Understanding the accumulation of data
The other day, I bought 6 TB of storage for under $300. This statement alone is startling to folks like me who have been following the storage and hard disk drive industry. Searching for a faster alternative led me to crack open the case and experiment with the drive inside.
Both Seagate and Western Digital have much to gain from these transactions. Western Digital becomes a full line giant of the industry, a credible competitor, and a successful supplier to OEMs. Seagate also retains its credibility in the market, but also gains access to Samsung, one of the strongest electronics companies in the world. Time will tell which of these companies got the better deal.
Hard disk drives, like the engines in our cars, have been massively upgraded over the last two decades. Although massive IOPS and horsepower get all the headlines, energy-efficient designs deserve a look as well. Manufacturers have recently introduced some new tricks to coax out a little more performance and capacity from a lot less energy, [...]
Western Digital announced this morning the world’s first “1 TB mobile hard drive!” But although the news is great for storage-hungry folks looking for a portable external drive, it doesn’t quite mark a sea change in the storage industry since this drive cannot be used in (most) laptops.
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 [...]
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 [...]
Western Digital may purchase Fujitsu’s hard disk drive development and manufacturing assets, getting closer to market-leader, Seagate, with greater manufacturing capacity and access to the laptop OEM market
I was thrilled to see the announcement by Blackmagic Design of two Thunderbolt versions of their respected Intensity video input/output box. But which is the better choice, the Intensity Shuttle or Intensity Extreme?
As a parent, especially a techie one, you never know when a teachable moment is going to appear. Last night, I mentioned that I was testing a new Ruckus access point and enthused about how fast it was. My 12-year-old asked, “why is it so fast?” This led to a wonderful discussion about radio waves, congestion and propagation, and spectrum licensing. Yeah, I’m that kind of dad.
Twitter is here to stay, and has become a potent communication tool in many industries. I recently received a request for advice on how better to use Twitter, and thought I would share some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years as an avid IT industry tweeter.
Make no mistake, the Das Keyboard Model S for Mac is a whole class better than the plastic junk most people use, and the snappy Cherry MX blue key switches are more rewarding than any scissor or membrane keyboard out there, but this is no IBM Model M, so buckling spring fans should look elsewhere.
EMC VFCache (née Project Lightning) is a fairly simple offering: A server-based PCIe flash card that acts as a read cache with no integration with storage arrays or hypervisors. But EMC’s entrance into the host-based flash storage market is a powerful demonstration of the wave of disruption caused by flash-based storage and high-performance computing.
The new Nimbus Data E-Class comes just at the right moment, with 500 TB of capacity, a fully redundant “dual active” controller architecture, massive performance (even InfiniBand), and complete feature set (once VAAI is released).
This week, two blog readers let me know what Google Chrome was warning them of malware on my blog. I dived in and discovered that, indeed, a nasty, obfuscated JavaScript attack had made its way into my site. Although I was disappointed by the lack of clarity about how to fix it, I believe I was able to remove it last night.
Although Clear clearly wants buyers to sign up for monthly service, they also have “secret” on-demand 2-hour, daily, and weekly plans. Here’s how to get online cheap!
HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.
For a massive IT company, Dell sure doesn’t get the kind of respect given their competitors. Time and again, I’ll hear the sneers about Dell being little more than a “box shifter” who doesn’t “get” real enterprise IT needs. After a series of acquisitions in storage and networking, Dell is trying to stake a claim as a serious competitor to HP, IBM, Oracle, and the like. But why should anyone take Dell seriously, especially in enterprise storage?