Aitech's new XMC SSD
Editor:-
February 18, 2010 -
Aitech launched
a new model in its family of
PMC/XMC
SSDs.
The
M224 has 128GB capacity, and
hardware RAID options
which support the onboard flash array. Sustained sequential R/W speeds are
170MB/s and 120MB/s respectively. The M224 is available in air-cooled and
conduction-cooled versions as well as in 3 levels of
ruggedization
depending on shock, vibration and humidity requirements. OS support includes
VxWorks, Windows and Linux.
DRAM market may reach $32 billion this year
Editor:-
February 18, 2010 - iSuppli
announced today it expects global
DRAM revenue in 2010 to
grow
40% to approx $32 billion - compared to 2009.
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.
SSD Backup - new directory for a new market
Editor:-
February 16, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
launched a new directory for -
Solid State Storage Backup.
Although
these are still early days for the S3B market - the new page will help you
filter out news, articles and messages from the S3B pioneers which otherwise
might get lost in the clamor of the
SSD market bubble.
"In
the early days of the
disk to disk backup market the old
tape vendors scoffed the
idea that hard disks
might one day steal their market. Now most of those old tape dinosaurs are gone
and the hard disk backup market reigns supreme" said editor, Zsolt Kerekes.
"Despite that - I expect that most vendors in the
D2d / VTL market today
will not even be dreaming about the possibility that
SSDs will one day
transform their own cozy market too. But they urgently need to start having
fresh ideas about what backup and recovery are really for? The
S3B page will chronicle the
news from the nascent Solid State Storage Backup market - and help to accelerate
those changes."
In Space the Data Recovery Engineer can't hear You Scream
Editor:-
February 15, 2010 -
NASA's
Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched last week, uses an SSD error
correction architecture designed by ECC Technologies.
Phil
White, inventor of this scheme says - "You can think of the SDO spacecraft
as containing a parallel-transfer, fault-tolerant
SSD that uses DRAM chips
instead of NAND Flash chips. It uses exactly the same PRS ECC that I have
proposed for use in solid state disks. All of the data collected by SDO is
encoded by the PRS encoder, stored in the SSD and decoded by the PRS decoder.
Multiple DRAM chips can fail with no loss of data or performance."
Editor's comments:-
understanding the data
failure modes in solid state storage arrays isn't rocket science. But
rocket science thinking (high mission cost of data failure without the
cushion of a service engineer) - is a critical starting point in the design
of SSDs with high data
integrity.
Here are some other "SSDs in space" links
And see also:- Data Recovery for flash
SSDs
Good Blogs from Xiotech
Editor:- February 15, 2010 -
the
Great Shrinking Disc Drive is a new blog by Rob Peglar at Xiotech.
"The
entire idea of using 2.5? drives in the enterprise has been anathema for many
years. Enterprise 2.5" drives have been around for several years, but
vendors never designed arrays to use them, because they not only wouldn't but
couldn't – they were too small, too fast and too unpredictable. ...But the
big news of 2.5" drives is this – the upcoming capacities of these
drives are rapidly expanding... and Xiotech has been the first enterprise array
vendor to architect these drives into a fully-baked architecture."
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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What happened to the home page of StorageSearch.com? |
Editor:- February 19, 2010 - it seems that every
time I read a new book or, article, about
web marketing - something good (or
bad) happens to my home page.
You may have noticed a few tweaks in
recent days to the main index page of
StorageSearch.com.
"Index page" seems like a quaint old
fashioned term - but when the original designers of the web were thinking about
how readers would navigate - that's what they had in mind - a list of the
contents you can expect to see when you encounter a new site.
Nowadays
search-engines and zillions of deep links mean that you probably arrive at a
new web site somewhere different than the home page. And most home pages are
not navigationally useful.
I can recommend the web design book BTW
- here's a sample chapter.
It's not the book's fault that my own web pages look the way they are.
Talking
about books. This month is the 18th anniversary of the 1st sales for
my original enterprise server / storage buyers guide. More about that in the
sidebar article lower right.
In all that span of time - I
fervently believe that this is the most exciting time to be in the storage
market.
And here's an apology for the later than promised delivery of
a new article I've been working on - which will predict key milestones in the
market adoption of SSD Backup.
It was getting so complicated I decided to split it into 3 separate articles
- starting with the subject's own home page which appeared earlier this week.
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| 18 Years of Enterprise
Storage Guides |
Editor:- February 18, 2010 -
it's 18 years since I sold the 1st edition of my enterprise server and storage
buyers guide - the SPARC
Product Directory.
Little did I imagine back then (in 1992) that
SSDs - a
technology I had used to boost the
reliability and
speed of servers in
the 1980s - and which occupied less than 1% of the pages in that heavy
$79 book - would one day become the #1 hot topic for millions of my readers
- as it is today.
2010 - year of the SSD
market bubble - is one of the most exciting times and places to be involved
in the computer industry.
It's got... the buzz I felt in
1977 as an electronics
engineer working with microprocessors. The uncertainty of being a web
publisher in 1996. The thrills of the dotcom boom days in 1998 which
gave me the confidence to put a cartoon character -
Megabyte the mouse -
on the home page of a serious new publication about
RAID,
SCSI,
HDDs and
SSDs - which I boldly named
StorageSearch.com
Today
- the storage market is the hot center of flaming innovation in computer
architecture.
SSDs are going to enable us to evolve new digital
markets faster than possible using the tired sagging clock rates and fat
cores of 30 year old processor architectures with hard drives. |
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There are thousands pages
here on StorageSearch.com - and our readers, contributors and sponsors include
many of the thought
leaders in the SSD industry. Together - we're "leading the way to the
new storage frontier". | | | |
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