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© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, November 26, 2010
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

A timely question from a comment on my cheap Momentus XT post and continued in my inbox:

How well does [the Momentus XT] perform in a Mac laptop? What I’ve noticed is substantial slow-down on my older MB Pro when there’s a lot of virtual memory usage (e.g. when running several apps plus Parallels.) For my next MBP (hopefully in the next 2-3 months), I’m considering 2 options:

1. Buy [the 500 GB Momentus XT] hybrid drive now, put it into my 1st gen MB Pro, and then move it to a new MB Pro when the boss lets me buy one.
2. When I get the new MB Pro, replace its hard drive with a 128 GB SSD, and put the rotating drive into an external (FW800) enclosure.  I’ve been tracking my disk utilization, and I figure I can live pretty comfortably within 128gb most of the time, as long as I have storage to move stuff I want to keep around but don’t use every day (e.g. mail archives, my iTunes stuff which I only use on the road, etc)

The interesting thing is these options are just about the same price, not counting the external drive enclosure.

I’ve had the Seagate 500 GB 7200 rpm drive in this (2.33 Core 2 Duo, 2005 vintage) laptop for a couple years now.  The fans kick in whenever anything disk-intensive goes on (e.g. mobile account rsync) and that is much more likely to happen when it uses more than 512 MB swap.

The current laptop is maxed out at 3 GB, the new one WILL have a full 8 GB, which should be a big help in reducing/eliminating swapping.

Weighing The Alternatives

It sounds like you’re looking at things the right way: Focused on lower cost and greater benefit without getting taken in by the coolness of SSDs or hybrid drives. And you’re also bringing up a key usability consideration: That external drive enclosure. So let’s weigh the merits.

How Does The Momentus XT Really Perform?

The Momentus XT is a nice compromise between "spinning disk" capacity and SSD performance with an emphasis on low cost

It’s really hard to benchmark a hybrid drive like the Momentus XT. An integrated hybrid drive, the Seagate includes an on-disk controller that attempts to keep its 4 GB of SLC flash memory full of the data you’re likely to ask for. So it’s always trying actively to predict what you’ll need and move that data between disk and flash. This is very different from an SSD, which always uses flash, or a hard disk drive, which mostly relies on the spinning disk for performance.

Most benchmarks are designed to hammer on the underlying storage media, actively bypassing cache. This really causes issues for the Momentus XT in benchmarks like Iometer. The best test of this drive I’ve seen is over at Storage Review, since it includes underwhelming Iometer tests and more-impressive Storagemark results. If you only looked at synthetic tests like Iometer, you’d think the Momentus XT was worthless. But the “workload trace” tests of Storagemark have it outperforming the 10,000 rpm Western Digital VelociRaptor!

The reality is somewhere in the middle: My friends Robin and Howard have both used a Momentus XT in their MacBook Pro, and were happy with its performance. They tell me the Momentus XT makes their computers feel much faster. But another friend, Greg, reports some serious issues with Windows crashing and an odd noise from the drive. Maybe it’s more stable in a Mac than a PC?

In my opinion, the Momentus XT is a nice compromise between “spinning disk” capacity and SSD performance with an emphasis on low cost. If I was going to upgrade my internal hard disk drive today, I’d buy a Momentus XT in a second. After all, I’m using a Mac and the additional cost is negligible. Plus, I tend to carry lots of data around – mainly video files for Final Cut. This last is the reason I haven’t “gone hybrid” myself: I already installed a 640 GB Toshiba drive!

What Are The “All-SSD” Tradeoffs?

The other option is to go all SSD, and this is what most computer vendors (including Apple) have selected for their high-end machines. Flash SSD technology keeps improving, giving better performance and a more-favorable cost/capacity balance. I don’t think 128 GB SSDs are yet available for the same $120 that gets you a Momentus XT, but that would get you the well-regarded 60 GB OCZ Vertex 2. A 128 GB SSD is likely to cost almost $250, changing the economic argument somewhat.

Capacity, performance, or low cost: Pick two!

Just about any SSD you pick will absolutely destroy the Momentus XT in both benchmark and real-world performance, but you’d never come close to the hybrid drive’s capacity without doubling the cost of the MacBook with a Kingston V+Series 512 GB device.

This is the SSD curse: Make do with less capacity and more performance or spend an arm and a leg.

Is SSD+HDD An Option?

Then there is the alternate path you suggest: Use both a hard disk drive and an SSD. There are two options here:

1. Replace the laptop’s optical drive with a hard disk drive using an adapter like the $99 MCE OptiBay
2. Use an external FireWire or USB drive, or repurpose your drive using a case

That second choice might not be an option for everyone. Do you really want to lug around a portable hard drive and cable? Do you want to connect it if you’re on a plane or in a meeting? Then there’s the fact that Macs don’t yet have native USB 3.0 or eSATA, so you’re looking at a maximum of 70 MB/s from a FireWire 800 port.

Either way, you’re talking about manually deciding which data resides on the SSD and which goes on the hard disk drive. Since Mac OS X is not nearly as friendly as Windows about using multiple drives, you’re certain to waste some of that expensive SSD capacity on rarely-used data. That’s fine, it just drives up the cost of the SSD+HDD combination.

One caution regarding SSDs in Apple machines: Mac OS X does not support TRIM, so ordinary SSDs will run into serious performance issues once they start filling up. You need a very aggressive SSD controller to maintain the awesome speed you start with. Something like the Kingston V+100 which uses the latest Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller with the updated firmware Apple uses in the MacBook Air.

Stephen’s Stance

I would never want to rely on an external hard disk drive solution, I need too much storage, and I’m too cheap to buy an OptiBay, let alone a decent-sized SSD. If I was in your shoes, I’d have just two options:

1. Spend $120 and get the Momentus XT for pretty-good performance and single-disk capacity
2. Spend $130 and get the 60 GB OCZ Vertex 2 for awesome performance and hack together some kind of OptiBay alternative

Although the second choice sounds like fun, it’s not a great idea in a laptop. I’m also not too good at manually managing data and would rather have something do it for me. This is why I’m so keen on the Momentus XT!

Given your circumstances, I suggest getting the Momentus XT now for your current laptop and seeing how you like it. If it doesn’t give you the performance you want, you can always go the SSD route with the new MacBook Pro and cry over the you $20 you wasted buying a hybrid rather than a regular 7200 rpm 500 GB drive. For what it’s worth, Apple currently charges $300 extra for a 128 GB SSD.

One word of caution, though: You mention that one of the main causes of performance issues for you is excessive swapping from virtual machines. This is a real red flag performance-wise. The Momentus XT has only 4 GB of flash, and your swapping VMs are going to eat that up, leaving none to accelerate other functions. You might find that the hybrid is even slower than a regular drive in this use case, since the controller would constantly be juggling gigabytes of data between flash and disk. An SSD will do much better with VM swapping, but if you’re not using TRIM you’re going to hit a wall sooner or later. The only real solution for a Mac user is to max out the RAM rather than trying to monkey with faster storage.

A Reader Talks Back

Here’s the opinion of a reader who upgraded his MacBook Pro to use the Momentus XT:

“To follow up on our previous discussion, I decided to buy the hybrid Momentus XT. It’s been in the laptop about 24 hours, and here are first impressions:

1. Getting into a pre-unibody MacBook Pro is no picnic!  I had to get a Torx #6 screwdriver and used about 6 different little containers to hold all the different kinds/sizes of screw.  And getting the top/keyboard assembly off of its clips was a struggle.
2. Right away I noticed the machine ran substantially cooler as measured by the fan speed.  The previous drive was a Seagate Momentus 500gb/7200 rpm 7200.4, and during disk intensive sessions e.g. TimeMachine backups the fans would crank up to 5000 rpm; they’d be pretty noticeable.  With the hybrid, during the same kind of backup activity, the fans have not run faster than 3200 rpm, which is comfortably below ‘notice’ sound levels.
3. The machine feels a bit faster, but Parallels definitely felt faster.  When I launched Parallels, the machine’s swap usage climbed to 2gb (on top of other stuff I run).  Before that would cause a significant hit, but with the hybrid the overall performance, and the performance inside Parallels, felt faster.

So I think this upgrade is a win if you’re considering replacing an existing drive with a 500gb/7200 rpm drive, just on the basis of reduced heat.  What remains to be seen, of course, is the reliability of this drive (I’ve had bad luck with Seagate 3.5″ drives.)”

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Are Hybrid Hard Drives A Good Alternative To An SSD?
This post was categorized as Apple, Ask a Pack Rat, Everything, 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.

Seagate's hybrid Momentus XT combines capacity and performance

Seagate has definitely gotten the attention of road warriors and storage nerds with their Momentus XT hybrid hard disk drive. Many agree with Brent Ozar, who called for it to be a standard component of every laptop. Even I was impressed! But the Momentus XT hasn’t seen much (any?) uptake by OEMs. Perhaps customers weren’t ready to pay a little extra for a lot more performance?

Regardless, it’s fairly straightforward to upgrade the hard disk drive in just about any laptop to take advantage of the Momentus XT’s excellent performance – even a MacBook Pro! That’s why I’m psyched to see the 500 GB Momentus XT listed on Amazon.com for just $114.99. That’s only a little more than a standard 7200 rpm 500 GB hard disk drive, and the performance is notably better.

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Buy The Speedy Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB Hybrid Drive For Under $120!
This post was categorized as Apple, Deals, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Hybrid Hard Drives: Take Two

Thar she blows! Seagate's hybrid ssd/hard disk drive is real!

The new drive family sports 4 GB of NAND flash and 32 MB of DRAM operating in tandem as a cache. It is a 2.5″ model, and since Seagate doesn’t currently produce a drive fatter than 9.5 mm one can assume it is a two-platter model and will work in most laptops. It sports a 3 Gb/s SATA interface with native command queueing (NCQ), nicely up to date but nothing special.

There are three models in the Momentus XT line, all with the same 4 GB/32 MB cache:

Unlike the previous-generation H-HDD drives, the new Seagates have fully-integrated SSD cache featuring speedy SLC chips. The dependence on the host operating system to make caching decisions was one of the things that sunk H-HDDs in the past, but this looks to be an entirely different solution. Seagate looks to have integrated the flash as an extension of the RAM cache and is using the drive’s own logic to determine what to cache and when. This will not only be more-generally applicable (not requiring a special OS) but will likely work better, since on-drive cache management has improved greatly over the years.

Stephen’s Stance

Assuming I’m right about Seagate’s fully-integrated cache architecture, this drive ought to blow away everything else on the market. The Register includes test results showing SSD-like performance for many workloads, yet this drive is half the cost and twice the capacity. It beats the 10k VelociRaptor drive in every test and will absolutely smoke any “normal” 7200 or 5400 rpm laptop drive. Feel free to exclaim “wow!” at this point.

How excited am I? How about this: Although I upgraded it just last month with a 640 GB Toshiba hard disk drive, I want a Momentus XT in my MacBook Pro. I’d rather have one of these than a straight SSD, considering the mix of performance, capacity, and price. Maybe I can move the Toshiba into an MCE Technologies OptiBay?

I will be watching this release with great interest. Word is that Seagate will officially unveil the drive in a webcast on Wednesday, May 26. I look forward to a flood of performance tests from my favorite consumer sites, and expect it will interest the enterprise guys, too (this means you, Howard!) Could hybrid drives finally be getting real?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Smoking-Fast Laptops: Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD Disk Drive Confirmed!
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Hard disk drive makers are adding flash storage to their conventional spinning-platter drives to improve performance and are targeting the performance PC market. Wait a second, haven’t we seen this before? As Rocky eventually said to Bullwinkle, “but that trick never works!”

Flash as a Cache

Using flash memory as a disk cache is a pretty good idea. Flash has awesome random read performance and fairly good write speed (compared to a hard disk drive, at least). That’s why more and more enterprise storage vendors are adding flash as a disk cache, not just a plain tier of storage.

EMC is the latest to make the move, announcing “FAST Cache” for their midrange Clariion and Celerra enterprise storage systems last week. They join NetApp, Sun, and others already offering similar capability. Fusion-IO has been the champion PCIe flash provider, but STEC is expected to join them soon.

See my post, Is Flash A Disk Or A Cache?

Flash-as-a-cache hasn’t been as easy to roll out as flash-as-a-disk, but it promises to be more effective. An array that completely integrates flash can take advantage of its positives (fast random read, fast-ish write, low power) without stumbling over its shortcomings (big write blocks, shorter lifespan).

Flash in a Disk

Although EMC is doing the right thing by adding FAST Cache, their implementation uses disk drive form factor flash rather than the PCI cards selected by others. It may prove more-difficult to optimize the system for the characteristics of flash when one is writing through a conventional disk drive interface like Fibre Channel or SAS. Would-be flash-and-platter drives face the same issue: How do you use flash effectively when it’s abstracted from the server and presented as a conventional disk?

The hybrid hard disk drive (H-HDD) method, rolled out back in 2007, added ATA commands allowing a compatible operating system to specify whether data sent to a hybrid drive should be written to flash or disk. These products were paired with Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost and SuperFetch to produce performance gains that never materialized in practice. The so-called “ReadyDrive” has become a footnote in history, along with Intel’s “Robeson” effort to add a flash cache to the motherboard.

It is unclear what the new generation of hybrid hard drives allegedly on the drawing boards at Toshiba and Seagate would look like. It is unlikely that they would use the H-HDD interface, but they will likely be aimed at the same performance laptop and desktop market. Servers have continued migrating towards advanced enterprise storage systems that pack their own cache, reducing the impact of bare hybrid drives.

Ingredients for Success

Rather than repeat the mistakes of the past, these companies could integrate real smarts into the disk controller, allowing it to autonomously move data to the flash cache to improve everyday performance without any special operating system support. This “tiered storage in a can” approach might deliver the goods that old-fashioned H-HDDs never could.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Hybrid SSD/Hard Disk Drives: This Time For Sure!
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.

1. Offline Storage becomes extinct for most uses

Mark claims that “he cost/availability of network bandwidth, the cost of the people side of tape storage and handling, disk cost declines, multi-site DR, data de-duplication and many more factors” will kill tape eventually. Let’s take some of these in turn…

Network bandwidth, DR, and related tech

Like Hu Yoshida, who claimed we home users would rely on service providers rather than have a terabyte in our home, Mark assumes plentiful and cheap bandwidth. But this is simply not the case for many organizations – bandwidth is one of the biggest IT costs, especially for small companies, and other issues like latency and availability abound. Even with technical fixes like WAFS compression and acceleration, many organizations will not be able to replicate much of their storage for the time being. Unless there is some new blossoming of bandwidth, I don’t see this changing.

Disk cost declines

Yes, disk costs are going down. But tape costs are, too! Today’s tapes are still 1/3 the cost of the same space on disk and have remained thus for the last decade. Tape drives are still expensive, but considering that most organizations still use a “weekly full” schedule, the cost of media becomes their big concern, and tape has disk beat hands-down. Unless we all give up on daily backups for data recovery and start using snapshots, tape will not die. And, although I fervently believe in the rightness of this snapshot-based strategy, I doubt it’ll happen for some time to come.

People costs

This is always the problem with backup systems. Not so much the cost of people, but the reliability of human tape handling. Pour in enough money to make tape handling reliable and you’re pouring a lot into it indeed! But people costs are notoriously hard for IT to recognize, let alone manage or reduce. I don’t see this killing tape any more than it could kill the multitude of other time sinks in the IT world.

2. Flash becomes a viable Tier 1 storage option

Didn’t I just cover this the other day? Here’s the summary – solid-state disks are still way too expensive and way too short-lived for enterprise use. Put some cache in front of a disk and forget SSD. Note to Mark: This is exactly what EMC did in 1992 when they turned the Orion into the Symmetrix.

As for the OLTP angle – I agree that this one application of storage technology needs high performance. And I agree that NAND flash is cheaper than RAM and other technologies. Maybe use NAND as a cache? Or hybrid drives? But this is only a small component of enterprise data.

3. High Capacity/Low Cost Disk becomes the principle “bulk storage” medium

I can’t argue this one. Big fat slow disks are here in the enterprise space and are here to stay. Auto-magic virtualization tech will put the right data on them, and we’ll all hold hands and sing.

4. FCoE SANs become the FC evolution path for OLTP storage

Let’s see – Mark is predicting that FCoE beats FC and iSCSI in the high-end enterprise market. Well, I suppose you could claim that future versions of FC will run over Ethernet hardware, but FCoE?!? That dog is just now getting out of bed – let’s give it more than 3-5 years to rule the world, ok? Oh, and iSCSI still works great to let’s not count it out!

5. Web Storage Applications move away from SCSI and File System protocols and become connected principally via “Object” protocols (e.g. SOAP, REST)

I really wish this would happen. Mark cites Amazon.com’s S3 and EMC’s Documentum as examples of object stores. I think this prediction is really up in the air. I’m glad he didn’t specify exactly which object storage protocol will win, because I suspect it’ll be something we haven’t heard of yet. But I think he’s right that increasingly modular and relational applications found in this “Web 2.0″ world will definitely prefer object storage instead of plain filesystems. Hopefully, enterprise applications will follow, and we’ll all laugh about the old days when we used to try to manage data with no metadata…

So I guess I don’t agree with Mark on a lot of these predictions. I really like what he has to say, for the most part. But it just doesn’t seem realistic to expect them all to come about in 3 to 5 years.

But hey, as they say, opinions are like belly buttons – everyone has one. Even me! Well, actually, I hear “they” use a different body part in this idiom, but this is a family blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Thoughts on Mark Lewis’ Future Storage
This post was categorized as Enterprise 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.

Now a handful of storage players are talking about SSD’s again, including some respectable names like LSI and Xiotech and some lesser-known outfits like Solid Data Systems and Texas Memory Systems. IDC is predicting mainstream uptake of the technology, too, but note that they’re mostly talking about the PC market, not enterprise storage.

I say that if SSD ever gains footing in the enterprise, it’ll most likely be in a virtualized hybrid system, acting like a mega-cache. Or maybe a non-RAM permacache, if you will! Of course, we’ve seen just how much uptake that feature has had, eh EMC? But hey, it could happen. Even though Apple is soaking up more than a quarter of the world’s NAND flash this year, maybe they’ll force prices down. Or maybe Samsung’s or Hynix’s PRAM will conquer the world!

Let’s get serious, folks. What good is SSD? It improves random access read performance over disk at the expense of longevity, throughput, and, well, expense! ReadyBoost looked like a nice application for flash memory, since the potential content was bounded and could fit on a flash drive, but it seems to have done precisely nothing for performance.

If enterprise applications could benefit from better random access performance, we’d be putting large amounts of memory in front of the disks already. Oh, wait, that’s right, we already do that! Modern enterprise arrays have gobs of cache, more than any SSD, and use it quite effectively. Remember the old RAID-5 penalty?

SSD just serves to remind me of one of those performance-tuning axioms I learned long ago: It’s always better to let an intelligently-designed system manage itself than try to second-guess it. This applies to all areas of system performance tuning, from filesystem and LUN layouts to cache tuning. And this is why permacache and things like it never caught on.

And it’s why SSD will continue to play just a bit part in the enterprise until it’s just as cheap as disk. Like that’ll happen anytime soon.

Edit: Looks like I got the name wrong – the EMC SSD was the Orion.  Introduced in 1989, this evolved into the Symmetrix in 1992.  I used one of these back at Texaco in the 1990′s.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Wherefore Art Thou, Solid State Disks?
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