Terabyte home

The race to ship a 500 GB mobile hard disk drive unit was heated last year. Hitachi was first to announce a fat 12.5 mm drive in January, but Samsung and Western Digital fought a pitched battle through the second half of the year to produce serious volume in a the slim 9.5 mm 2-platter form factor. 320 GB and 500 GB became common in the first half of 2009, with vendors adding a baby-step 400 GB size as well.

Until this month, all four major disk vendors have remained silent on the step past the half-terabyte barrier, however. Certainly any could have slapped together a 640 GB, 750 GB, or even 1 TB 4-platter semi-mobile disk drive using existing technology, as Hitachi did last year, but no such announcement came. But the break just came: Seagate has quietly added a 640 GB model to their 2.5 inch FreeAgent Go portable disk drive line. There was no press release, but this is a major step forward. Continue Reading »

Windows 7 RC literally hit home for me today. Seriously! Eight DVD copies of Windows 7 RC (32-bit) arrived in a FedEx from One Microsoft Way!

Microsoft just let loose a Release Candidate for Windows 7, the operating system that will bring peace, love, and joy to PC users everywhere and finally stop folks from switching to Macs instead of using Vista. Maybe.

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Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the iSCSI StorCenter Pro ix4-200r. As of now, EMC’s SOHO storage subsidiary is a serious challenger in the small business and entry-level VMware ESX storage market.

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I’ll be joining I joined John Troyer’s VMware Communities Podcast #44 tomorrow, April 14, and will be leading a segment focused on the changing storage landscape. I’m really looking forward to talking with John and the rest, since this is such a solid, fair, and content-rich podcast series!

The podcast is now available on iTunes!

Although the topic is an open roundtable, I thought I might give my readers a peek into the areas I plan to bring up:

• Why storage is so critical to VMware admins: It’s all about the IOPS!
• EMC’s new Symmetrix V-Max and why it’s important to VMware shops
• The great FCoE/CNA debate and Cisco’s UCS home run
• Super low-end storage for the small business or lab

Of course, what will actually get discussed is anyone’s guess, but it’s good to go in with a list of topics to avoid dead air!

So dial in or listen online, and let the discussion start!

DroboPro is here!

DroboPro is here, and it’s quite a compelling offering. It’s generating buzz (DroboPro was the number one trend on Twitter for a while on Tuesday) but is it deserving? In a word, yes. But I’m still not going to buy one!

The Drobo for Pros

Just as in Apple’s Mac and MacBook lineup, the “Pro” name denotes more of everything for the pro user or small business. The most obvious addition is four more drive slots, bringing maximum capacity up to eight 2 TB drives or a solid 16 TB of raw storage. Mix in data protection with Drobo’s unique BeyondRAID and subtract disk drive “liars inches”, and you’re left with 10.9 or 12.5 TB of usable capacity. Continue Reading »

Can you supercharge a Mac Mini?

Last week I reported my progress upgrading my Mac Mini’s RAM and hard drive to extract much more performance out of Apple’s little desktop. And indeed, adding a 7200 rpm high-performance laptop hard drive did make a noticeable difference in system responsiveness.

But a question came in via email asking, will Western Digital’s killer 10,000 rpm VelociRaptor SATA drive work in the Mac Mini? So inspired, I set out to find out just how far one can push a Mac Mini’s performance! Continue Reading »

The Tortoise and the Hare: Upgrading my new Mac Mini's hard drive and RAM made all the difference!

It may seem odd to buy a computer intending to upgrade it right out of the box, but so it was with me when I snapped up a new 2009 Nvidia-powered Mac Mini. I had been waiting for Apple to update the aged Mini line, saving up my pennies, but the out-of-box specs for RAM and hard drive space were underwhelming.

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Inland 8412 USB to IDE/SATA Adapter

I imagine every home computer hacker one day finds they have one too many hard drives to deal with. Maybe you are migrating to a new system or installing a new OS. Or maybe you’re upgrading the disk in your new Mac Mini. Whatever the reason, a universal way to connect any hard drive to a PC is a very handy thing to have on hand!

Send in the Inland USB to IDE/SATA Adapter. As its workmanlike name implies, it connects just about any IDE or SATA drive to the USB port of any PC or Mac (or just about any other OS, in my experience) with no fuss or hassle. It handles laptop and desktop drives with equal ease, and can provide appropriate power as well. I bought mine at MicroCenter for under $20, but Amazon sells the same Inland brand one I have, as well as a very similar one from Sabrent and others.

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iPhone OS 3.0 is coming, supporting Apple's "second platform" of mobile devices including the iPhone and long-awaited tablet

Apple has a big 2009 planned, focused on mobility:

• Apple will introduce us to the basic features of iPhone OS 3.0 on March 17.
• Apple will release a new iPhone handset in June, powered by OS 3.0.
• Apple will introduce a 10-inch touch-screen netbook/tablet in September, for Fall release.

That’s my take on Apple’s timeline, it makes sense, and here’s why:

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IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world

Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:

• 1982-1992: A computer on every (business) desk
• 1990s: Networking all those computers

He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:

1. Cloud/Outsourced Computing
2. Server Virtualization
3. Flash Memory

Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.

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