Predictions are perilous: Get it right and you look like a mere trend-watcher; get it wrong and you look like a fool. So I’m doing something different this year: I’m going to make predictions for 2009 now that it’s over, and reflect on just how smart I am (not) to have made them.
Computer History
Considering the history of computing, from the enterprise to the home.
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
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.
The Dumb Disk Fallacy
I am spending a few weeks examining the truths and fictions that bind our industry together. Let’s start with one of my favorite old canards: That enterprise storage must be overpriced because bare disk drives are so cheap. I have seen this straw man argument set up by so many throughout my career that it […]
We Hold These (Storage) Truths…
I usually welcome discussion (and even argument) about the things I know best: There is always more to learn, and the best insights come through engaging those who disagree with us. But some ideas have been argued so well for so long that they deserve enshrinement. For example, although non-scientists like to argue about evolution […]
