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SD3000 / SD3000X2 high availability SSDs - click for more info
high performance, high availability
FC solid state disk accelerators
from Solid Data Systems
Data Integrity Study at CERN (pdf)
Latent Sector Errors in Hard Disk Drives
Increasing Flash Solid State Disk Reliability
SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
Flash Disk Reliability Begins at the IC Level (pdf)
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (pdf)
reliability - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com
Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures?
Reliability Mechanisms for Very Large Storage Systems (pdf)
Reliability Modeling for Long Term Digital Preservation (pdf)
Empirical Measurements of Disk Failure Rates and Error Rates (pdf)
Understanding Soft and Firm Errors in Semiconductor Devices (pdf)
Reliability of Modular Mesh-connected Intelligent Storage Brick systems
Data Loss and Hard Drive Failure: Understanding the Causes and Costs
storage reliability
. Megabyte's 10 year storage epic nearly came
to an abrupt end due to some weak links.
high reliability flash SSDs  for embedded and high reliability servers
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


Disk Error Correction Company Gets $22 million Funding

Santa Clara, Calif. - April 9, 2008 - Link_A_Media Devices Corp secured $22 million in Series B financing.

The funding round, led by AIG SunAmerica Ventures, was secured from 4 additional financial and corporate investors - KeyNote Ventures, NEC Electronics, Micron and Seagate.

Link_A_Media Devices is developing a new class of chip controller resident data recovery solutions for HDDs and SSDs. These are designed to exceed the performance of conventional methods deployed in peripheral storage devices, as well as provide adaptive features that can be used during manufacturing to improve drive yields and product margins. ...Link_A_Media Devices profile

Editor's comments:-
MLC flash SSDs have high internal error rates and are currently unrecoverable. It looks like Link_A_Media's technology could improve the odds of data recovery in failed devices which incorporate its technology (as well as reducing data errors while the SSD is still operational.)

Another side effect of their technology may be better performance in flash SSDs.

Link_A_Media says their IOP Buster architecture enables scalability within the controller to address various segments of SSD applications seamlessly. It enables faster Read and Write transfers.


Spectra Libraries will Log Tape Health Metrics

SNW, ORLANDO, FL - April 8, 2008 - Spectra Logic announced details of its soon to be released new Media Lifecycle Management software for its tape library customers.

MLM will reduce backup failures by tracking more than 30 pieces of information about individual LTO tapes and logging this on on the tape's built in flash chip. Information such as: born-on date, number of reads and writes, error rate, media quality, date of last access, application usage, encryption information, cleaning log and remaining capacity are tracked. MLM and BlueScale are compatible with all major backup applications. ...Spectra Logic profile

Editor's comments:-
already past the decline and now in the fall years of the tape library market it looks like customers will get all kinds of useful information and services which they probably would have liked to have before. This sounds similar in concept to the SMART logs in hard disks and SiSMART in SiliconSystems' flash SSDs.


Pillar's Petabyte Arrays are 99.999% Available

San Jose, Calif. - April 7, 2008 - Pillar Data Systems today announced availability of the Pillar Axiom 500MC - a mission critical storage system .

The Pillar Axiom 500MC delivers up to 192GB of cache, with the ability to scale capacity to 1.6 petabytes. The system supports both fibre channel and SATA disk drives. Pillar guarantees 99.999% availability. ...Pillar profile


Does Unhappy Notebook Maker Have High Rate of SSD Flash Backs?

Editor:- March 19, 2008 - a report discussed in an article on CNET saying that flash SSDs in notebooks are incurring double digit customer reject rates has been dismissed by Dell as "untrue."


Study Enumerates Key Factors in 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


Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?

Editor:- February 27, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com published a new article today called - Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?

This is a follow up article to the popular SSD Myths and Legends which, in early 2007, 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 this morning) takes you to a startling new world of possibilities. ...read the article


WEDC Targets Medical CompactFlash Market

Phoenix, AZ - December 19, 2007 - White Electronic Designs Corp is leveraging its defense industry experience and expertise to develop high-reliability modules for the growing portable medical device market.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there will be an expected 40 million persons in the U.S. over the age of 65 by 2010, driving the need for portable medical devices, especially for home use. The portable medical device market is driven by the same requirements and expectations as the defense segment; such as high quality and reliability, shorter development cycles, a well-defined and documented supply chain and extended product lifecycles. Among other products WEDC designs and manufactures one of the industry's first medical series CompactFlash cards. ...White Electronic Designs profile

Editor's comments:- WEDC has also recently published a paper Is All CompactFlash Really Created Equal? (pdf) which uses the medical instrumentation market as the backdrop for a discussion about flash SSDs similar to those concerns analyzed in SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" - which looked at the enterprise server market.


Patent May Suit High Reliability SSD OEMs

MINNETONKA, MN - November 23, 2007 - ECC Technologies, Inc. announces that its parallel Reed-Solomon error correction designs and US Patent are immediately available for licensing.

PRS encoder and decoder designs allow parallel I/O storage devices to be designed with automatic, built-in backup (fault-tolerance). PRS applied to flash SSDs (for example) enables SSDs to be designed that can tolerate NAND Flash chip failures. PRS can also be applied to Hard Disk Arrays. Potential licensees can read about the PRS technology applied to SSDs and to HDDs on these preceding links. ...ECC Technologies profile, storage reliability

Editor's comments:-
in the early days of a fast growing technology market most vendors are too busy growing their revenue by selling products to customers. But when markets get big enough or growth rates slow down - another round kicks in - of harvesting money from those who succeeded in the market - but didn't protect themselves properly with patents.

When I was a young engineer several designs of mine did get patented. In one particular company I remember being asked to leaf through some 10 year old logbooks of my predecessors to find some prior art to help nullify a competitor's potential attack. I always preferred doing things my own way - so I grumbled at being asked to delve into these dusty old files. But I did find what my boss was looking for.


Panasas Solution Targets RAID Unreliability

FREMONT, CA - October 9, 2007 - Panasas, Inc. announced the Panasas Tiered Parity Architecture which the company claims is the most significant extension to disk array data reliability since Panasas CTO Garth Gibson's pioneering RAID research at UC-Berkeley in 1988.

With the release of the ActiveScale 3.2 operating environment, Panasas will offer an innovative end-to-end Tiered-Parity architecture that addresses the primary causes of storage reliability problems and provides the industry's first end-to-end data integrity checking capability.

Traditional RAID implementations protect against disk failures by calculating and storing parity data along with the original data.

In the past 10 years, individual disk drives have become approximately 10x more reliable and over 250x denser than those protected by the first generation RAID designs in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the number of disk media failures expected during each read over the surface of a disk grows proportionately with the massive increase in density and has now become the most common failure mode for RAID. A RAID disk failure can cause loss of all the data in a volume which may be tens of terabytes or more. Recovery of the lost data from tape (assuming that is all backed up) can take days or even weeks.

Other storage system vendors recognize this same issue and apply RAID 6, often called double parity RAID, to address this problem. Double parity schemes only treat the symptom of the failure, not the cause, and they carry substantial cost and performance penalties, which will only get worse as disk drive densities continue to increase.

Panasas Tiered Parity architecture directly addresses the root cause of the problem, not the symptom. Solving the storage reliability problem caused by these new 1TB and larger disks allows Panasas to build larger and more reliable storage that allows users to get more value from their data and are less expensive for IT to support.

"The challenges with storage system reliability today have little to do with overall disk reliability, which is what RAID was designed to address in 1988. The issues that we see today are directly related to disk density and require new approaches. Most secondary disk failures today are the result of media errors, which have become 250x more likely to occur during a RAID failed-disk rebuild over the last 10 years," said Garth Gibson, CTO of Panasas. "Tiered Parity allows us to tackle media errors with an architecture that can counter the effects of increasing disk density. It also solves data path reliability challenges beyond those addressed by traditional RAID and extends parity checking out to the client or server node. Tiered Parity provides the only end-to-end data integrity checking capability in the industry." ...Panasas profile

Editor's comments:-
the problem of data corruption in large data sets because of obsolete technology assumptions built into hard disks, interface and RAID products has been looming for several years. You can see articles and research about this on the storage reliability page.

Is the solution more reliable hard drives? better interfaces? or a smarter storage OS? Users can't wait another 5 years for ideal solutions because the symptoms are there today when you look. The Panasas solution sounds like a pragmatic tactical approach for some customers - but the industry is a long way from a better storage reliability mousetrap.


Why Sun will Shine with a New Lustre

SANTA CLARA, Calif - September 12, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today said it will acquire the majority of Cluster File Systems, Inc.'s intellectual property and business assets, including the Lustre File System.

Sun intends to add support for Solaris OS on Lustre and plans to continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware platforms. ...Sun Microsystems profile, Acquired storage companies

Editor's comments:-
I hadn't heard of this company before. A sure sign that they were heading straight for the gone away storage companies list without any deviations on route. Here's what I picked up from their web site present and past.

The Lustre product description (pdf) says - "the Lustre architecture was first developed at Carnegie Mellon University as a research project in 1999." The company's website started in about 2001 amd they released Lustre 1.0 in 2003. By 2004 had a product ready for a bigger market.

Strangely enough Solaris support isn't listed as a strong feature in their recent roadmap. So why does Sun want this technology? - Well - even if you're not in the supercomputer business - some technologies which start there eventually trickle down to the rest of us. "Zero single points of failure" - mentioned on their home page - is a good enough reason. As I wrote in my 7 year storage market predictions (2005) storage reliability is going to become a major headache in enterprise storage in the next 5 years.

See also:- Robin Harris's blog which explains the business background to CFS - "why aren't they rich?"


Tapewise Enterprise Checks Tape Media Errors

Farnborough UK - September 18, 2007 - Data Product Services today announces the release of Tapewise Enterprise.

Tapewise is software that writes data to a tape and then reads it again, tracking any errors, soft recoverable ones or unrecoverable ones, that occur. It streams a whole tape through a drive in this way and, with its Tape Error Map technology, produces a 3D graph showing errors encountered along the length of a tape when data was being read and written.

The user can decide what an acceptable error rate is and that boundary will be shown on the graph with any error rates above the user-defined norm instantly visible. The software supports a large number of tape formats: 3480; 3490; DLT; SDLT; 3590; 9840; 9940; T10000; LTOs 1, 2 and 3 and 3592. Costs start at $16,000 approx. A free 14-day evaluation copy is available. ...Data Product Services profile, Tape drives, Storage Testers


Noise Damping Techniques for PATA SSDs

Editor:- August 10, 2007 - SiliconSystems today published a new white paper called - "Noise Damping Techniques for PATA SSDs in Military-Embedded Systems."

This article looks at electronic signal integrity issues in integrating high speed PATA SSDs. It helps electronic designers understand how factors such as ground bounce, loading, power supply noise and signal trace mismatches can lead to false data or even device damage. Examples given in the tutorial style commentary include scope shots and logic analyzer traces. ...read the article, ...SiliconSystems profile, storage chips, storage analyzers

Editor's comments:-
the article gives a good grounding (couldn't resist that one) in the signal quality factors needed to get high reliability operation and is equally relevant to hard disks. To simplify the 20 page document:- if you connect reliable electronic modules using unreliable signal paths - that will compromise the integrity of the data. Logic states are virtual - but digital signals are real and can have completely different shapes to what you expect if you don't follow basic rules.


Squeak! - Green Storage - What's Green. What's Not

Editor:- June 24, 2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today published a new article - Green Storage - Trends and Predictions.

There's a lot of nonsense in the media about so called "Green Storage". This article blows away the puffery and clears the air for a better view of forward looking green data storage technologies. Reliability gets an honorable mention. Find out what's really green - and what's not. ...read the article


Hard Drive Unreliability Costs are Reason to Switch to SSDs

Aliso Viejo, Calif., May 30, 2007 - SiliconSystems, Inc. today announced the publication of a white paper called - "Solid-State Storage is a Cost-Effective Replacement for Hard Drives in Many Applications."

The paper cites data from Google and Carnegie Mellon University that indicates hard drive field failure rates are up to 15x greater than quoted in disk manufacturer data sheets. The white paper was developed by SiliconSystems to educate OEMs about the numerous technical and business decisions they must successfully navigate to select the best storage solution for their application. ...read the article (pdf), ...SiliconSystems profile

Editor's note:- storage reliability is a type 4 application in our SSD Market Adoption Model.



Debunking Misconceptions in SSD Longevity

Editor:- May 11, 2007 - BiTMICRO Networks today published a new article called - "Debunking Misconceptions in SSD Longevity."

It cites lifetime predictions from my own popular article - SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance" and fires a warning shot aimed at some competitors by saying "some flash SSD makers have even quoted higher write endurance ratings than those provided by manufacturers of their flash memory components."

That's certainly true - but I knew when writing my article that endurance varies from batch to batch of flash chips within the same semiconductor fab process. Some SSD oems sample test and reject chips which are at the lower end of the distribution curve. That means their worst case numbers are better than would be the case by simply accepting merchant quality flash chips. Although starting from a different base of assumptions - BiTMICRO's article "conclude(s) that fears about the endurance limitations of SSDs are rightfully fading away."


Seagate Drops Notebook Drives

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif - March 12, 2007 - Seagate Technology today announced the worldwide availability of a 7,200 RPM hard drive with free-fall protection for beefed-up laptop durability.

Momentus 7200.2 delivers up to 160GB of capacity and has a SATA interface. The hard drive is also offered with an optional free-fall sensor to help prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, then parking the head off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches. ...Seagate profile

Editor's comments:-
Hitachi revealed details about its similar ESP drop sensor in 2005. The drop sensor approach is better than nothing, but doesn't get around the unavoidable fact that hard disks can break when dropped.

Another approach is that of Olixir Technologies who have marketed repackaged high performance hard drives which can be dropped repeatedly onto a concrete floor from 6 feet and still survive.

But solid state disks are inherently even tougher than that because there are no internal moving parts to crash together. That's why they have been used in space ships, helicoptors and missiles. In 2006 In-Stat predicted that half of all mobile computers would use SSDs (instead of hard disks) by 2013. It's not just the ruggedness and better power consumption. A video by Samsung demonstrates the advantages more graphically.


Hard Disk MTBF Specs Incredible - Say User Reports

Editor:- February 28, 2007 - an article published today in Channel Insider - "Hard Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce? - casts serious doubt on the inflated MTBF claims made by all hard disk manufacturers.

Reviewing a number of recently published reliability studies from end users - the author David Morgenstern says "...there's a gap between the reliability expectations of manufacturers and customers. The current MTBF model isn't accounting accurately for how drives are handled in the field and how they function inside systems." ...read the article, storage reliability


Google Reports on HDD Reliability

Editor:- February 20, 2007 - Researchers at Google recently published a paper at the recent Usenix conference about hard disk reliability and failure prediction - based on their own experiences as a large user of hard disk drives.

The fascinating paper describes how Google measured available metrics and status reports generated by the drives themselves and how this correlated with actual failure patterns. One of the key insights in the report is Google's view of how useful SMART parameters were for predicting failures.

"Our results are surprising, if not somewhat disappointing. Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count. In other words, models based only on those signals can never predict more than half of the failed drives... ...even when we add all remaining SMART parameters (except temperature) we still find that over 36% of all failed drives had zero counts on all variables." ...read the article, Hard disk drives, storage reliability

PS - the measured data on the percentage of disks which fail each year over a 5 year cycle under various conditions is essential reading for disk to disk backup contingency planning.



Agere Halves Power Consumption for Mobile HDD Interface

ALLENTOWN, Pa - February 6, 2007 - Agere Systems has begun shipping a new fully functional 90-nanometer TrueStore read channel.

The TrueStore RC1300 uses half the current required by the previous generation of read channel chip technology in this market segment and is 25% faster. It targets the 1.8-inch and smaller HDD form factor that provides critical data storage of 20 to 160 gigabytes in a wide variety of consumer devices. ...Agere Systems profile


STORAGEsearch.com Launches a New Strategic Directory - Storage Reliability

Editor:- June 20, 2006 - STORAGEsearch.com today launched a new directory dedicated to the subject of "Storage Reliability".

Reliability was named as one of the 3 most important future trends in storage in my state of the storage market article published last year. In that article I also predicted that uncorrectable failures in storage systems (due to embedded design assumptions made in earlier generations) could, if not dealt with by drive and interface designers, pose a more serious threat to enterprise computer systems than the Y2K bug in the late 1990s.

In addition to covering news about what the industry is doing to improve reliability in future drives, media and interfaces, STORAGEsearch has invited CTOs and technical directors of leading companies to write special articles about this subject - which will appear in the months ahead.

When most people think about storage reliability - they think about MTBF and thermal factors.

If an individual drive isn't reliable enough - wrap it in a RAID. If heat reduces the life of the disks - then cool them with more fans. If a memory system or interface is critical to an application - cocoon it with error detection and correction codes. Those are approaches which have worked adequately for the past few decades - but they are not good enough any more.

The demands for storage reliability are growing. Non stop applications need data that can be trusted to be available on demand. Compliance dictates that data should be readable not just years - but possibly decades after it was created. Meanwhile storage components, interfaces and systems are increasing in speed and capacity - while many of them are using error correction thinking that comes from earlier generations when data sets were smaller. As storage gets bigger - users face the risk of having uncorrectable errors in the heartland of their decision making data. That's why - all over the industry - manufacturers are starting to talk about new storage reliability initiatives.

There's also the risk that new storage technologies which get rushed to serve the needs of the consumer market - have not in fact been tested long enough to guarantee that they will not fail or start to corrupt data in the timeframe that enterprise customers care about.

Wrapping arrays of consumer disks based on new 2 year proven media technology in a big "enterprise" box - cannot guarantee that the data will still be readable in 5 years time. This is not a worry for consumers. They'll throw a failed disk away or buy a new one. But if your enterprise owns thousands of these disks (hidden by virtualization) it could be a big headache when the crumbly nature of the storage defects start to hit the news. This is another of the many concerns we'll be covering in these pages. Storage media have failed in the past and been withdrawn because they didn't meet their original extrapolated lifetimes. Lessons are not always learned from errors in the past - but can be forgotten and reoccur.

Storage reliability is changing. If you are interested - I hope you'll stay tuned to the new storage reliability channel here on the mouse site - as we report on these exciting developments in the months ahead.


Why Solaris will Get 128 Bit Addresses

Editor:- May 1, 2006 - an article today in InformationWeek.com discusses the Zettabyte File System - a new 128 bit addressing scheme for Solaris.

The article says that apart from the obvious advantage of being able to access more storage, Sun is apparently thinking about building in error correction into the new address scheme.

In a market forecast published last year in STORAGEsearch.com - Storage Reliability and failures were cited as one of the most important long term problems which oems and users will have to deal with.

The cause of the problem is that storage interfaces as well as modules and components (like disks, tapes, optical drives etc) use error correcting schemes which were designed for the much smaller and slower architectures of the past. As storage systems expand - new algorithms and correction schemes will be needed to guarantee that users don't get affected by data failures which are uncorrectable using today's products and protection schemes.

It's good to see that Sun is working proactively on one aspect of the problem. I've talked to many storage manufacturers about the upcoming reliability problem - which could be more serious than the Y2K threat - if not dealt with in advance. Sun is highly sensitive to data reliability concerns. Problems with its own SPARC server cache memory design back in 2001- were cited at the time by many large users as reasons for considering a switch to Intel and PowerPC based systems.

See also:- SPARC Product Directory


Hard Disk Sector Size May Change

SUNNYVALE, Calif - March 23, 2006 - IDEMA today announced the results of an industry committee assembled to identify a new and longer sector standard for future magnetic hard disk drives.

This Committee recommended replacing the 30 year-standard of 512 bytes with sectors having ability to store 4,096 bytes. Dr. Ed Grochowski, executive director of IDEMA US, reported that adopting a 4K byte sector length facilitates further increases in data density for hard drives which will increase storage capacity for users while continuing to reduce cost per gigabyte.

"Increasing areal density of newer magnetic hard disk drives requires a more robust error correction code, and this can be more efficiently applied to 4,096 byte sector lengths," explained Dr. Martin Hassner from Hitachi GST and IDEMA Committee member. ...IDEMA profile


Whitepaper Measures ROI of Disk Defragmentation

Burbank, CA - January 24, 2006 - Diskeeper recently sponsored IDC to write a whitepaper called - "Defragmentation's Hidden Value for the Enterprise."

This measured the ROI of defragmentation software in real customer sites. During the reliability test, the servers that were defragmenting files automatically had a higher uptime (5 to 10%) than the servers that didn't have defragmentation software automatically running. ...read the article (pdf), ...Diskeeper profile


ProStor Systems Unveils New Backup Technology

BOULDER, CO - November 2, 2005 - ProStor Systems made its public debut today by introducing the firm's RDX removable disk backup technology.

The RDX removable cartridge uses the same 2.5" hard disk media platters found in notebook computers and provides initial capacity upto 400GB (compressed). That will will increase in line with conventional hard disk technology. But the difference is that RDX uses a new patent-pending error correcting format, which makes the data 1,000 times more recoverable than in a standard hard drive. ProStor says this means that RDX-stored data will be readable even after the cartridge has been archived and non-operating more than a decade. ...ProStor Systems profile, Removable Storage, Disk to disk backup, Storage People

Editor's comments:- the reliability of embedded storage modules and components such as disk drives, tape drives and optical disks will become an important issue for users in the next 7 years.

These products rely on inbuilt error correction algorithms which were designed over a decade ago - when storage capacities were much smaller. All those "ten to the minus something" numbers which you see quoted for error rates sound good - except that when your enterprise is managing Petabytes of data, at every higher connection speeds, then you will start seeing uncorrectable data failures occurring every year - inside the storage, and beyond the scope of your RAID or other protection scheme to correct. ProStor is one of a new generation of storage manufacturers addressing this problem, and we'll soon publish a directory section dedicated to storage reliability issues such as this.
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high reliability flash SSDs  for embedded and high reliability servers
click to read article by SiliconSystems
Increasing Flash Solid State Disk Reliability - article by SiliconSystems

Solid state disks, based on flash technology, have greatly improved in performance in recent years and now compete head to head with RAM based accelerator systems. Flash also has significant advatanges in servers compared to RAM SSDs due to low power consumption.

But if you think that all solid state disks which use flash are equally reliable and enduring then think again.

That's a bit like saying that a Mercedes 300SL sports coupe is as tough as a Tiger tank because both were made in Germany and both are built out of metal. But as Oddball (Donald Sutherland) says in the movie Kelly's Heroes "I ain't messing with no Tigers."

This article by SiliconSystems, shows how their patented architecture cleverly manages the wear out mechanisms inherent in all flash media to deliver a disk lifetime that is about 4 times greater than of other enterprise flash products and upto 100 times greater than intrinsic flash memory. ...read the article, ...SiliconSystems profile, Solid state disks
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Management appliance from Themis Computer
Manage upto 50 servers in real-time, any application,
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click to see Disklabs RAID recovery  page
RAID Recovery. All RAID systems can fail
or suffer physical damage (fire, flood etc).
Disklabs Data Recovery offer fast
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Squeak! - SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
Does the fatal gene of "write endurance" built into flash solid state disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration applications - such as RAID systems?
It was certainly true as little as a few years ago.

What's the risk with today's devices?

This article looks at the current generation of products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried.
read the article - SSD Myths and Legends
RAM based SSDs have been used alongside RAID for years - but flash SSDs are physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 160G in 2.5", 512G in 3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to look interesting. ...read the article, storage reliability solid state disks
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Testing Storage Solutions - article by Extreme Protocol
Testing Storage Solutions - article by Extreme Protocol Solutions

In the data storage industry, testing is generally considered a neccessary evil in bringing a product to market and as a result often companies will do the bare minimum neccessary in order to cross the item off its checklist. This article by Roger Gagnon President / CEO Extreme Protocol Solutions attempts to explain why testing is so important to product validation and also to provide a concise methodology to testing. ...read the article, ...Extreme Protocol Solutions profile, Storage Testers
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Squeak! - Why are Most Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks?
read the article - Why are Most Analysts  Wrong About Solid State Disks?
Most analysts and editors of other computer publications don't really understand the solid state disk market. They show their ignorance and naivete by prefacing every discussion of SSDs with a superficial analysis which compares the cost per byte of storage between flash and hard disk drives.

That's the wrong answer to the wrong question. And it's far removed from why the SSD market is racing to become a multi billion dollar market seemingly in blithe ignorance of the cost per byte proposition.

This new article tells you what's important to users and the main applications in which SSDs are already being used and new applications where they will be used in the next 3 years. ...read the article, Solid State Disks
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read the article by ICS - Sanitization Methods
Sanitization Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives - article by Intelligent Computer Solutions

Removing the data on old unwanted disk drives has become a concern for all users.

In 2005 Pointsec found that they were able to read 7 out of 10 hard-drives bought over the Internet at auctions such as eBay, for less than the cost of a McDonald's meal, all of which had "supposedly" been "wiped-clean" or "re-formatted".

This article reviews the various methods available to sanitize hard disks along with the advantages and disadvantages in each case....read the article, ...Intelligent Computer Solutions profile, disk sanitizers
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read article by Plasmon the Impact of Compliance  on Archival Storage Strategies
the Impact of Compliance on Archival Storage Strategies - article by Plasmon

It's difficult enough protecting and archiving your data so that it's available to the right people at the right time (and cost). But now that's only part of the problem. With so many new rules and regulations which prescribe how you should destroy data records at the appropriate time - how do you guarantee that they stay deleted?

Archiving data on the wrong kind of media could mean you run the risk of breaking the law. Advances in the data recovery industry, and the future cohabitation of storage search-engines both mean that Compliance Officers have to pay much more attention to the ways in which data is dispersed and disposed of in different types of media.

This article summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently available market technologies. ... read the article, ...Plasmon profile, Optical Libraries
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Squeak! - the Fastest Growing Storage Companies
read the article - the Fastest Growing storage companies in 2005
This is the 6th annual edition of this popular article, and is compiled from analyzing the reported results from the top 1,000 storage companies.

The top 3 companies had over 300% year on year revenue growth.

If you're looking to team with successful storage companies or want to emulate their success, this article will tell you who they are and the market segments they are in. ...read the article
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