| hard disk drive news |
New SSD is a
Zillion Times Faster than a Hard Drive
Editor:- May 7, 2008 - in a new article
published today on
STORAGEsearch.com called "How Much Hay Has Your Car Been Eating
Lately?" - I bemoan the tired old comparisons of server SSD IOPS to HDDs.
SSDs
have been around for long enough now to drop those worn out old comparisons from
which we never learned anything very useful in the first place. ...read the article
HDD & SSD Reliability Event
Editor:-
May 2, 2008 - Here's news about an upcoming IDEMA event - "Hard
Disk and SSD Reliability - The Pursuit of Excellence" - May 15 in
Sunnyvale, CA.
This IDEMA Symposium will address HDD reliability;
the physics, mathematics, and statistics of its assessment, HDD design for
reliability, field performance experience of storage users and finally the HDD
production environment and supporting metrology to maximize yields and minimize
reliability detractors. Also included will be a similar discussion relative to
SSD product
reliability. Price is $455 for non members. ...IDEMA profile,
Storage Events,
Storage Reliability,
Storage Industry Trade
Associations
WD Reports 43% HDD Revenue Growth
LAKE
FOREST, Calif - April 24, 2008 - Western Digital Corp. today reported
that hard drive revenue grew by 43% for the quarter ending March 28
compared to the year ago period.
Overall revenue was $2.1 billion
comprised of $2.022 billion of hard drive revenue and $89 million of revenue
from media and substrate sales. Net income was $280 million.
"The
hard drive market
continued to demonstrate strong year-on-year unit growth of 16% in the March
quarter, while exhibiting an expected seasonal decline of 8.6% from the
exceptionally strong December quarter, as anticipated in our guidance issued in
January" said John Coyne, WD president and CEO. "Our March quarter
revenues demonstrate strong customer preference for the WD value proposition...
We remain very enthusiastic about our opportunities in the fast-growing hard
drive industry in the years ahead." ...WD profile
Editor's
comments:- these results confirm that Seagate, which announced lower
revenue growth of 10% for the same quarter, is losing market share within the
overall hard disk market. That's not a problem it can fix by hiring lawyers to
sue SSD companies.
Seagate First to Ship a Giga Hard Drives
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif - April 22, 2008 - Seagate Technology announced it is
the first hard drive manufacturer to have shipped 1 billion hard drives.
Seagate says that although it took 29 years to reach the 1 billion
milestone, it will ship its next billion in less than 5 years. Also, by the time
its nearest competitor reaches 1 billion drives shipped, Seagate will already be
close to shipping its second billion.
According to
Gartner, in 2007 alone
more than 500 million drives were shipped, compared to 1990, when slightly less
than 30 million were shipped. ...Seagate profile
Editor's
comments:- I forgot to check if there's a footnote somewhere defining a "billion".
You've got to be so careful nowadays to get the right meaning for once arcane
big number adjectives (like Giga) when they seep into the public domain and get
misunderstood.
WD Ships Fastest SATA HDD
LAKE
FOREST, CALIF - April 21, 2008 - WD said it is now shipping the fastest
SATA hard drives.
At under $300 MSRP the
300GB
10,000 RPM VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class
mechanics encased in a heat sink that fits into a standard 3.5" system
bay. ...WD
profile
Editor's comments:- "fast" claims like this
have to be seen in an almost legalese PR copywriting context.
15,000
RPM HDDs are faster - although they don't have a
SATA interface. Many
3.5" SSDs are
faster, and do have a SATA interface, but cost more.
Iomega Hard Drives Games Market
SAN
DIEGO - April 17, 2008 - Iomega Corp today announced availability of
the new Iomega Media Xporter Drive, a $119.95 160GB game-oriented portable hard
drive.
The USB
powered drive connects to ports on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 to give
gaming enthusiasts a convenient new way to enjoy music, digital movies, and
photos through the family game console, without the need of a PC or digital
media adapter. It also includes software for converting file formats not
natively supported by the game consoles. ...Iomega profile
Hitachi Claims Biggest 15K RPM HDD
SAN
JOSE, Calif - April 16, 2008 - Hitachi today said it will be shipping
the highest capacity 15K RPM hard drives later this quarter.
The
Ultrastar 15K450 with 450GB of storage capacity will ship with either
3Gb/s SAS or
4Gb/s Fibre Channel
interfaces. ...Hitachi
profile
Editor's notes:- later this week - a Reuters news story
commented on
Hitachi's
future strategy for its HDD business unit.
Seagate Steps Towards Failing the SSD Market Challenge
Editor:-
April 15, 2008 - Seagate Technology has filed a patent suit against STEC
according to a report in the New York Times.
Seagate is claiming that SSDs made by STEC may infringe Seagate
patents related to disk interfaces and flash technology.
In an article
published earlier this year Why
Seagate will Fail the SSD Challenge I explored the business options
available for Seagate in the
flash SSD market.
This move against STEC is in line with that analysis (and conclusion).
It's
not unusual for Seagate to sue companies which it sees threatening its hard disk
business. Earlier in this decade the business development of hard disk startup
Cornice was first
slowed down in the courts by suits from HDD makers and then killed off by
flash memory.
LaCie Disks and NAS Win Design Awards
Hillsboro, OR -
April 10, 2008 -
LaCie announced today that it has been awarded 4 Red Dot Awards for
superior design across multiple product families.
Winning products
include the Neil Poulton designed
2big family of
SMB NAS, the Sam Hecht designed
Little Disk
family and the Ora-Ïto designed
Golden Disk.
These LaCie products were selected by an international jury of design experts
from among more than 7,000 entrants from 60 countries.
The Red Dot
Award, organized by Essen's Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen since 1955, has
ranked amongst the largest and most renowned design competitions in the world.
...LaCie profile
Editor's
comments:- in 2007 the Red Dot awards for storage went to
Freecom.
Seagate Delivers First Terabyte SAS HDD
ORLANDO,
Fla - April 7, 2008 - Seagate today announced it has begun worldwide
shipment of its first terabyte SAS hard drive.
The Barracuda
ES.2 drives spin at 7,200 RPM, have an unrecoverable error rate that is 10x
better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour MTBF at full 24 x 7 data
availability. ...Seagate
profile, Serial
Attached SCSI
the Top 10 SSD OEMs in Q1 2008
Editor:- April 2, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today published the 4th edition of - "the Top
10 Solid State Disk OEMs."
Covering the quarter ending
March 31, 2008 - the article also looks at market milestones and comments on
changes since the earlier quarters. ...read the article
XLC May Close the Gap in HDD vs SSD Cost Per Gigabyte
Editor:- March 31, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today published an article about stealth mode fabless
semiconductor company, XLC Disk, Inc called - Unveiling XLC Flash SSD
Technology.
It describes their revolutionary multi-level cell nand
flash technology which may appear in a new range of high density
flash SSDs in Q1
2009.
Overcoming the intrinsic technology problems which have limited
previous MLC
devices to 2 bits in a single
flash memory cell - the
new XLC technology uses a patent pending calibration / discriminator
architecture which enables reliable operation with 4 bits (with today's process
technology) and may be scalable to more bits in the future.
If
successful - this type of technology could deliver 16x the storage density
currently available from SLC SSDs using the same area of silicon - thereby
closing the gap in cost per gigabyte between
SSDs and
HDDs. As with any new
storage technology reliability
is an unknown factor - but XLC Disk claim that intrinsic data repeatability
(before on chip error correction) is at least as good as current MLC devices.
This article was initially planned for publication tomorrow (on April
1st) but when I contacted Jim Handy at
Objective
Analysis for a comment on this spoof concept - he surprised me by saying
that he knows of at least one of the
top 10 SSD companies
which is working on exactly this type of technology. It shows that fact can be
stranger than fiction - and we can expect to see SSDs starting to put price
pressue on the hard drive market years earlier than predicted by Moore's Law
type density improvements. ...read the article
Fujitsu Targets Fast Growing 2.5" HDD Segment
Sunnyvale, CA -
March 24, 2008 - Fujitsu today announced its 2nd generation 7,200 RPM
SATA hard disk drive - the MHZ2 BJ with upto 320GB in a 2.5" form factor
will start shipping in Q2 08.
R/W power consumption is typically 2.3W and in standby mode power
drops to 0.13W.
"Worldwide shipments of 2.5" 7,200R PM SATA
HDDs increased more than 90% in 2007 while average overall 2.5-inch HDD
capacities grew more than 60%," said John Monroe, a research VP at
Gartner. "As
average HDD capacities
continue to increase, the need for greater performance to take full advantage of
rich media applications in mobile computing environments will create new
dimensions of demand and new opportunities for drive makers and PC OEMs. We
anticipate a combined annual growth rate for 2.5" 7,200 RPM SATA HDDs in
excess of 60% during the next 5 years."
...Fujitsu profile
EMC Improves Offer for Iomega
Editor:-
March 17, 2008 - Iomega says it has received a better offer from EMC
(than the unsolicited one last week) to buy the company.
Iomega
says it's thinking about it. ...Iomega profile,
...EMC profile
1.8" Storage Drives - new article
Editor:- March 10, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com
published a new article and directory of 1.8" Storage Drives.
The battle for supremacy in the 1.8" storage drive form factor, between
hard disks and
flash SSDs is
reminiscent of the 30 year war between Intel
and AMD over which processor would be
designed into PCs, notebooks and servers. Currently 21 oems actively market 1.8"
drives. ...read the
article
LSI Acquires Infineon's HDD Chip Business
MILPITAS,
Calif - March 10, 2008 - LSI Corp today announced that it has signed a
definitive agreement to acquire the assets of the hard disk drive semiconductor
business of Infineon Technologies AG
The agreement calls for LSI to purchase the assets and IP of the
Infineon HDD business, which includes product designs, related software,
inventory and test equipment. The transaction is expected to close within 60
days.
...LSI profile,
...Infineon profile
Editor's
comments:- the 2 companies have done business before. In
August 2007
Infineon agreed to pay $0.5 billion for LSI's Mobility Products Group which
designed chips for cellphone handsets and satellite comms applications.
Study Enumerates Key Factors in Hard Disk Array Failures
Editor:-
March 6, 2008 - a recently published paper called - Are Disks the Dominant
Contributor for Storage Failures? - reports on a 3 year study of nearly 2
million operating disks.
Among the many findings:- the
annualized failure rate in near-line systems which mostly use
SATA disks is
approximately twice as high as in systems which mostly use
fibre-channel disks.
But other factors such as datapath resilience, presence or absence of
RAID and
reliability of the
rack system components are just as significant contributors to storage
reliability as the hard
disks themselves.
...read
the article
Seagate Ships New 15K RPM Hard Drives
CeBit,
Hanover, Germany - March 4, 2008 - Seagate Technology announced it
will begin shipping its new Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive this month.
The 3.5" hard drives
spin at 15,000 RPM and are available in capacities upto 450GB and with
fibre-channel or
SAS interfaces.
Seagate says the new generation reduces power consumption by as much as 61%
while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% to 164MB/sec.
...Seagate profile
Aleratec's Disk Sanitizer gets Military Citation
Chatsworth, CA - March
3, 2008 - Military Embedded Systems magazine has commended Aleratec Inc.
for its new stand alone HDD Cruiser - a hard disk drive sanitizer and
duplicator all in one unit.
The
HDD Cruiser will
simultaneously sanitize
up to 4 hard drives to
assure that all confidential data is unreadable. It can also
duplicate up to 3 HDDs
simultaneously.
"We are very proud to be recognized for our developments by
Military Embedded Systems Magazine"
said Perry Solomon, President and CEO of Aleratec. "...We made the HDD
Cruiser the complete tool, it can also make exact duplicate copies of hard
drives to expedite setting up new PCs or recycling old drives with new site
licensed operating systems and standard applications which is particularly
useful when drives have already been used and need to be set up for a new
project." ...Aleratec
profile
Toshiba's New 1.8" Hard Drive
IRVINE
- February 25, 2008 - Toshiba Storage Device Division today added a
line of 5,400 RPM SATA 1.8" hard disk drives to its product offerings
for mobile PCs.
Available in 120GB and 80GB capacities, these new
HDDs integrate design
elements from Toshiba's flagship 2.5" line to offer enhanced performance
for ultra-thin and light PC applications.
With over 60 million 1.8" HDDs shipped since 2000, Toshiba has
consistently held the #1 position in the 1.8" HDD segment according to
IDC. Toshiba is showing the
new drives this week at the Intel
Mobility Summit in Shanghai, China. Shipments will start in April 2008.
...Toshiba profile
The Greener Side of HDD Defrag?
Editor:-
February 21, 2008 - Diskeeper Corp Europe claims that the use of its
Diskeeper 2008 does not only improve systems performance but can also make your
company greener by enhancing its power consumption.
Diskeeper says that its
disk defragmentation
software can not only make reading files from a
hard disk twice as
fast (compared to the fragmented state) but also gives a proportional increase
in energy savings.
Unlike
Microsoft's dog of a
utility (my words - not theirs) Diskeeper's software maintains your PC
performance at its peak while operating on the background on idle resources.
Defragmentation thus runs automatically while you work.
Saving
electrical power has got to be the nuttiest argument I've ever heard for defrag
and based on my estimates I don't believe you'd ever recover the cost of
buying this software from the energy saved. ...Diskeeper profile,
article:- Green
Storage Trends and Predictions
Fantom's New eSATA+USB Desktop MegaDisk
TORRANCE,
CA - February 20, 2008 - Fantom Drives today announces its new G-Force
MegaDisk eSATA + USB external storage systems.
Now available in
1TB ($319.95), 1.5TB ($459.95) and 2TB ($649.95) capacities , the MegaDisk
storage system includes both
eSATA and
USB 2.0 )interfaces and
NTI Shadow Backup.
Fantom Drives' new offering has
RAID built in and is
housed in a desktop aluminum enclosure.
...Fantom Drives profile
Heise Article Shows HDD Encryption Flaws
Editor:-
February 18, 2008 - an article today on Heise Online reveals that the so
called 128 bit hardware encryption in some hard disk products is ineffective -
because it hasn't been implemented properly.
Sans Digital Introduces 3.5"
InstaRAID
Santa Fe
Springs, CA - February 15, 2008 - Sans Digital today introduced the
InstaRAID IR12TB - a a 3.5" SATA hard drive module which houses 2
internal 2.5" drives with RAID support.
The
IR12TB has a
built-in hardware RAID engine to support RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0
(stripping) allowing data redundancy or performance increase, while only
occupying the space of a single 3.5" hard drive.
...Sans Digital
profile, Storage Boxes
Editor's
comments:- the idea is not entirely new. A few years ago
Adtron used to market
the
I35MB
Diskpak which included 2x PATA mirrored disks.
Drive Genius 2
Pleasanton, CA
– February 12, 2008 – Prosoft Engineering, Inc. announces the
availability of Drive Genius 2, the award-winning $99 hard drive maintenance
utility for the Mac.
Drive Genius 2 is a disk utility with a wide
array of features that allow you to maintain your hard drives such as:- disk
defrag, directory repair and repartition on-the-fly. ...Prosoft Engineering,
Storage Software
LaCie Embraces 1.3" Hard Drive
January 15, 2008
- LaCie and Samsung announced today the end results of their
collaboration in implementing 1.3 inch hard disk format for LaCie micro storage
devices.
Available in 30GB or 40GB USB versions, LaCie will be
offering its smallest Little Disk yet. The devices come preloaded with
LaCie's '1-Click' Backup Software for PC and Mac and SilverKeeper Backup
Software for Mac to regularly back up data.
...LaCie profile,
...Samsung profile
Goodbye to the Power Cable for eSATA
BEAVERTON,
Ore - January 14, 2008 - SATA-IO today announced its Power Over eSATA
initiative.
The new specification will provide power to
external SATA (eSATA)
devices without the need for a separate power connection. Led by the
organization's Cable and Connector group, the specification is targeted for
completion in the second half of 2008. ...SATA-IO,
storage ORGs
Toshiba's New USB Hard Drives
Las
Vegas, NV - January 7, 2008 - Toshiba Storage Device Division today
announced it will introduce a new range of 1.8" hard disk based storage
products with USB interfaces in the Spring.
The pocket-sized units
will be available in 60GB, 80GB and 120GB models. Toshiba plans to include
encryption and backup
software with its 1.8" line to protect data should the hard disk ever
be lost or stolen. Toshiba will also be shipping a new 320GB 2.5"
USB external hard disk in
the next few weeks ($200 approx). ...Toshiba profile
Seagate Announces PipelineHD Hard Drives
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif - January 6, 2008 - Seagate Technology today announced
its PipelineHD Series hard disk drives for DVRs.
These new drives
are virtually silent a feature that is important in the living room and
bedroom environments in which these devices are designed to operate. With
shipments beginning in the first half of 2008, the PipelineHD Series hard drive
will initially be available in capacities from 320GB up to 1TB. ...Seagate profile
Editor's
comments:- Seagate says its PipelineHD hard drives can operate at drive
case temperatures of up to 75° C that means fanless products don't have
to compromise silent running with unreliability.
Samsung Launches Coolest Terabyte Hard
Drive
SEOUL, South
Korea - January 3, 2008 - Samsung announced today its new F1 RAID Class
3.5" SATA hard drive featuring 1TB of capacity.
The Spinpoint
F1R specs an MTBF of 1.2 million hours and offers enterprise class features such
as command completion time limit, and vibration tolerance. It features a
16 or 32MB cache, a SATA
interface, 175MB/s maximum media transfer rate, and NCQ.
Samsung
claims the F1R is the coolest operating 1TB
hard drive in its class
with an average of 6.7 watts in idle mode and an average of 7.2 watts in random
seek mode. It will ship this quarter.
...Samsung profile
Iomega Buys $700 million Hard Disk Maker
SAN
DIEGO, CA - December 12, 2007 - Iomega Corp today announced that it has
entered into a definitive share purchase agreement to acquire ExcelStor
Technology.
ExcelStor produces more than 20 million
hard disk based devices
per year and in the first half of 2007 ExcelStor had revenue of $371 million.
...Excelstor
profile, ...Iomega
profile, 451 gone-awat
storage companies
New Maxtor Disks Were Infected by Virus
Editor:-
November 15, 2007 - Seagate's Technical Support page confirms that a
virus was installed on new Maxtor branded disks produced by a
subcomtractor.
Apparently some infected units were sold to the
public before the problem was detected. I was sceptical about this when I saw
earlier
reports but it shows that you can never be too paranoid about protecting
your data. Big markets tend to be lost by oems shooting themselves in the foot
rather than being grabbed by nimble competitors. ...Seagate profile,
Storage Security
WiebeTech Launches Low Cost Disk eRazer
WICHITA , KS -
November 12, 2007 - WiebeTech today unveiled its Drive eRazer family
for IDE/PATA and SATA hard drives.
The standard model (price
$99.95) can erase a 250GB drive in under 2 hours. Operation is easy. Simply
connect it to a drive and flip a switch.
"As many people discover too late, trashing a file does not
erase it from a hard drive,"
said James Wiebe, president/CEO of WiebeTech. "It is fairly easy for
someone else to recover files from used hard drives. As a
test, we bought used drives on eBay and recovered everything from corporate data
to email conversations to financial data to legal documents. Drive eRazer is the
easiest, most economical solution available to prevent others from seeing your
files." ...WiebeTech
profile,
Disk Sanitizers
Seagate Pays for Shrinking the Kilobyte
Editor:-
October 31, 2007 - an article today in the Sydney Morning Herald
discusses Seagate's out of court settlement re misleading capacity
claims.
Apparently Seagate shrank the size of a kilobyte in past
product promotions. Its "unique" definition of 1,000 bytes being a
kilobyte - instead of the world standard 1,024 means that customers have been
getting 2.4% less storage capacity than they expected. The company is said to
be offering 5% refund to qualifying US customers. ...Seagate profile
Hitachi Technology will Deliver 4T Hard
Drives
TOKYO
- October 15, 2007 - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced
today they have developed the world's smallest read-head technology for hard
disk drives, which is expected to quadruple current storage capacity limits to 4
terabytes on a desktop hard drive.
Hitachi's new technology is expected to be implemented in shipping
products in 2009 and reach its full potential in 2011. Hitachi will present
these achievements at the
Perpendicular
Magnetic Recording Conference this week in Tokyo....Hitachi profile,
Hard disk drives
Formation Launches 320GB 3.5" SATA
ToughDisk
MOORESTOWN, NJ -
September 12, 2007 - Formation, Inc. announced today introduction of
its ToughDisk 3500 SATA 320GB 3.3" rugged hard disk.
ToughDisk
is a rugged data storage solution used by all branches of the US military and
many commercial organizations because of its ability to perform
reliably in
temperature, altitude, shock, vibration, humidity, and dust conditions that
would destroy conventional hard
disks, at a fraction of the cost of
solid-state storage.
"The TD3500 SATA can be used with high-end
SAS controllers as
well as any of the ubiquitous embedded
SATA ports" says
Sam Carswell, Formation's chief technology officer. "They provide the
performance of SAS enterprise-class disks without the heat and mechanical
limitations of those 15K RPM disks. Using the same principle that gives
dual-core processors high performance with fewer watts of power dissipation,
this 3.5" SATA disk contains 4x 2.5" inch platters bonded together
with RAID. The independent
actuator arms and read/write heads double the media transfer rate normally
available from rugged disks."
...Formation profile,
Military Storage | |
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Nibble
- Re: Hard Drives
IBM invented disk storage and shipped the
first model in 1956. With a 24 inch diameter it stored 5M bytes.
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. But in the past few years as hard drives have increased in
capacity, become cheaper, more rugged and smaller new markets have emerged
which have boosted hard disk revenue and reversed years of revenue decline. | |
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Hybrid Hard Drives Market
Report
Los
Gatos, CA - December 19, 2007 - The Hybrid Hard Drive will not make a big
splash in 2008, according to a new 36-page report by Objective Analysis.
PC users who are waiting for this technology to speed their boot
times are going to have to wait a little longer.
"Once all the kinks are ironed out, hybrid drives and their
counterparts should sweep the market," said Jim Handy, the report's author.
"Unfortunately, the hardware is ready but the software support is weak.
Hybrid drives will have to wait for better support to justify their small
additional cost."
Hybrid Hard Drives: How, Why, And When? - is an in-depth review of
the hybrid hard drive market, exploring the technology, implementation costs,
and expected benefits, as it explains why those benefits are not within reach
today. The report takes a special look at alternative technologies like SSDs,
Intel's Turbo Memory, the
SanDisk Vaulter Disk,
larger DRAM main memories
and DRAM HDD caches, and even small SSDs from
Samsung. The report
reviews members of the Hybrid Storage
Alliance members and details their product offerings.
Readers will learn how hybrid drives work and why they are receiving
so much attention today. They will also understand why hybrid drives will
threaten the SSD market, and why neither technology is likely to see much
acceptance until the second half of 2008 or later.
...Objective
Analysis profile
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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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| Are MLC SSDs Ever
Safe in Enterprise Apps? |
This is a follow up
article (published in March 2008) 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 | |
| . |
Nibble:- WORM Hard Disk Drives?
Words and their connotations
can change their meanings over time...
I first heard the term "WORM"
(Write Once Read Many times) back in 1980 - used in the context of one time
programmable non volatile memory. Back then Intel was trying to convert
manufacturers to use EPROMs (Erasable PROgrammable Memories) in low cost OTP
windowless plastic packages for production runs instead of the more expensive
ceramic packages used for development which had windows enabling the devices to
be erased in a UV light box and reused. The plastic packages also had the
advantage of being compatible with robotic insertion - unlike the more brittle
ceramic.
In 1986 I was hearing the term "WORM" again, this
time referring to the new generation of 5.25 inch optical disk drives which
were hitting the market as long term archival storage.
Then for over a
decade the terms WORM and optical storage were synonymous, although the
fashionable technology of the time changed from writable CD, then writable DVD,
and now HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc).
Then in 2003 - a new type of
WORM wriggled into our consciousness - the idea of one time writable tape
backup. Introduced by Sony as a feature in its SAIT drives - the concept seemed
bizarre at first. But there were good commercial reasons behind the idea. US
laws governing the ways in which data had to be archived created a guaranteed
market for any data archiving technology which made accidental erasure of data
foolproof. Sony managed this with some flash memory inside the tape cartridge
which remembered that it had been configured as a WORM device and prevented
over-writes at the low level driver level.
I'm going to introduce a new
idea - and remember where you heard it first. Because in a few years time this
could be a multi billion dollar segment of the hard disk drive market - which
needs all the revenue it can get - as it's under constant pressure from two main
trends:-
- a capacity versus price technology curve which at
times has much in common with the type of cliff that lemmings (or venture
capitalists wedded to learning curve pricing) like to throw themselves off
- serious threat of obsolescence at the entry level
capacity end - by lower priced, lower power and more resilient flash disks.
My new WORM concept - which you may already have anticipated
by this point - is WORM HDDs.
There are many reasons why WORM HDDs will
come and are inevitable. The main one is that if hard disk drive technology is
to become the real replacement for tape storage - then cost per bit
competitiveness - which some vendors claim has already been established - is not
enough. HDDs will have to become available with true WORM capability - which
means they will have to include a mechanical switch which enables them to be
configured as WORM devices - and which over-rides driver level over-writes of
the files on the disk when the directory is full. This will require standards to
be set up so that drives from different manufacturers understand how they are
supposed to operate. That process could be managed by a current trade body like
IDEMA. Or it could be managed by a new
body set up for the purpose.
WORM HDDs will have to have some other
characteristics - such as the ability to power down - and power up by remote
control in a predictable way - otherwise the power consumption of Petabyte disk
archives will be horrendous. Some drives already do this. For WORM applications
- low cost, low power and high MTBF will be more important than high
performance. But we're already seeing many of these capabilities in newer
serially connected hard disk drives.
What about reliability? How will
hard disk drives compare to optical media or tape - when you come to read the
data off them in 5 to 10 years?
Well - tape isn't exactly maintenance
free. If you don't rewind and rewrite the data from time to time it's not
guaranteed to stay there. And tape media can stick and jam. Similarly optical
media is subject to aging effects. If you take the unit of a hard disk drive
WORM repository as being a network connected RAID system rather than a single
disk drive - then the problem with long term data viability is easily resolved.
At some stage in the 5 to 20 year cycle - when it's no longer economic to buy
replacement drives - you just move the data onto another newer replicated WORM
HDD system.
WORM HHDs will have a number of advantages compared to
write many times disks. For example - the risk from viruses or administrator
error deleting large chunks of replicated data (which does already happen with
conventional RAID based disk to disk backup systems) will be eliminated. And
compared to WORM tape - the WORM HHDs will be faster to read and write.
They
will also have a FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) advantage compared to newer
optical storage technologies - in being proven. It sometimes takes several years
for the long term reliability of new storage media to be proven - and often the
permanence and error rates in the past have been revised downwards.
And
finally, WORM HDDs have the same superficial advantage that almost guarantees
that the concept will be adopted. Like Internet SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI and
similar concepts - we're already familiar with the words. | | |
