Are “enterprise” drives worth the extra cost in a RAID enclosure? The reason I ask is I’ve had 2 of 4 Seagate ‘consumer’ (7200.12) drives fail in my (Other World Qx2) enclosure. The two drives that failed were maybe a year old, well short of any ‘MBTF’ expectation. Enterprise drives cost nearly twice that of consumer drives.
Flush Time
October 19, 2009 By 5 Comments
Single-parity RAID is under attack. Caching is the hottest trend in storage. The end of the high-performance disk drive is imminent. What happened? Increasing areal bit density has caused disk capacity to grow much faster than disk performance. A presentation at Storage Networking World by Ronald Bianchini of Avere exposed the mathematics of this phenomenon.
Drobo: First Impressions
September 4, 2009 By 8 Comments
Although the Drobo “storage robot”, essentially a friendly home RAID enclosure, has long impressed me, it never fit my laptop-oriented lifestyle. But my home network has changed with the addition of a 2009 Mac Mini server, so it was time for me to pick up a Drobo of my own!
What Is The Secret To Efficient Hard Disk Drives?
August 25, 2009 By 3 Comments
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, [...]
WD’s 1 TB Laptop Drive? Not Quite!
July 27, 2009 By 3 Comments
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.
Seagate Surpasses 500 GB In 2.5 Inches
June 23, 2009 By 4 Comments
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’ll Have Two Platters of Sheer Storage Madness, Please!
January 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The inexorable march of areal density continues with this week’s release of two breakthrough two-platter hard disk drives: 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 [...]
Is Flash A Disk Or A Cache?
October 22, 2008 By 2 Comments
There is a battle shaping up in the enterprise storage industry. On one side are those who see flash storage as an upgrade for the disk drive, and on the other are those who see it as a cache between the CPU and the drive. It’s a fundamental difference of opinion – flash chips can [...]
Big Little Disks Are On The Way
June 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment
The relentless march of hard drive capacity is about to reach its next cantonment as 500 GB 2.5″ drives begin to arrive this month. These little half-terabyte wonders will continue the downward pressure on price and challenge flash-based drives just as they stake their claim in the main stream of the market.
Specialized Desktop Hard Drives
August 6, 2007 By 2 Comments
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 [...]
