That didn’t take long! Less than a month after Hitachi introduced their 2 TB enterprise disk drive, Xyratex has announced that they will offer the drive in their OEM storage systems. The A7K2000 is 7200 rpm 5-platter design with a 3 Mb/s SATA interface: Not exactly high-end, but backed by the reputable folks at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
But the era of the 2 TB enterprise hard disk drive is not quite here yet. It is not clear which Xyratex-made products will support the massive drive since the company is an OEM supplier, but IBM ought to be on the list. Once a vendor announces product, it could take months for these monster arrays to ship.
One issue with these massive drives is RAID protection. These massive drives must be protected with dual-parity RAID-6 or similar. Although drive capacity has been growing, transfer speed has not kept up: A 2 TB drive, running at full speed, would take upwards of 10 hours to rebuild its contents, an unacceptably-long window for a single-parity RAID-5 setup.
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