Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

This should not come as a shock to anyone, as it has been proven before, but let me take this moment to say that, yes, despite their rated speeds, 400-megabit FireWire S400 (aka IEEE 1394) is faster than 480-megabit USB 2.0.

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.

Continue Reading »

Uh oh, after this backup I'll only have a few GB left on my Time Machine backup drive!

Well, that happened pretty quickly!  After upgrading the internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro to 320 GB, I moved the 120 GB disk Apple shipped with the machine to my Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire+USB enclosure to use as a Time Machine backup target.  Despite applying some tricks to reduce the amount of data backed up by Time Machine, I filled up the 120 GB drive pretty quickly indeed!  So I decided to swap the 160 GB drive from my Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini USB drive into the (faster) Verbatim FireWire enclosure to give Time Machine some (temporary) breathing room.

It turns out that you can move Time Machine backups easily, with included OS X tools, and without breaking anything.  My old backups are still visible, and I have another 40 GB to work with.  Read on for the details!

Continue Reading »

I know I’m not the first to do this, but it does make me chuckle to have upgraded a brand new machine less than a week after buying it.  That’s right, my brand new MacBook Pro now has 4 GB of RAM and a massive 320 GB of disk space.  If you’re thinking of upgrading your disk, whether you have a Mac or PC, now might be a good time, as prices have recently hit a new low point.

Read on for details on swapping a disk in a MacBook Pro, finding a great deal on the drive, and how to get Boot Camp and VMware Fusion to work again after you do it!  Surprisingly, this was the hardest part… Continue Reading »

Meet the Maxtor Personal Storage 3200. It’s a cheap, quick, and dirty way to add storage to your PC, and it’s ilk is becoming the surprise hit of the holiday season, lifting the stock of Seagate and Western Digital, and making Hitachi, LaCie and others fight for a piece of the market.

I’ve bought two 3200’s and a Western Digital MyBook (500 GB each) over the last 9 months, adding 1.5 TB to my home environment without opening a computer case or spending a fortune. The MyBook (which has eSATA) is connected to the Series 3 TiVo, one of the 3200’s is connected to my NSLU2 for home server duty, and the other is doing backup duty.

And, yeah, the most recent 3200 had that Chinese virus problem, but Avira’s AntiVir blocked it and a quick reformat wiped it clean… It’s kind of amusing to be personally affected by a tech meme, isn’t it?

With the advent of “quick enough” USB 2.0 and blazing fast eSATA, I wouldn’t be surprised if these external drives change the face of the PC. I already know of a few folks who have switched to the Mac Mini and are hanging these drives outside instead of buying a big empty case to house internal storage. And the laptop market is booming, threatening to replace the traditional desktop PC. Perhaps the idea of a Lego brick PC wasn’t a bad one after all - it was just waiting for USB to ramp up the speed…

Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial SCSI, Fibre Channel, and even SATA.

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… Continue Reading »

I will begin my overview of the specialized hard drive market with the ubiquitous desktop disk drive. While just about any drive could be used in a desktop computer, the class is generally defined by what it lacks - compact size, power efficiency, exotic interfaces, special drive features, and high performance are all generally not required.

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!

Continue Reading »

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz in the enterprise storage arena about whether so-called “enterprise drives” are really any better than plain-Jane hard drives in Enterprise applications. This came to a head with the controversial findings of Google and CMU, but it’s been simmering under the covers everywhere from TiVo communities to gamers. I’ve normally been loathe to focus on a product so mundane as a hard disk unit in this blog, but I find that their functionality ripples up to the highest levels of strategic buying.

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!