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Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Archives for Western Digital

Taming Monster Disk Drives: 3 TB and Beyond!

May 18, 2010 By Stephen 1 Comment

Seagate, Western Digital, and others are introducing massive new 3 TB hard disk drives, but will they work with current computers? In order to take advantage of new hard disk drives over 2 TB, you must have a compatible operating system, BIOS, partition table, and file system.

Lemons Into Lemonade: Seagate Repackages SATA As GoFlex

May 6, 2010 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Lemons Into Lemonade: Seagate Repackages SATA As GoFlex

The external hard disk drive market is incredibly hot right now, but it’s also ultra-competitive. The latest trend is dockable multi-function drives that are friendlier to use and offer advanced features like video playback. Most docks rely on USB 2.0, but Seagate just dropped a bomb on the industry with a simple twist: They moved the intelligence outside the case, repackaging the standard internal SATA connector as GoFlex, an external link to a variety of docks and adapters.

Should Home Users Buy Enterprise Hard Disk Drives?

May 4, 2010 By Stephen 1 Comment

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.

Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!

December 23, 2009 By Stephen 4 Comments

Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!

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

October 19, 2009 By Stephen 5 Comments

Flush Time

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

August 27, 2009 By Stephen 2 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

August 27, 2009 By Stephen 51 Comments

Iomega’s ix4-200d: A Killer Desktop Storage Array

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?

August 25, 2009 By Stephen 3 Comments

What Is The Secret To Efficient Hard Disk Drives?

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 Stephen 3 Comments

WD’s 1 TB Laptop Drive? Not Quite!

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 Stephen 4 Comments

Seagate Surpasses 500 GB In 2.5 Inches

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 […]

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