Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Enterprise storage, Everything, Terabyte home on 23. Dec, 2009 | View Comments
Personal computer hard disk drive access methods have been repeatedly forced to adapt to ever-expanding capacity. But Western Digital is leading the change to larger 4 kilobyte hard disk blocks. Although this new “Advanced Format” includes mechanisms for backwards compatibility, buyers should be wary of these new drives for the time being.
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.
Pillar First To Put Faith In 2 TB Enterprise Drives
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage on 27. Aug, 2009 | View Comments
That didn’t take long! Just two weeks ago, Xyratex announced that they would support Hitachi Global Storage’s 2 TB enterprise hard disk drives. We wondered at the time which OEM would be the first to ship such massive drives, and our question is answered today. Pillar Data announced today that they are now supplying 2 [...]
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 [...]
How Far Can You Push a Mac Mini?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 23. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
Last week I reported my progress upgrading my Mac Mini’s RAM and hard drive to extract much more performance out of Apple’s little desktop. And indeed, adding a 7200 rpm high-performance laptop hard drive did make a noticeable difference in system responsiveness.
But a question came in via email asking, will Western Digital’s killer 10,000 rpm [...]
Upgrades Give New Mac Mini a Whole New Attitude
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 17. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
It may seem odd to buy a computer intending to upgrade it right out of the box, but so it was with me when I snapped up a new 2009 Nvidia-powered Mac Mini. I had been waiting for Apple to update the aged Mini line, saving up my pennies, but the out-of-box specs for RAM and hard drive space were underwhelming.
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.
