Zip drives like this 1996 parallel-port example made Iomega famous, but EMC is giving the company a second act

Pity poor old Iomega. The company responsible for hot products like the Zip drive and coulda-beens like the Clik drive was stumbling in the early part of this decade, unable to distinguish itself from all of the other providers of commodity external storage devices for consumers. Although the company had built the Zip into a viable floppy drive successor, USB “thumb drives” took that market by storm, replacing removable disks with flash memory.

The company was working to break into the small business market in the middle of this decade, offering Rev disk-based backup, small desktop and rack-mount NAS servers, and internet storage in addition to well-regarded software add-ins. But by that time, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital had come to dominate the external USB drive market, and Lexar, PNY, and the like had taken over the removable world.

Then EMC stepped in with their March, 2008, $178 million buyout offer. Iomega rebuffed the offer at first, since it was in the process of being merged with China’s Excelstor. But after some apparently tough back and forth between the companies, Iomega finally accepted a $213 million offer in early April, completing the acquisition in June. Although it made sense for EMC to move down-market, as Cisco did with their similar Linksys acquisition, many wondered how this would work out, especially when one considers the contentious buyout process.

We needn’t have worried – ever since the EMC buyout, Iomega has rocketed forward, introducing intriguing new products, finding synergies within EMC, and gaining mindshare. Although they still peddle commodity storage, Iomega’s new line of EMC-powered NAS systems is getting the real attention (VMware geeks especially should take a hard look at the StorCenter ix2!) But the company ought to make a few marketing changes if it is to really succeed.

EMC Throws a Lifeline

Without a doubt, it was EMC’s LifeLine software that injected the most adrenalin into Iomega. Although it predated the acquisition, LifeLine is a perfect fit for Iomega: It’s a Linux-based NAS operating system with RAID, Retrospect backup, integrated media services (compatible with iTunes, Xbox, Wii, and UPnP), print services, and unusual features like Picture Transfer Protocol, Bluetooth, and Axis surveillance storage.

It’s a great combination of home features, and Iomega quickly launched a product including this software: the StorCenter ix2. Although Iomega had used the StorCenter brand name for years on a variety of NAS devices, the ix2 was the first to use EMC’s LifeLine software. The combination of Iomega, LifeLine, and Retrospect makes for a compelling home product, and many a “terabyte home” is switching to the platform. But the product’s inherited industrial design is plain (one blogger suggested it had a Wife Acceptance Factor issue), and the naming is confusing. A casual shopper would have no way of differentiating the various StorCenter products – indeed, it is difficult for me to figure out the various product lines from Iomega’s sales-oriented web site!

Predictably, Iomega is expanding their LifeLine-powered lineup both down- and up-market. The company recently introduced a smaller single-drive LifeLine-powered home NAS device, and we are hearing rumors of larger office-oriented versions. But the little guy also uses hand-me-down clothes, and is tagged with a mouthful of a name that is at once inconsistent and forgettable: Home Media Network Hard Drive. The average consumer would have no way of knowing what lurks under the skin of this home NAS, since it looks exactly like the basic USB-connected Prestige line! Why can’t the company that gave us the pretty eGo drive design something a little more attractive – check out what the competition is offering!

Moving On Up

Although their home-oriented offerings are compelling, VMware geeks should keep their eye on the upscale uses of the LifeLine platform! It hasn’t been officially announced, but EMC folks are saying that iSCSI will be added to LifeLine in short order. And the platform is already VMware certified!

Interested in building your own VMware lab? Pick up an ix2 and use NFS until the iSCSI software is added. It’s on the HCL, and makes an excellent platform for playing around with ESX! Plus, you can stream iTunes and store webcam video of your door at the same time!

Although the rest of the StorCenter line isn’t currently LifeLine powered, I’m sure it’ll be upgraded in short order. It might not be powerful enough for real enterprise computing, but a small office or lab would be well served by EMC’s kid-brother systems.

Although Iomega’s latest offerings are compelling, the company really needs to do something about its marketing. Ditch the bland and confusing names and cases and come up with something really compelling. Let buyers know which systems are LifeLine-powered and transform the web site from an online store into a site that draws attention to the unique features of these systems. Although EMC’s products might sell themselves, the consumer / prosumer / small business market is a tough one, as Iomega must already know.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

My survey did reveal a surprising range of devices, even given these limited requirements. Although no 5400 RPM drives are currently being sold for desktop use, there is (one) 10,000 RPM desktop drive! And a few of the larger drives are showing up with mondo caches – up to e32 MB! I bet these cache sizes will put the squeeze on hybrid drives…

Really, desktop drives are mostly notable for what they are doing to the enterprise market, which I’ll cover tomorrow. But for now, click through for the full story on the desktop drive market!

Segment Differentiators

Unlike other drive types, desktop drives are mostly defined by what features they lack rather than what they offer. Although just about any drive can be used in any system, price-conscious desktop users typically find a large 3.5″ 7200 RPM drive under the hood. Mainstream systems use drives with 8 MB cache, but 2 MB, 16 MB, and even 32 MB alternatives are sometimes found as well.

Parallel ATA is still the dominant interface, but this is rapidly losing ground to SATA. In fact, most drive manufacturers have, publicly or privately, decided to stop producing PATA drives in the coming year. Surprisingly, nearly all SATA drives even in the desktop market now boast a form of command queueing! This was one of the features that was supposed to differentiate SATA and SAS, but it seems to have become a non-issue.  Note that the implementations are different, however, and the tests have not been overwhelmingly positive.

With nearly all desktop drives spinning at the same 7200 RPM speed, two differentiators have emerged: cache size and platter count.

Cache sizes range from the puny (2 MB) to the immense (32 MB). This can have a real impact on performance, as a large cache and the native command queueing feature common on SATA drives combine to allow the drive to continue servicing I/O requests while the drive is seeking. Most tests show that larger drive caches in general make a noticable impact on overall system performance.

Disk drives store information on spinning magnetic “platters”. These are read by heads, and can have data written on one or both sides. Although adding platters gives more capacity, it also adds weight, height, and especially heat output. The first manufacturer to reach a new capacity limit (250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB) often does so by squeezing five platters into a single drive unit, but later offerings with fewer platters ought to be more reliable. Single-platter drives are much sought-after for their low temperature of operation, lower noise, and greater perceived reliability.

Specific Drive Offerings

There are lots of choices in the desktop field. As noted, just about any hard drive could be found in a desktop computer, but the following are specifically targetted to this market. Check out the Tom’s Hardware 3.5″ drive comparison table for lots of test information!

Note that only Hitachi and Seagate manufacture all parts of a hard drive these days. Fujitsu outsources wafer manufacturing and Western Digital buys the physical disk platters, but are otherwise quite integrated. However, Samsung, Toshiba, and Excelstor are little more than assemblers. This does not necessarily dictate which companies can be innovative, though. Samsung has surprised many in the market with their high-capacity SpinPoint drives, and Fujitsu has generally lagged the rest of the market. Note that Fujitsu and Toshiba are absent from the desktop market currently but are major forces in other market segments.

Excelstor

The Chinese manufacturer, Excelstor, is an also-ran in the disk drive race, with two lines of desktop drives (reportedly based on Hitachi technology) and one mobile offering. Their Jupiter Callisto is a small-capacity (40/60/80) 7200 RPM desktop drive. The non-Callisto Jupiter series is available in 80, 120, and 160 GB capacities on a single platter. Both offer PATA or SATA interfaces and high-tech features like fluid dynamic bearings and native command queueing, but with a 1-year warranty I wonder who is buying them. These are probably limited to the white-box integrator market with their low prices.

Hitachi

Hitachi Global Storage Technology’s Deskstar line comes in quite a few variants. Generally speaking, Hitachi’s older Deskstar line tells you the size of their platters with the model number. The 7K80 uses an 80GB platter, the 7K160 has a 160 GB, and so on.

This does not hold for the newer drives, however: The 7K250 line uses a 125 GB platter, and the 7K500 is available with 100 GB, 133 GB or 166 GB per platter. Hitachi was first to market with a half-terabyte drive (back in July of 2005) by spinning up five 100 GB platters in the 7K500 line. This was also the first desktop drive with 16 MB of cache as an option.

The jumbo 7K1000 series uses 4 or 5 187 GB or 200 GB platters for sizes of 750 GB and 1 TB. Note that Hitachi was first to reach this magic number back in April, but their 5-platter disk isn’t (well, actually, is) looking too hot compared to Seagate’s pair of 4-platter units and Samsung’s amazing 3-platter SpinPoint F1 drive.

Samsung

Samsung doesn’t explicitly assign their SpinPoint drives to market segments, but a look at their product lineup shows that the SpinPoint P (mainstream) and SpinPoint T (three-platter) drives are appropriate for the desktop. Of course, their hybrid drive line is ultra-specific to Windows Vista, since that’s the only operating system that currently supports hybrid technology! SpinPoint V (AV-optimized) SpinPoint S (silent)

Seagate

Seagate’s desktop line continues the long-standing Barracuda name. The company currently offers three series of drives, numbered 7200.9, 7200.10, and 7200.11, all with 7200 RPM spindle speeds. The single-platter 7200.9 models are targetted at OEMs and system builders, coming with 2 or 8 MB of cache in 40, 80, 120, and 160 GB sizes.

The 7200.10 was the first 3.5″ drive to use perpendicular recording to pack up to 250 GB onto each platter, a point they hammered home back in June. The 7200.10 was the first 750 GB drive on the market by a long shot, owning the greater-than-500 GB market from July 2006 through the beginning of 2007.

has been superceded by the new 7200.11 line in the high-capacity space. This new line offers up to 32 GB of cache and 1 TB of capacity (not yet released), though Hitachi beat Seagate and the rest to the punch at this magic number. Note that Seagate currently offers a 1 TB 7200.10 which uses four of the older-tech platters.

Seagate also sells a line of drives called just “Internal 3.5 Inch“, but these appear to be simply re-packaged Barracudas in retail-kit packaging.

Seagate bought Maxtor last year, but still offers the old Maxtor DiamondMax line, for the time being. Both the 20 and 21 series DiamondMax drives are sold in capacities from 40 to 320 GB. All run at 7200 RPM and the SATA versions offer native command queueing. The 20 series offers just 2 MB of cache in sizes of 40, 80, and 160 GB, while the 21 series features the more typical 8 MB cache and 160 GB platters for 250 and 320 GB capacities.

Western Digital

Western Digital’s Caviar line comes in four flavors for the desktop. The entry-level Caviar features just 2 MB of cache and tops out at 250 GB. Next up is the Caviar SE with its mainstream 8 MB cache and 320 GB maximum capacity. Top of the Caviar range is the Caviar SE16, which has 16 MB of cache and ranges to 750 GB (as of July). New to the line is the Caviar GP, Western Digital’s new “Green Power” high-efficiency drive, which ranges up to 1 TB and is only found in their MyBook external drive line (so far).

Western Digital also caters to the performance desktop market with the Raptor X. This speedy 10,000 RPM SATA drive is only available at 150 GB currently, but features a clear cover for all those clear PC nuts out there.

Conclusion

There is fierce competition in the desktop disk drive space, which opens the market to great opportunity. 500 GB drives can be had from a number of manufacturers for less than $150, and competition is heating up at larger sizes as well. Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung are all rushing to one-up each other, so I expect to see a 1.3 or 1.5 TB drive on the market by the new year.

I found a few items of specific interest during my research:

• Western Digital’s Green Power concept is likely to be copied by others, especially Samsung with their high-capacity platters. Although hard disk drives currently consume far less power than CPUs or graphics boards, a little extra power conservation never hurt. Plus, the external USB drive market is red hot and bus-powered 3.5″ drives are likely to appear soon.
• Drive capacity expansion continues to outpace interface speed, but the switch to high-speed SATA is a welcome change.
• Larger on-drive caches will likely make a heck of a lot more difference to system performance than hybrid drives.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my review of enterprise disk drive offerings!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Specialized Desktop 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.

So what makes a great hard disk drive? It turns out that the major manufacturers have a lot of ideas, segmenting and specializing their product lines faster than anyone can keep up with it. I realized that I really knew very little about these important components and set out to learn more.

So all next week, I’m going to highlight each segment of the hard disk industry, discussing the various models of drives offered and the reality of their specialization.

I’ll be looking at drives from the following manufacturers:

• Excelstor – An assembler from China
• Fujitsu – A major player in the laptop/mobile and enterprise drive market
• Hitachi – Purchased IBM’s disk drive operations and a major enterprise maker with products in nearly every market niche
• Samsung – Quietly gaining ground in the desktop and laptop/mobile space
• Seagate – The other full-line player in the market, especially after the purchase of Maxtor
• Toshiba – The big dog in laptop and ultraportable drives
• Western Digital – The consumer disk titan is starting to move into the server/enterprise territory

And I’ll be covering the following market segments:

• Desktop
• Server/Enterprise
• Laptop/Mobile
• DVR/Surveillance
• Ultraportable
• Automotive/Industrial

At the end, I’ll sum up my findings and opinions on this amazingly diverse market. Note that, while I focus on enterprise data storage as a professional consultant, I’m no disk drive market insider. I’m researching and learning, and I value input from others, especially on this topic!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Specialized Hard Drives: Worth the Effort?
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.