifs in my
article.
SSDs have been used in the
enterprise
for decades. As the
price
curves for memory have dropped - many new opportunities have been
incrementally created within the SSD market. Over 110 companies now make and
market SSDs. That will more than double in the next year helped by the easy
availability of SSD SoCs.
Seagate will eventually be among them. Seagate's commentaries on SSDs sound
remarkably similar to Sun
Microsystems' public
agonies
with Linux and the
x86 server OS
market. First denial, then more denial, then explanations of why customers
wouldn't buy such products and then too little cautious action too late - when
no one really cared any more. And you can see where
they
are now.
WD Enters the SSD Market
Editor:- March 30, 2009 -
Western Digital
has entered the SSD market by acquiring SiliconSystems
for $65 million in a cash transaction.
Integration into WD begins
immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State
Storage business unit, complementing WD's existing Branded Products, Client
Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.
"WD's strong balance sheet, sales reach, and operations and
logistics capabilities will allow us to greatly accelerate our penetration of
our existing markets, while combining our engineering expertise with WD will
enable us to develop new solid-state drives to broaden our overall product
portfolio and address the emerging applications for solid-state storage in WD's
existing customer base," said Michael Hajeck, a founder and CEO of
SiliconSystems, now senior vp and general manager of WD's Solid-State Storage
business unit. "We are extremely excited to be joining WD and enabling an
even stronger future for our talented team."
WD's SSD
acquisition FAQs
After SSDs? - Predicting the Storage Market's Next Obsession
Editor:-
March 12, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
has published a new article -
After SSDs... What
Next?
It looks beyond the next 3 years of hoopla in the
SSD market and predicts
what will be the next "big thing" in storage after that. ...read the article,
SSD market research &
analysts
Seagate Demos 6Gbps SATA Prototype Hard Drive
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif. - March 9, 2009 - Seagate and AMD will
collaborate in the first public demonstration of 6Gbps SATA storage this
week at a conference in New Orleans.
The demo features 2 Seagate
SATA disk drives -
one a shipping Barracuda 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive and the other a
prototype Barracuda 6Gbps drive - in a desktop PC to show the performance
difference between the 2 generations. The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA
6Gb/second chipset. The Seagate SATA 3Gb/second drive runs at more than 2.5Gbps
and the SATA 6Gb/second drive at 5.5Gbps with the performance of each storage
interface displayed on the PC monitor.
...Seagate profile,
storage chips
Olixir Announces DataVault Support for FIPS 140-2
Washington, D.C. - March 9, 2009 -
Olixir Technologies announced it will add new security features to
its family of DataVault hard drives in Q2 2009.
This will make them
fully-compliant with the requirements outlined in the Federal Information
Processing Standards FIPS 140-2.
Incorporating an advanced set of security features including
anti-virus, anti-malware and encryption agents, which have already been approved
by the DOD DARTT Team, Olixir's external drives will meet all criteria to be
connected via USB cables to
U.S. Department of Defense networked computers. This comprehensive security
capability will be resident on the Mobile DataVault products and run
independently of the host computer to proactively protect the drive and the
network from malware and virus infections.
...Olixir Technologies
profile, Storage
Security
Hitachi GST Buys Desktop Storage Company
SAN
JOSE, Calif. - February 23, 2009 - Hitachi GST today announced that
it has agreed to acquire Fabrik, Inc. whose leading storage brands
include G-Technology and SimpleTech.
Financial
details of the transaction were not disclosed. Closing of the acquisition, which
is subject to customary conditions, is expected to occur early in the 2nd
quarter of 2009. Fabrik's business will continue intact and form the core of
Hitachi GST's newly-formed external storage business.
Hitachi GST will
fully support the G-Technology and SimpleTech product lines, building upon their
success and differentiation in the market. The combined company will also
leverage operational, technical and product development resources, distribution
channels and global reach to accelerate delivery of a full portfolio of
traditional hard drives,
solid state drives and
branded personal and professional storage products. ...Hitachi GST profile
...G-Technology profile | |
| . |
|
|
|
| |
. |
SSDs Pass HDDs
in Storage Density
2009 may well be remembered as the year
that flash SSDs surpassed
HDDs in storage capacity in the same form factor.
I'm not talking about
itsy bitsy
1 inch and smaller drives
here. I'm talking about the hard core
2.5" form factor.
That's
the size which once seemed to offer the
best hopes
for hard disk makers staying in business - in applications like disk to
disk backup, entertainment
bulk storage etc.
In January 2009 - pureSilicon started
sampling a
2.5" MLC SSD -
with 1TB capacity in a 9.5mm high form factor.
A few weeks later
Western Digital
temporarily restored the parity in storage density when it announced a
2TB
3.5" hard drive. Since you can put 2x 2.5" drives into a single
3.5" enclosure - you
can think of them as being equivalent. That is until either the next
amplification in MLC (if it ever
works) or the next shrink in flash memory (maybe
later than sooner).
Price of the 2.5" terabyte SSD wasn't
mentioned. I expect it will cost a lot. But nowhere near as much as the 1st
terabyte SSDs cost - when they appeared in
2002 - at
a cool $2 million.
So you may well ask - when will SSDs cost less
than HDDs for the same capacity?
In some high-performance grades (15K
RPM server drives) - I expect to see that happen this year - in smaller
capacities like 100GB. Looking Ahead to the
2009 SSD Market | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
| 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
| |
| . |
|
|
| . |
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 | |
| . |
|
| . |
|
|
| . |
|
|
| . |
|
|
| . |
| 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 | | |
| . |
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 | | |
|
