| hdd / hard disk drive news |
Viterbi joins
Link_A_Media board
Editor:- September 2, 2010 - Link_A_Media Devices
recently announced that Dr.
Andrew Viterbi has joined its
board of directors.
“I
have followed Link_A_Media’s progress for some time and find its culture of
innovation compelling. The company has already emerged as the technology leader
in the data storage application with its introduction of Low Density Parity
Check SoC products in the mobile
hard disk market,”
said Dr. Viterbi. “With its strong financial backing, customer traction,
technology leadership and executive team, the company is well positioned to
deliver compelling SoC solutions to the broad data storage market.”
The LAMD LDPC data
recovery architecture can tolerate significantly more noise on the recording
medium at the expense of increased complexity relative to
Reed
Solomon decoders. LAMD's current LDPC-based SOC device reduces the number
of errors read from a disk from 1 in 100 to 1 in 100 Million bits of data,
relative to the previously-used concatenated coding schemes. This enables more
efficient utilization of the available disk surface to store more data and
reduce the cost per gigabyte of storage.
see the storage future at Storage Visions 2011
Editor:-
September 1, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today confirmed it is a media sponsor for the 10th annual Storage Visions conference
taking place January 4 - 5, 2011 at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, NV.
The
event theme is - New Dimensions Drive Digital Storage.
In this
context those dimensions are spatial - as more pixels need to be stored and
manipulated to support increasing video content resolution and stereoscopic
imagery.
I couldn't remember how many of these past events we've
sponsored. Then I found the answer - since 2003.
The storage market
has changed a lot in that time but nothing like it's going to change in the
future. Vendors and oems have to anticipate the future and lay down plans to
adapt and thrive in new emerging markets. If they get it right - they get
another chance to compete and evolve. If they get it wrong...
sianara. |
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Above is the
Storage Visions event banner which we ran here in 2003. If you click it you'll
go back in time to the old web site.
Below is the Storage Visions
event banner for 2011. If you click it (and attend the event) you'll race
forwards in time. |
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10,000x more
reliable than hard disk RAID?
Editor:- August 26, 2010 - Amplidata claims
that its BitSpread
technology is 10,000x more reliable than current
RAID based technologies
and requires 3x less storage.
Is another new way of fixing
reliability
problems in hard disk
arrays worth the effort just as we approach the end of the
hard disk market's life?
- I doubt it. See why in -
this way to the
petabyte SSD.
IDEMA launches new initiative
Editor:- August 13,
2010 - IDEMA
plans to launch a new grouping called - Storage Technology Alliance.
STA
will aim to co-ordinate efforts in university research and development of
storage industry roadmaps.
Editor's comments:- all
industry ORGs start out
with the idea of accelerating the adoption of particular standards - then
after industry adoption - they lose focus and become talking shops rather than
initiators of change.
When it comes to guidance about the future
directions of solid state storage and related architectures - publications like
StorageSearch.com and other
SSD market analysts
have been more effective at setting agendas for the industry than traditional
storage organizations. Standards organizations are needed to co-ordinate
implementation detail - but they are too slow to be effective at initiating new
architectural trends.
EMC has cleared STEC shelfware
Editor:- August 3,
2010 - STEC
reported
$61
million for the 2nd quarter ended June 30 - a decrease of 29%
year on year but significantly up on the previous quarter.
The company indicated that inventory issues at
EMC (whose worse than
expected SSD sales in
2009 had
created a glut of STEC shelfware) had been resolved.
WD reports revenue
Editor:- July 21, 2010 - Western Digital
today reported $9.8 billion revenue and net income of $1.4 billion for the
fiscal year ended July 2, 2010.
Editor's comments:- WD's annual revenue is 21% higher
than
FY
2008 ($8.1 billion) - the period just before the credit crunch.
But
if you compare the total revenue in the HDD market (for all companies) 2008
compared to today - you'll see it's essentially the same. Market share has
shifted in that time - with WD gaining at the expense of Seagate.
Seagate shipped 193 million HDDs in past year
Editor:-
July 20, 2010 - Seagate
today
reported
$11.4 billion revenue and net income of $1.61 billion for the fiscal
year ended July 2, 2010 in which the company shipped 193 million disk drives.
Editor's comments:- Seagate's annual revenue is 16%
higher than
FY
2009 - which sounds good. But it's 10% lower than
FY
2008 ($12.7 billion) - the period just before the credit crunch - which in
my view is a more realistic comparison if you're looking at long term
HDD market trends.
upgrading old PCs with new SSDs
Editor:- July 9,
2010 -
Upgrading
Old PCs with SSDs is a cautionary tale published on Denali Software's blog.
I've often told readers who asked me about this subject - that they
could be wasting their time trying to upgrade old notebooks with
PATA or
SATA SSDs - because
most of the speedup benefits - if any - will be lost by the latency damping
effects of cheap and slow bridge
chips on the motherboard - and that - unlike in a server - notebooks have
precious little CPU headroom.
It's nice to see these views are
shared by the author of this article who works for an
SSD IP vendor. ...read
the article
HDD market price trends
Editor:- July 7, 2010 - a
report in
DigiTimes
says price quotes for 500GB+ HDDs at the end June (in Taiwan ) were 20%
lower than at the beginning of April.
Seagate offers consumers 3TB HDD for under $250
Editor:-
June 29, 2010 - Seagatetoday
announced availability of the
3TB
GoFlex (under $250) - an
external desktop
FireWire /
USB 3.0
hard drive. |
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| WD launches
enhanced TV media player |
| . |
Editor:- June 9, 2010 - Western Digital
introduced the
WD TV Live
Plus HD media player (US$149.99) which connects directly to a users' HDTV
and automatically converts and plays
many file
formats stored on a connected
USB drive.
(But
it doesn't support protected premium content such as movies or music from
iTunes.) |
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| The WiFi enabled box (via
optional extra USB adapter) also includes a user remote interface to the
Netflix online movie on demand service. | |
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HDD shipments
expected to double in 5 years
Editor:- June 7, 2010 - Coughlin Associates
has published its 14th annual
HDD
Capital Equipment and Technology Report (pdf) (189 pages / $7,000).
Fueling
the need for more capex the authors anticipate that disk drive volumes will
more than double - from about 670M in 2010 to 1.4B in 2015 - and that
technology developments will result in 10TB 3.5"
HDDs and 1TB
1.8" drives.
Editor's
comments:- in my article -
this way to the
Petabyte SSD - I said that the highest capacity 2.5" - bulk archive
SSDs - (a product category which doesn't exist yet) could store 50TB in 2016 -
which would be 10x the best hard drives - and with better R/W
performance and a lower power footprint.
I also said that a key
difference would be that the SSD could use wire-speed compression (with minimal
impact on R/W performance) to deliver an order of magnitude higher virtual
storage. It's the combination of SSD's unique factors which will make the
difference in big disk backup
systems at the end of this decade - not just the raw media cost / density
which transfixes many market commentators. Will there still be a market for
hard drives? - Yes. And much bigger volumes than today. But not in the
datacenter or the enterprise. More from me on this subject later.
will it work any better this time? - consumer bybrids
Editor:-
June 3, 2010 -
Objective
Analysis published a new white paper -
Flash
Cache is Back (pdf) which says soon all computing platforms will employ
a cache layer between the
HDD and the
DRAM.
Author
Jim Handy says projections from
notebook SSD
makers that SSDs would already have replaced tens of millions of HDDs were over
optimistic and may "never happen". Instead he says a flash cache,
supported by a properly designed
SSD ASAP controller "will
provide near-SSD
performance at near-HDD
prices".
Early implementations of such flash cache schemes -
cited in the article - didn't work properly because... ...read
the article (pdf), ...read editor's
comments
Seagate launches hybrid for notebooks
Editor:- May
23, 2010 -
Seagate today
launched the
Momentus
XT a 2.5" hybrid
drive - for the
notebook PC
market - which internally has a 500GB
HDD cached by a 4GB
SSD ASAP controller.
Seagate
says the new drive is OS agnostic and delivers
SSD-like
performance at the lower
price of a hard
drive.
This isn't a new concept - as you can see on this
archived
product page for the Platinum HDD from March 2008. Except that pioneering
old product from DTS was a
3.5" form factor and used a
RAM SSD. (Since then
DTS has moved on to market a
fat flash SSD
- called the Platinum M-Cell
SSD.)
In 2006 the reputation of hybrid hard drives in notebooks
(as a poor man's SSD placeholder) was ruined by the poor performance of
Microsoft's
ReadyDrive support in VISTA. So experienced users may be cautious about
Seagate's new product. Anyone who needs serious PC application performance
won't be wasting their time with a hard drive.
When Seagate introduced
7,200
RPM HDDs in 1992 computer users were impressed by its performance. But
Seagate's press release headline today - "World's Fastest Hard Drive for
Laptop Computers" - is a bit of a joke. Because hard drives aren't fast.
2.5" hybrid flash SSD/HDDs are a waste of space - says
StorageSearch.com's editor
Editor:- May 17, 2010 - a recent
article in
TheRegister.co.uk
discusses prospects for the
hybrid SSD/HDD
market and includes the above quote from yours truly.
The article,
written by experienced storage commentator
Chris Mellor,
came out of a discussion that
Toshiba might be
thinking
of new hybrid SSD products.
As readers know I always have an
opinion about everything - but as I thought the Toshiba idea was not a very
good one - I didn't want to waste my time writing about it. Chris asked why I
thought that - and as a result he has written a much better article than I
would have done myself anyway. ...read the
article
...Later:- May 17, 2010 - after seeing the
above article - a thoughtful SSD reader asked me to say more about about my
dismissal of such single hybrid drives for consumer markets.
See what I said in
this follow up article.
PLX samples eSATA bridge encrypt SoC for consumer HDDs
Editor:-
April 13, 2010 -
PLX Technology is
sampling the
OXUFS944SE - a low cost ($7 in volume) 0.4W
controller chip which
bridges between an eSATA,
FireWire or
USB 2.0 interface and a
hard drive.
It
can also deliver on-the-fly eSATA
encryption /
decryption of data at upto 80MB/s write speeds.
David Raun, VP of marketing at PLX said the company has shipped more
than 30 million external storage controllers to leading global brands since
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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
In April 2006 - Hitachi
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 | | |
| Did FDE
choke the HDD sanitizer market? |
Editor:-
Self-Encrypting
HDDs for Servers (pdf) - is a white paper by Seagate which makes
good reading for those interested in server disk security.
It's easy
to be wise after the event - but I see now that the rapid industry take up of
FDE (full disk encryption) may have been a factor in capping the size of the
disk sanitizers
market. I thought that market would be a lot bigger by now. | | |
| . |
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."
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