Flush Time
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 19. Oct, 2009 | View 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.
Iomega’s ix4-200d: A Killer Desktop Storage Array
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 27. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
Iomega is well into its second coming as EMC’s entry-level storage division. First, they applied EMC’s compact and full-featured LifeLine home storage software to existing gear, giving birth to the Home Media Network Hard Drive, StorCenter ix2, and StorCenter Pro ix4-100. Then they wooed the small-business community with the rack-mount StorCenter ix4-200r, adding iSCSI target [...]
What Is The Secret To Efficient Hard Disk Drives?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Everything, Terabyte home on 25. Aug, 2009 | View 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!
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home on 27. Jul, 2009 | View 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
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Terabyte home on 23. Jun, 2009 | View 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 [...]
New Mac Mini Is A Diamond In The Rough
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Everything, Terabyte home on 10. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
After a very, very long wait, Apple has finally updated their entry-level “bridge” Mac, the Mac Mini. It’s amazing that, after 19 months without an update, Apple’s new Mini looks exactly the same as the old Mini. But what’s under the hood matters, and Apple delivered a mixed bag there. The new Mini is an excellent home server, which is how mine will be used, but some poor choices limit its abilities out of the box.
Does Hitachi+SimpleTech = EMC+Iomega?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home on 24. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) just bought Fabrik (SimpleTech and G-Technology). So is Hitachi’s combination with SimpleTech a response or challenge to EMC’s acquisition of Iomega? In a word, no.
EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 07. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
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 [...]
I’ll Have Two Platters of Sheer Storage Madness, Please!
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 06. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
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 and [...]
Top Ten Coolest Enterprise Storage Flops
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage on 06. Dec, 2008 | View Comments
This is the second entry in my Top-Ten in Storage series.
Not every innovative product can succeed in the market, and no matter how good some ideas seem, they can fail to make much of an impact. The truth is, people buy solutions, not technologies.
This list includes products so cool, so ahead of their time, that [...]
