It is tempting to think of storage as a game of hard disk drives, and consider only The Rule of Spindles. But RAM cache can compensate for the mechanical limitations of hard disk drives, and Moore’s Law continues to allow for ever-greater RAM-based storage, including cache, DRAM, and flash. But storage does not exist in a vacuum. All that data must go somewhere, and this is the job of the I/O channel.
performance
Review: 1 TB Seagate Expansion Portable USB Drive (ST910004EXA101-RK)
The Tech Field Day events I organize generate a massive amount of HD video content, and moving half a terabyte or more of data is a real issue. We had been using luggable desktop drives from Western Digital and Seagate, but preferred a smaller, lighter, USB bus-powered portable solution. The Seagate Expansion Portable USB drive we bought this week packs an amazing 1 TB of capacity, but our experience with the product was mixed at best.
The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: The Rule of Spindles
Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? Mechanical performance, RAM caching, I/O capacity, and the intelligence of the system all have a part to play. Today we examine the rule of spindles: Adding more disk spindles is generally more effective than using faster spindles.
In Praise of Performance Comparisons
I’ve long been critical of poorly-executed performance comparisons and the “fastest is always best” mentality behind them. But, although it sounds inconsistent, I still love reading the performance “comparos” in Car & Driver, and I am committed to the belief that the enterprise IT world needs lab tests and performance comparisons.
STEC Spills the Beans on ZeusRAM SSD
STEC may not have been quite ready to reveal their next-generation ZeusRAM solid-state disk (SSD), but they are demonstrating it anyway at EMC World in Boston this week. The ZeusRAM is a fundamentally different animal from the existing ZeusIOPS drive in one critical way: Rather than using flash memory for primary data storage, the ZeusRAM uses DRAM. This improves reliability and longevity and ought to raise the bar on performance as well.
