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.
performance
Robocopy: Better, Faster, Stronger
Robocopy is the best tool to move data between NTFS filesystems but was never very quick. Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and later versions include a new version of Robocopy with performance tweaks including multi-threading that speed things up dramatically.
How Did Microsoft and Intel Get 1 Million iSCSI IOPS?
Ever since Microsoft and Intel declared that the combination of Windows and Nehalem could deliver over a million iSCSI IOPS, I’ve been curious about just how they did it. What black magic could push that many I/Os over a single Ethernet connection? And what was on the other end? Now Intel has revealed all in a whitepaper, and the results are surprising!
Innocence, Fairness, and Technology Benchmarks
HP recently commissioned Tolly Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolly focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?
Ramdisks: Back From the Brink of Extinction
Using system memory for storage is something of a lost art these days. But many of today’s I/O intensive tasks can still benefit from the untouchable quickness provided by a ramdisk. Happily, most operating systems are still capable of creating and using ramdisks.
