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.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | 2 TB Enterprise Drives Are Here?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

• First up is Seagate, with their next-generation 3.5″ “7200.12″ drive family. Boasting 500 GB per platter, the drives are initially offered in 500 GB, 750 GB, and 1 TB versions, but we expect a 1.5 TB three-platter and perhaps a 2.0 TB 4-platter version to arrive shortly. Seagate claims a new areal density achievement with 329 Gb per square inch. Rumors are that Seagate is winding down development of 3.5″-platter disk drives, however, in favor of the 2.5″ form factor. 
• Western Digital is also shipping a new two-platter 500 GB Scorpio Blue mobile drive in volume. Unlike competing products from Samsung and Hitachi, WD was able to achieve the 500 GB mark in the WD5000BEVT with only two platters, comfortably fitting into the common 9.5 mm laptop drive cavity.

So why is a 2-platter design important? Simply put, fewer platters equals less power and heat, and more density equals more performance. But there’s more to it than power and heat: As Tom’s Hardware points out, greater platter density moves the sweet spot of the market to a new capacity threshold. Since manufacturers prefer to offer inexpensive single-platter drives in their mainstream products, these products point to a new 250 GB and 500 GB standard for inexpensive laptops and desktops, respectively. Further, expect to see 250 GB portable and 500 GB desktop external drives drop to new rock-bottom prices.

All of the major drive manufacturers are moving forward, of course. Hitachi GST has already announced 375 Gb per inch technology, and Western Digital is expected to launch a 2 TB 3.5″ drive unit soon. The 250 GB/500 GB 2.5″/3.5″ per-platter threshold should last through the year in shipping products, but expect announcements of 320 GB/750 GB or higher through 2009.

Maybe I’ll swap out my MacBook Pro’s 320 GB internal drive for a new 500 GB unit once these hit the stores! And today’s imminent announcement of a 1 TB 2-drive Mac Mini suggests that Apple will be offering 500 GB 2.5″ disk drives in their products starting now.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | I’ll Have Two Platters of Sheer Storage Madness, Please!
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Let’s take a look at the two company’s product lines and market positions as we determine the impact of this deal.

Update: Fujitsu is denying the deal, even though the market loves it, but it still makes sense for WDC to pick up either Fujitsu or Hitachi’s disk drive business to better compete with Seagate.

Update 2: Rumors in December are that the deal is back on.

Final (?) Update: The deal is off as of January 2009.

Introducing Fujitsu

Although they’ve never enjoyed the high profile of (post-Maxtor) Seagate,  Western Digital, and (post-IBM) Hitachi, sixth-ranked disk manufacturer, Fujitsu, has enjoyed success in two key OEM markets: Laptops and servers. The company’s disks are found in many portable computers (including my Apple MacBook Pro), sharing this market with number-three maker, Hitachi. Although Fujitsu reportedly does not manufacture their own drive wafers, they apparently handle all other aspects of design, construction, and assembly.

The company offers a variety of portable 2.5″ drives:

• The BH series is a thin 9.5 mm unit in capacities up to 320 GB
• The BJ is a high-performance 7200 rpm, 9.5 mm mechanism for high-end machines
• The new BT is fatter, at 12.5 mm, but reaches 500 GB
• Finally, the CJ is an upgrade to the BJ, with built-in encryption in addition to 7200 rpm and 9.5 mm thinness

In the enterprise space, Fujitsu offers both 2.5″ and 3.5″ models:

• The 3.5″ MBA3 is available in both Fibre Channel and SCSI variants at 10k and 15k rpm speeds and sizes to 300 GB
• The MBB2 is a 2.5″ drive for blade servers, with low power consumption, 10k rpm speed, and a SCSI interface
• The MBC2 bumps the 2.5″ drive up to 15k rpm

The company also offers a variety of 2.5″ drives for embedded use, with enhanced vibration and shock tolerance and 24×7 operation.

So let’s sum it up:  Fujitsu is the number-six maker (in terms of sales), is strong in the OEM laptop and server markets, and has a respectably diverse set of drive offerings, but mostly focuses on 2.5″ mechanisms.

Western Digital

Now let’s turn to the reported buyer, Western Digital (NYSE: WDC). WDC is well known in the hot (and hotly competitive) retail space, selling buckets of external and portable USB hard disk drives to consumers. The company has been a fixture of the PC market for decades, originally as a manufacturer of a variety of components but focusing on hard disk drives in the early 1990s. The company has grown organically, only acquiring IP and R&D through acquisition rather than buying up its competitors like rivals Maxtor and Seagate. Reports say that Western Digital also buys their platters, but handles the rest of the engineering and construction activities in-house.

Western Digital’s Caviar line was the performance toast of the PC community in the 1990s, and they have recently had a resurgence with their Raptor and VelociRaptor drive units. The latter, a 10k rpm 2.5″ mechanism designed for desktops, was especially lauded in the press and blogs. Although their RE2 and RE3 enterprise SATA drive lines sport respectable specifications, Western Digital has never been a common sight in the data center.

On the mobile side, WDC has two lines: The 7200 rpm Scorpio Black and 5400 rpm Scorpio Blue. The latter is especially common wrapped in the company’s well-regarded My Passport portable USB enclosure, and is also used by OEMs like Verbatim. I transplanted one of these 320 GB Scorpio Blue drives into my MacBook Pro, in fact.

WDC’s bread and butter has long been its desktop drives, however. The company currently manufactures three lines of Caviar drives (Black, Blue, and Green) for different market segments, and their My Book external desktop drives are hot sellers in the consumer sector. The company boasts “green” drives with lower power requirements, as well as embedded units for DVRs like TiVo.

A Nice Match

So what would Fujitsu bring to Western Digital? Greater OEM leverage and increased manufacturing capability, chiefly, along with more R&D depth. Both companies have similar manufacturing capabilities, and Fujitsu’s strong OEM laptop and server lines would mesh nicely with WD’s existing desktop and consumer strength. Although the combined company would still trail Seagate in market share (30% vs. 35%), it would be a force to reckon with in the market, and could force further consolidation among the smaller players. Hitachi’s OEM drive manufacturing business would certainly face pressure, and they would have been a nice alternate target for Western Digital. All in all, I give this rumor two thumbs up!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Western Digital + Fujitsu = More Competition for Seagate and Hitachi
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

While swapping out disk drives (first to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook Pro and later to give Time Machine more room), I took some quick performance snapshots with xbench and showed that, depending on I/O type, FireWire can be almost twice as fast as USB, but neither really holds a candle to SATA.

I also took the opportunity to compare the highly-integrated USB 2.0 controller in my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini with the much more complicated FireWire/USB combo found in the Verbatim SmartDisk, as well as the performance of three popular notebook hard disk models.

This post is part of my series focused on PC/Mac Integration.

• Vista, OS X Boot Time Compared
• Quick and Easy Bluetooth Sharing Between PC and Mac
• Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB
• How to Keep an IOGear KVM from Dimming Your Mac's Screen
• Command and Control: The Clash of Keyboards

Test Setup

I’ll be the first to admit that this wasn’t the most scientific test ever.  I just happened to have three hard drives, two external drive chassis, and one notebook computer, and whipped off a quick xbench test with each of the (many) permutations of these I happened upon.

First, the drives:

1. My MacBook Pro (late 2007) came with a 120 GB Fujitsu MH2120BH drive built in.  This MHY2 series drive is from Fujitsu’s previous generation and was their first with perpendicular recording.
2. I replaced this with a 320 GB Western Digital WD3200BEVT drive sourced from a Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire/USB portable enclosure.  This is the latest Scorpio Blue model from Western Digital and incorporates all their bells and whistles, including native command queueing (NCQ), though it’s not the fastest portable disk they make.
3. After running out of space for Time Machine, I swapped the Fujitsu out for a 160 GB Seagate ST9160821AS drive sourced from a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini USB enclosure.  This is also a previous-generation (5400.3) drive and lacks NCQ.

Now, the enclosures:

1. In this corner, we have Verbatim’s SmartDisk portable FireWire/USB enclosure, which originally housed the impressive WD drive.  It’s powered by a mighty collection of electronics, including an Oxford Semiconductor OXUF934SSA controller and some impressive capacitors.
2. In the other corner, we have Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 Mini USB enclosure, which has the most compact integrated interface I’ve ever seen – a single Initio INIC-1605L.

As you can see, the test was seriously flawed.  The drives aren’t comparable, and neither are the controllers. I only ran the test once, I changed the content of the drives between tests, and I didn’t even try every possible combination.  Will this stop me from reporting the results?  No!

USB vs. FireWire

First up, let’s compare the performance of USB 2.0 and FireWire S400.  Rated at 480 megabits per second, USB is supposed to win, but experts agree that it won’t. For example, in Tom’s Hardware tests, every FireWire drive outperforms every USB drive, and that’s a fact.  Despite the limitations of my test, my results bear this out.

Let’s set the stage by comparing the performance of the two interfaces on the Verbatim enclosure to the internal SATA connection in the MacBook Pro.  We’ll use sequential performance numbers only, since random I/O is limited by the seek time of the disk drives.

As we can see, FireWire outperformed USB in every test, and was able to match SATA when it came to sequential reads of 4K.  FireWire S400 was anywhere from 8% to 45% faster than USB 2.0 in my tests, and a difference of this magnitude should be somewhat noticeable to the user.  Note that Apple’s (or Oxford’s) implementation of the USB and FireWire hardware might account for some of this difference.

USB vs. USB

Let’s turn now to a comparison of the USB 2.0 performance of the Verbatim/Oxford enclosure and the Maxtor/Initio alternative. I’ve always suspected that some chipsets were better than others, and I was right! Maxtor is 3% to 8% slower than Verbatim using the same drives.  This should only magnify the differences between FireWire and USB illustrated above!

Drive Against Drive

Finally, let’s see how the disk drives themselves perform.  There are two core considerations: Maximum throughput and seek time.  Larger drives tend to excel at throughput, but seek time (the core component of I/O latency) is more of a black art, with both spindle speed and disk density playing a part.

To compare seek time, we use the random I/O performance of the three drives.  We will normalize against the maximum result in each test to magnify the differences and hide the fact that random 4K I/O is really really slow compared to 256K or sequential access.

We can see here that the drives are fairly well-matched at random reads, meaning that their head movement and tracking performance is about equal, as is their rated spindle speed.  But writes show more pronounced differences, with the Seagate unit quite a bit slower than the others.

One item really stands out:  The WD’s ace performance with tiny random writes.  I’d suggest this is due to the benefits of native command queueing (NCQ), which is present in this drive and not in the others.  It looks like NCQ really does provide noticeable benefits in random I/O!

Finally, let’s think in absolute terms – just how fast are these drives? I only tested the Fujitsu and Western Digital with a SATA connection, but these drives peaked at just under 50 megabytes per second and nearly 57 megabytes per second, respectively.  This performance was maintained on large sequential accesses for both read and write operations.  These are respectable numbers, to say the least:  Half-duplex FireWire S400 should top out at 49 MB/s!  So this chipset and controller must implement the asynchronous streaming feature of 1394a to bump up performance to near-SATA levels.  Awesome!

Although I did not test the Seagate over SATA, all three drives turned in similar large sequential I/O scores on the FireWire interface, which suggests that it would be right up there in streaming performance, at least the equal of the Fujitsu.

In Conclusion

Let me sum up my findings:

• FireWire S400 is faster than USB 2.0 in nearly every respect, and sometimes much faster
• FireWire S400 can even approach SATA when streaming data, but the latter is much faster when it comes to lots of I/O requests
• Different USB controllers can affect all areas of performance
• Native command queueing (NCQ) seems to speed up small random writes by a respectable 2x at least
• Modern-ish notebook drives are wicked fast – every test beats anything I ever saw on my old desktops and laptops

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although Hitachi was first to announce and ship a 2.5″ 500 GB drive, theirs used four platters, pushing thickness to 12.5 mm – too much for most laptops and external enclosures.  So Samsung’s announcement of their 9.5 mm two-platter SpinPoint M6 disk was greeted with enthusiasm, but it has taken months for actual drives to ship.  

All that looks to be changing, however, as at least one vendor is currently offering SpinPoints for sale in the United States, and OEMs are rapidly raising their hands.  Earlier this week it was familiar name Verbatim, who announced a 500 GB addition to their SmartDisk line.  Today it is Mac-friendly LaCie with a dual-drive bus-powered RAID 0 unit delivering a massive terabyte in a palm-sized package.

All this mobile storage goodness will continue pushing cost down and capacity up in the hot mobile market.  Where 120 GB was exciting last year, today we are seeing 200, 250, and even 320 GB drives in affordable notebooks and portable enclosures.  I missed snapping up a 320 GB Verbatim unit last week at Best Buy for just $139, but I expect to see a lot more at this bargain price over the next month or so.  That company claims their 500 GB drive will start under $300, and I expect it will drop 1/3 off that price on sale right off the bat.

Where does this leave supposed bargain NAND flash drives?  They’re not looking as attractive, with even the cheapest consumer units priced over $400 for a usable 60 GB.  Until vendors start hitting massive volumes, NAND will continue to command ten times the price per GB of old fashioned “spinning rust”.  With similar power requirements, expect NAND to remain a niche product for another few years at least.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Big Little Disks Are On The Way
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

If you’re like most people, you have accumulated a large number of removable USB storage devices over the years, from flash-based thumb drives to external hard disks.  I have seven of these things sitting on my desk or in by laptop bag right now!  But Windows XP and Vista uses the same icon for all of them, adding a few seconds of examination every time I try to select one.  Icon confusion can cause problems too, like the time I accidentally saved a presentation to my big desktop backup drive instead of the thumb drive I headed out of the office with!

Before: Everything looks like a generic external book type thing.

But I’ve stumbled on a great method to create easy to locate the right drive using free software and the power of Google.  I create a custom drive icon that looks like the physical drive in Windows, so I can see which is which at a glance.  Here’s how!

After: Aah, now I can see which removable drive is which.  Shame about that iPhone icon, though…

1. Install a copy of Icon Sushi, a small, free icon editing application.
2. Locate a nice image of your drive and save it to your Pictures folder.  I use Google’s image search function and key in the brand name for the drive in question.  I’ve usually been able to locate a good white-background oblique shot in no time – the manufacturer or a reseller like Amazon.com or Buy.com often has just the right picture.
3. Convert the picture to a PNG file using the built-in Microsoft Paint program.  Open it in mspaint and immediately select “File”, “Save As…”, drop down the list and select “PNG (*.png)” as the type, and click “OK”.



4. Fire up Icon Sushi and open your new PNG file.  The menus are kind of confusing, but follow along here and you’ll be fine.



5. Make sure the first line on the left (under “Icon”) is selected.  Under “Edit”, select “Edit transparency mask”.
6. In the “Edit transparency mask” window, select the color dropper (third from left) and click the background of the image. This will select most of the background (as seen below) and might even be enough for your image.



7. If your picture is like my example, there are still lots of off-color areas in the transparency mask.  You can get rid of many of these easily by selecting “Use color picker continuously” and clicking on each area in turn.  Use the crayon (far left icon) to select individual pixels if you need to.
8. Once the background is cleaned up to your satisfaction, click “OK” to return to the main window.



9. Now we will save the icon to the target drive.  Under “File”, select “Save as Single Icon(s)…”  Locate your removable drive (it is connected, right?) under Computer and save the file with a descriptive name.  I like to use the model name, so in my example, I saved it as “H:\Coolmax CD-311.ico”.
10. Now we tell Windows to use this icon for this drive.  Fire up Notepad and enter the following text, substituting your own drive icon name for mine:

[autorun]
icon = .\Coolmax CD-311.ico

11. Save this as “autorun.inf” in the root directory of the removable drive.  In my example, this would be “H:\autorun.inf”.  If there’s already an autorun.inf on the drive, take a look at it and see if you can add the “icon” line to it.
12. Now eject the drive and re-insert it.  You should see your new icon in “My Computer” – much better, don’t you think?

I’ve had great luck using this with thumb drives, memory cards, and removable hard disks.  But it doesn’t work with iPods, digital cameras, and other such things that show up with bogus icons.  I’d love a suggestion if you know how to modify these!

Also, note that the icon goes with the drive.  If you’re a psycho like me that swaps bare disk drives in and out of an enclosure, you might want to use an icon that identifies the drive.  I’ve added a big numeral for the capacity on top of the enclosure image for my bare drives.

Finally, don’t buy that Coolmax CD-311 USB/FireWire/e-SATA enclosure I used in my example.  The FireWire is flaky.  It’s going back to Fry’s!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Custom Icons Keep Removable Drives Straight
This post was categorized as Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This didn’t happen. It was merely a rumor.

The stock market was alive with rumors that Seagate might be bought by an unnamed Chinese company, as reported in the New York Times, among others. This comes after a week of insider whispers about a possible tieup between Seagate and memory-makers, Micron or SanDisk, itself a Seagate spin-off. It seems that the hot disk drive and flash memory markets are shaking as sales heat up and margins thin out. Note that this is far from a done-deal. Rather, Seagate CEO, William Watkins, was merely noting in an interview that there was such an inquiry.

To my eyes, a Seagate buy-out would be little different from the sale of IBM’s disk drive operations to Hitachi back in 2002 or their sale of the PC group to Lenovo two years later. Seagate is a component maker, and although it is a critical piece of the storage industry it is not really a strategic entity. Certainly, the company’s contributions to standards like SATA, SAS, and (yes) hybrid drives are worthwhile, but apart from evault, the company contributes little to the value-added services landscape.

Still, if a buy-out softened scrappy Seagate I would miss the healthy contribution between them, Western Digital, Hitachi, and the other disk vendors. And it would be an end of an era, with Alan Shugart‘s old company going the way of MG Rover and the rest.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Seagate Going to China?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Tom’s Hardware, one of my favorite nests of geeks, tested a pair of these 32 GB SanDisk drives and came out with some interesting findings. Notable among their findings is the fact that the pathetic random write throughput makes SSDs totally unsuitable to server (read enterprise storage) applications. How does 40 I/O operations per second strike you? Yes, that’s 40, and it’s due to the inherent nature of NAND flash memory and its organization in SSDs. RAID helps some and hurts some – it spreads the load, improving performance, but makes sequential writes even less likely.

But these drive mechanisms aren’t meant for this kind of load – they’re meant for laptops and gamer PCs which heavily lean toward random reads, an area in which solid state disks excel. “Boot Windows in half the time!” (unless you’re comparing the SSD to an actual high-performance disk)

There’s also a little issue of reliability. Well, actually, let’s say longevity. You see, a NAND flash cell is still good for only about 10,000 writes before it becomes a lump. This isn’t much of a problem in a thumb drive or iPod since these don’t actually get written to all that much. Plus, all current SSDs include “wear leveling”, a strategy that maximizes write longevity by moving blocks (on write) to less-used flash cells. So a bigger flash device actually lasts much longer than a smaller one under the same I/O profile because all those extra cells can give their little lives to save your data.

This longevity issue isn’t just academic. Ask anyone with an Unslung NSLU2 booting from a flash drive (yeah, including me) and you’ll hear about failed thumb drives after a year or two of use. No big deal when you’re talking about a $15 item, but what about enterprise storage? I guess EMC and IBM wouldn’t mind forcing you to replace your enterprise storage media every year or two, but how will you feel about it? And what if the NAND was soldered to your motherboard when it failed? Makes Apple’s sealed iPod/iPhone batteries seem trivial, doesn’t it?

Then there’s the issue of cost. A 32 GB SATA SSD drive runs $400 retail, which is about how much you’d pay for a 300 GB SATA 2.5″ laptop drive (if you didn’t get a good deal). In other words, it costs about 10 times more than a comparable spinning drive on a per-GB basis. Lots of companies are investing in flash (iPod effect, anyone?) but NAND prices are not promising to overtake disks any time soon. So we’re left with an exceptionally flawed product.

Of course these drives have no cache – it’s irrelevant, say the manufacturers, in a solid-state device. But write cache might actually improve random write performance substantially, especially if it was backed by a super-smart algorithm to maximize sequential I/O in the same way that Network Appliance’s WAFL optimizes RAID-4.

And if this software also included the wear-leveling smarts, things would be even better. Imagine optimizing writes to kill a single NAND module quickly, sparing the rest of the array. Think tiered storage for longevity instead of cost – frequent write I/O operations go to the sacrificial cells and longer-lasting ones are destaged to the “permanent” ones. Makes media replacement much more palatable, doesn’t it? Add in some smarts and a sizable write-back cache to keep the really transient writes off the flash entirely and you might have something there.

As for cost, consider Mark Lewis’ recent posting about OLTP versus “web” data. He’s telegraphing EMC’s playbook for SSD – smart tiered storage that places small amounts of OLTP data on smart NAND and everything else on regular disks. Sounds workable to me!

One more point to make. Rumor has it, disk giant Seagate is thinking of snapping up memory specialist, Micron. If this isn’t a sign that solid state tech is becoming important to the storage component industry, I don’t know what it is!

So I’m still not too positive on SSD technology. It’ll always be more costly, and the current offerings are woefully inadequate. But I can see a way to make it work in enterprise storage, and I see signs that the big companies are trying to do just that. Wake me when the train arrives, ok?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Commercial SSDs Are Here?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Don’t expect to see this tech widely used, though. It’s way too complex for mainstream application.

Once again, in the words of Mystery Science Theater 3000, “Trumpy, you can do stupid things!”

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Water-Cooled Hard Drives
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Lots of innovation is currently on the horizon in the enterprise drive space, notably the application of desktop and mobile technologies to the space. Right now, you can buy a 15,000 RPM 2.5″ dual-SAS enterprise mechanism from two different companies! Or maybe you want a 1 TB bulk drive with SATA? These are a far cry from the bread and butter 10- and 15k 3.5″ SCSI and FC drives we’ve long been accustomed to. Click through for the full story…

Segment Differentiators

The market for enterprise drives is quite different from the desktop world. Buyers are less price- and power-sensitive and much more concerned about raw performance.

Vendor claims of enhanced reliability have been questioned by many, but it cannot be doubted that these drives are often engineered differently. Seagate representatives told me that they focus on stronger casings to reduce flexing under stress of faster rotational speeds and increased heat. They also often use different bearing, airflow, and filter designs. And enterprise drives use lower-capacity platters. But objective studies have not revealed great reliability improvements.

Drive interfaces are quite different than other market segments. Although SATA and Serial -Attached SCSI (SAS) is becoming more common, the bulk of enterprise drive shipments use Ultra SCSI or Fibre Channel. State of the art is 3 Gb dual-SAS and 4 Gb FC, with parallel SCSI and especially 2 Gb FC becoming less common. We will soon begin seeing 6 Gb/s SAS, and multi-channel drives promise to multiply interface performance.

Spindle speed has long been the defining characteristic of enterprise drives. Back when 5400 (and even slower) ATA drives were common in desktops, enterprise arrays relied on 7200 and 10,000 RPM SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. These days, desktops have ratcheted up to 7200, and enterprise units have climbed to 15,000 RPM, with 10,000 RPM becoming the new standard. These speeds (7200, 10k, and 15k) are available across the board on all enterprise drives.

Emerging Trends

Two trends are particularly notable in the enterprise space: “Enterprise” brothers of high-performance desktop SATA drives, and 2.5″ form factor units.

All four current enterprise drive vendors offer high-capacity SATA drives in the enterprise market. Ranging in size to 1 TB, these drives are increasingly being deployed for tiered storage, disk-based backup, archiving, and other less performance-sensitive tasks. Paired with RAID-6, it is likely that the reliability of enterprise storage arrays using SATA drives will be satisfactory. Certainly their massive capacity will bring the per-GB price point down!

SATA in the enterprise has been controversial, but much of this has to do with the meager specifications of the SATA drives examined, rather than any limitation of the protocol itself. It must be pointed out that SATA and SAS share the same physical connectors and interface chips, and the introduction of command queueing (albeit a different implementation) across the board in the latest SATA drives means the interface could be appropriate for just about any use if paired to a fast-enough drive mechanism. I wonder if their opinions would change if they tested Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM Raptor instead of a 7200 RPM Hitachi or Seagate drive.

Undoubtedly, multi-channel and 6 Gb SAS will outperform SATA in the long run. And the implementation of command queueing, drive naming, and bus expansion in SAS remains superior. But SATA is plenty fast for many of today’s needs, especially when tiered storage is considered.

The other big trend is the introduction of 2.5″ enterprise drives. With ultra-fast 15,000 RPM 2.5″ enterprise drives now available from multiple vendors, this segment simply cannot be ignored. In fact, the fastest enterprise drive available today (by a slight margin) is a 2.5″ Seagate Savvio! Combine these amazing performance claims with the fact that more physical spindles can be packed into the same space and we have a winning combination for enterprise arrays! However, these ultra-dense 2.5″ arrays will also be ultra heavy, and paradoxically ultra hungry for power and cooling, since many more drives will be used, even though each drive is more efficient. This will lead to the same weird situation we now see with blade servers – where so much density is achieved that empty rack space must be preserved to keep weight, power, and cooling demands in check!

Specific Drive Offerings

There are a multitude of enterprise drives on the market, but many users have little say in what they get. Each vendor selects their own drives when it comes to enterprise storage arrays! But by examining the array of offerings, we can learn something about the market. More information is available in this Tom’s Hardware comparison table, which is updated regularly, as well as this Tom’s Hardware article.

Fujitsu

Fujitsu’s drive names can be perplexing, with dozens of different drives currently offered. Generally, though, you can figure them out with a bit of detective work. They use the second two letters in their naming scheme for drive families or generations – MAW is older than MAX, then comes MAY, MBA, and MBC. The number is the drive’s size – 3 for 3.5″ and 2 for 2.5″. The final two letters is the drive’s interface – NC or NP for parallel SCSI, RC for SAS, and FD for Fibre Channel.

Fujitsu focuses solely on the mobile and enterprise markets, and is joining most other vendors in the 2.5″ enterprise race. Let’s start with their 3.5″ units, though. Replacing the old 10,000 RPM MAW line is the MAX3, available in SCSI (NC/NP) or dual SAS (RC) and offering 36, 73, or 147 GB of capacity and 15,000 RPM. The MBA3 line is offered in 2 or 4 Gb FC (FD), SCSI (NC/NP), or dial SAS (RC) and boasts 73, 147, or 300 GB and 15,000 RPM.

The company has jumped into the 2.5″ form factor as well, which is no surprise given its line of mobile drives. The MAY2 RC was first, with dual SAS interfaces, 10,000 RPM speed, and 36 or 73 GB of capacity. This was upgraded to 73 or 147 GB with the similar MBB2 RC. Both boast 16 MB of cache. The new MBC2 RC, announced in May and available in 36 or 73 GB, is the stunner, though, with 15,000 RPM.

Hitachi

Hitachi’s naming focuses on drive speed – the 7K, 10K, and 15K names are easy enough to decode. Next is an indication of platter size and generation, which is much less specific. Larger numbers are generally newer and seem to refer to the flagship of that line. So the “300″ line tops out at 300 GB, the “147″ is older and smaller, and the “1000″ is the big up-to-1 TB SATA unit.

Hitachi’s enterprise credentials rest on traditional 3.5″ drives with Ultra SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces. The 10K300 is the company’s entry level, with 10,000 RPM and capacities of 73, 147, and 300 GB. Although that drive boasts only SCSI and 2 Gb FC, the faster 15K147 adds 3 Gb SAS and 4 Gb FC, along with 15,000 RPM speeds.

Just introduced is Hitachi’s top-dog drive, the 15K300. Combining 15,000 RPM speed and 300 GB capacity in a 3.5″ enterprise drive is impressive, and 2 Gb FC is no longer offered.

Hitachi’s new entry-level enterprise model is the A7K1000. Based on the 7K1000 desktop SATA drives, this unit has 3 to 5 platters for 500 GB, 750 GB, or 1 TB capacity. The similarities might lead some to question this 7200 RPM SATA drive’s enterprise credentials, however.

Hitachi also just introduced a 2.5″ enterprise drive, the C10K147. With sizes of 73 and 147 GB, speeds of 10k RPM, and a SAS interface, there is little to differentiate this drive apart from its small size.

Seagate

Seagate’s entry-level line is the Barracuda ES. Now in its second generation (the ES.2), this line is an uprated Barracuda SATA drive with optional dual-port SAS for enterprise applications. Running at 7200 RPM like its desktop brother, the ES line reaches 1 TB.

Seagate’s mainstream enterprise offering is the Cheetah line. The seventh-generation 10K.7 is the 10,000 RPM traditionalist, in 73, 146, and 300 GB capacities and Ultra SCSI and 2 Gb FC interfaces. The 15K.4 offers 36, 73, and 146 GB capacities, 15,000 RPM performance, and adds 3 Gb SAS as an option.

Seagate’s performance leader is the perpendicular-recording 15K.5. The company boasts 100 MB/s sustained throughput from this modern 73, 146, or 300 GB 15,000 RPM drive. 4 Gb FC, 3 Gb SAS, and Ultra SCSI are all offered. A variant of the 15K.5 is the Cheetah NS. Available in 300 GB and 400 GB sizes and 4 Gb FC or 3 Gb SAS, Seagate claims power optimization benefits in addition to best-in-class capacity.

Seagate entered the 2.5″ enterprise drive market back in 2004 with the Savvio line. The 36 or 73 GB 10K.1 was upgraded in 2006 to 73 or 146 GB in the 10K.1 line. But the real winner is the 15,000 RPM Savvio 15K announced in January. This 36 or 73 GB drive is easily the highest-performance 2.5″ on the market, boasting impressive 104 MB/s throughput numbers.

Western Digital

Western Digital trails the pack, offering no 15,000 RPM, FC, or SCSI drives at all. They do boast the world’s only 10,000 RPM SATA drive, the Raptor, as well as a decent-sized 750 GB SATA unit in their RE2 line. I’m looking forward to their future offerings, especially if Green Power is included (as expected).

Conclusion

The arena of enterprise hard drives is perhaps the most interesting in the entire market. Combine the twin impacts of large, slow 3.5″ drives and tiny, fast 2.5″ drives and we will soon see the market split along tiered storage lines. Although simply re-driving a storage array might not make it greener, tiered storage will reduce the average cost and increase the specific performance of enterprise arrays.

Some specific things that excite me in this space:

• The amazing 15k RPM 2.5″ drives from Seagate and Fujitsu give just the right amount of capacity and performance in a tiny form factor. These are perfect for servers and storage arrays alike. I expect Hitachi to come along with a similar drive soon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if laptop-king Toshiba joins in, too.
• Western Digital’s entry into the enterprise space won’t work without OEM wins, but their 10k RPM Raptor drives should prove enticing. I’d expect to start seeing these in tier-2 servers soon, but don’t look for them in enterprise storage arrays, at least not in this generation of hardware.
• The exit of Ultra SCSI is all but assured. Farewell, 68-pin connectors!
• SAS promises to finally offer the front-end connectivity demanded by today’s large, fast drives.

Tomorrow we’ll be looking at laptop and mobile drives. See you then!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Specialized Server/Enterprise Hard Drives
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