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 TB enterprise disk drives. But Pillar is going with Western Digital’s impressive RE4-GP rather than the 5-platter Hitachis.
It would have made more sense if a vendor of fully-automated integrated tiered storage arrays was the first: Although Western Digital impressed me and others with these big drives, they aren’t going to be speed demons. Pillar suggests that they can make effective use of this capacity without killing overall performance thanks to their QoS technology and the ability to mix drive types in the same frame, but this isn’t the same as the granular, dynamic tiering some vendors offer.
Who will be next? And when will it be Hitachi GST’s turn in the sun?