| EMC
Aims to Cut 2,400 Positions |
HOPKINTON,
Mass. - January 7, 2009 - EMC Corp said it aims to reduce its
workforce by approximately 2,400 positions, or about 7% of its headcount
as of September 30, 2008.
EMC expects the program to reduce costs from its 2008 annualized
rate by approximately $350 million in 2009, increasing to approximately $500
million in 2010. ...EMC
profile
News Feed from CES
Editor:-
January 7, 2009 - there's a whole bunch of new products being announced this
week at CES.
I will extract the interesting ones (related
to storage) later - but the organizer's news page (link above) seems to give
useful results in the meantime.
STORAGEsearch.com Reports Top Searches
Editor:- January 7, 2009 -
STORAGEsearch.com today updated its monthly list of the top articles
and subjects viewed by storage searchers in December.
Despite
58% year on year reader growth for the ever popular
SSD Buyers Guide
- it was knocked out of the #1 slot by a new article -
Looking Ahead to
the 2009 SSD Market.
Surprisingly
Data Recovery entered
the top 5 subjects viewed by StorageSearch.com readers for the 1st
time.
"Like any rescue service of last resort, Data Recovery is
something which it's healthy to spend little or no time thinking about. But
when something goes wrong with your operating data and backups - you are forced
to become an instant expert" said editor, Zsolt Kerekes. "The icon
used for Data Recovery on the mouse site since 1999 is still one of my
favorites. You can see a larger version of the image
here."
The
list of top articles and subjects can be seen on the
market research page.
RAED Demo at CES Aims at Gamers
Editor:-
January 6, 2009 -
Advanced Media, Inc. demonstrated a RAED configuration of its
flash SSDs today at CES.
This shows the kind of
performance that gamers can get from upgrading their PCs. Using 4x Ultra-S Plus
MLC SSDs in RAID 0 the demo delivered throughput as follows:- 450MB/s read and
330MB/s write.
The performance is unremarkable for a flash SSD array. All
rackmount SSD
systems are already much
faster. So you may
be wondering - why did I mention this at all? And is the appearance of the word
"RAED" above a typo?
Well consider this. When the term
RAID was coined in the
1980s - the letter "I" stood for "inexpensive". At that time
the idea was that you could use a bunch of inexpensive PC hard disks (which were
then 5.25") to deliver the same throughput as physically larger server
drives (which were 8.5" and even much bigger). The media whizzed past the
heads at a higher linear speed on those big diameter disks - even at the same
RPM - and there was plenty of space to pack in a crowd of heads.
That
was 20 years ago and things change. Now all
hard drives are "inexpensive"
- and at the same spin speed there's no performance difference between a server
drive and a fast PC drive. If you want faster throughput you have to use COTS
flash SSDs in the array - instead of HDDs - because the rotational roadmap long
ago hit
its limit. Many vendors have been doing this for a year or more now,
examples include EasyCo,
EMC and
Superior Data
Solutions .
This is where the "E" comes in. "E"
for "Expensive" - because it's mostly true that for the same capacity
an SSD costs more than an HDD. Hence we get RAID = Redundant Array of
Expensive (solid state) Drives. And thus another useless acronym is born. Will
my RAED term be adopted by vendors to usefully differentiate their SSD based
arrays? Or will it join the pantheon of lost RAID jargon such as RAIN, RAIGE,
SAID... ...Advanced
Media profile
Samsung Discloses IOPS for New 2.5" SSD
Las
Vegas, NV - January 6, 2009 - Samsung announced details of a new 100GB
2.5" SLC flash SSD that will ship this quarter.
For the 1st
time in a Samsung press release - the company has disclosed
IOPS data
for the new SSD... 25k random read IOPS and 6k write IOPS. R/W throughput is
230MB/s and 180MB/s respectively.
Samsung marketing VP,
Jim
Elliott said "We have created a very reliable drive for data centers
with high-performance, high-endurance and sharply reduced power consumption
requirements, plus tremendous long-term value when the total cost of ownership
is analyzed." ...Samsung
profile, the
Fastest SSDs
RunCore Infringes Copyright of STORAGEsearch.com
Editor:-
January 6, 2009 -
RunCore likes
the content on StorageSearch.com
so much that they have reproduced an entire article -
What's a Solid
State Disk? - on its
page
here.
Unfortunately they did not ask permission, and to make things
worse there is no attribution to the original source. This copyright violation
is something which we take very seriously. ...Later:- RunCore have now
apologized and removed the content.
Seagate Ships 500GB Per Platter 3.5" Hard Drive
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif. - January 5, 2009 - Seagate today announced volume
shipments of a mainstream desktop hard drive with the industry's highest areal
density.
Packing 1TB of capacity on just 2 disk platters,
Seagate's Barracuda 7200.12 HD is a 3.5" 7,200 RPM
SATA drive with an
areal density of 329 Gigabits per square inch. It delivers a sustained data
rate of up to 160MB/second.
...Seagate profile,
Hard disk drives,
Record Breaking
Storage
G-Tech Launches Desktop SSD RAID for Macs
Macworld, San
Francisco - January 5, 2009 - G-Technology today announced a new
family of external drives based on 2.5" SSD technology.
The
G-DRIVE mini SSD has a FireWire and USB interface and costs $599 for 120GB and
$1,299 for 250GB.
The G-RAID mini SSD has
eSATA,
FireWire and
USB interfaces and upto
195MB/sec data transfer rates. Price is $2,199 for 500GB. ...G-Tech profile
Benchmark Reviews Confirms flash SSD Performance Uncertainty
Principle
Editor:-
January 4, 2009 - Benchmark Reviews has recently published an article - "SSD
Benchmark Performance Testing."
This provides experimental
confirmation of something I warned about in an earlier article -
Can you trust flash
SSD specs & benchmarks? - namely that hard disk based performance
software provides unreliable results for SSDs.
The author, Executive
Editor, Olin Coles (who has published many disk benchmarks) concludes "I
warn readers to regard SSD reviews with a high degree of caution". He says
he's going to stop using certain test suites, and the discovery that he can't
trust all the results which he has worked hard to collect and publish made him
feel sick. Coles is a very experienced benchmark tester - and his article makes
interesting reading. ...read
the article
See also:-
how fast can your
SSD run backwards? - 11 Key Symmetries in SSD design
StorageMojo Article - the Top Storage Stories of 2008
Editor:-
January 4, 2009 - Robin Harris, publisher of StorageMojo.com has
published an article listing - the Top Storage Stories of 2008.
It's
worth a look. You can see my own pick of top news stories on the
Storage History
page.
Apacer Launches Miniature SSD
Editor:- January 3,
2009 - Apacer
launched a miniature SLC flash SSD - the
Mini
SAFD 25M - which fits into 1/2 the footprint of a
2.5" SSD.
Capacity
ranges from 256MB to 16GB and R/W speed is 35MB/s and 25MB/s respectively. A
shell is available for users who want to mount this in a 2.5" hard disk
slot.
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| storage sanitizers |
Is it true that the Queen's
apartments are
dusted clean by those bushy hats?
Megabyte was sworn to secrecy. | |
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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.
Price 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 | |
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