Look beyond spin speed when evaluating SATA drive performance
Here’s a look at the Barracuda ES.2 SATA drive from Australian reviewer PC Authority. Many of today’s capacity intensive server applications require both TBs and IOPs. Depending on the application, both are available in a 7200 rpm SATA drive that can outperform a 10K rpm drive:
Amazingly, it managed to beat Western Digital’s Raptor - the King of Desktop Performance – in every aspect except seek times.
Of course there are serious applications that require more oomph than 7200 rpm SATA can provide. Thinking of performance and capacity in terms of spectrums of requirements rather than black and white needs will result in the most cost-efficient (and profitable) designs.
Slow-motion video shows a laptop disk drive ”bracing” for a fall
What’s the one irreplaceable piece of a notebook computer? Any data that’s not backed up. The latest in laptop data protection is a zero-G sensor that automatically parks a hard drive head whenever a laptop goes into free fall.
This is an extremely slow-motion video of an actual disk drive head being parked as the drive falls. The drive spins at 7200 rpm, which is seen here as very slow rotation. Note the bounce at the bottom!
More facts about the zero-G sensor and the G-Force Protection feature on Seagate’s Momentus 7200 drive:
It is fast enough to protect in drops as little as 7 inches
It senses in 3 axes, allowing it to “feel” head-over-heels tumbles as well as a simple vertical drop
The drive is plug-compatible with standard laptop drives, and requires no configuration to enable the feature
Tony Pearson pointed to a cogent 4-minute video from ZD Net UK on server virtualization with Dan Chu of VMWare. If you’ve wondered what all the fuss is about but were afraid to ask, here’s your chance.
Cor Digital says customers want to keep it all to cover their bases.
Jack Hatfield at Cor Digital Technology, Inc. has a booming email archive business, driven by his customers’ desire to protect themselves from legal risk. Their gut reaction is to save it all - forever, if possible.
The multinationals have moved to 2.5″ server drives. Are you ready?
System builders for the most part have yet to adopt 2.5″ drives in mainstream servers. Yet Seagate sees these drives accounting for 34% of SAS/SCSI/FC units shipped in the 12 months ending in June 2008.
What’s the disconnect?
The multinationals have made the shift to 2.5″ for performance servers. They made the jump because they can provide servers with lower power, smaller footprints, and better reliability by using these drives. Seagate’s Savvio drive is a big part of that transition.
Your customers are seeing these solutions now. What will you say when they ask how your solutions compare?
The time is now to develop your alternative to these now-mainstream solutions from a lot of acyonym-named companies. The good news is that chassis manufacturers are ready now.
The British government lost personal records on every family with a child under 16.
The British government lost data with personal information on every UK family with a child under 16. DrunkenData passed on this story from the BBC.
Every family with a child under 16!
Get used to it folks! Data’s created or used for more and more of…everything, and its value (and sensitivity) is multiplying. It’s as if the money we carry around in our wallets went from $50 to $5,000. The wrong place to keep such valuable stuff, right? Not so different from mailing personal data for every family with a kid through the UK postal system. Lots of room for ”oops”es.
There will be many more of these kinds of mistakes until we collectively figure out what to replace that data wallet with.
Your customers have this problem. How are you solving it for them today?
Businesses are keeping their surveillance data for up to a year
Jack Hatfield filled me in on Cor Digital Technology, Inc.’s surveillance business. They’ve been focused on this market for a while now and are seeing lots of growth. He also talks about his growing mobile surveillance business and what’s driving it.
Gotta love those terabytes!
By the way, Seagate has a three-product solution set for surveillance: SV35 drives for surveillance DVRs, Barracuda ES drives for enterprise surveillance and EE25 for mobile/rugged surveillance.
Consider Barracuda 7200.11 for gaming - performance AND capacity.
I’m proud of our new monster drive! Tom’s hardware rates Barracuda 11 as the fastest 1 TB drive on the market. More interesting to gamer system builders:
“With the exception of access time and I/O benchmarks, it also clearly beats Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM Raptor, and sets the new standard for desktop hard drives.”
Raptor has been the defacto gamer drive for a long time. Consider offering your customers a new twist: performance with capacity for their data-heavy gaming systems.
Here’s a comparison of the new 1 TB drives for the Mac world from Barefeats. Over 100MB/sec for sequential reads and writes! I’m happy to see such strong performance from a Seagate drive. It hasn’t always been our strength.
Take a close look at the Barracuda 11 at any capacity vs. a WD Raptor. The Raptor spins at 10K, but net system performance differences to the newest 7200 rpm drives may be in the noise at a system level, especially given the price difference.
Limited number of drives infected, free virus software available
As you may have heard, some of our Maxtor Personal Storage PS3200 drives were infected with a virus before they shipped. Here are some facts:
A small number drives were infected (I don’t know the number) by a Chinese sub-contractor.
The Taiwan investigative bureau’s claim that the virus sent all user data to Chines authorities was false, and Seagate has asked them to correct that misinformation.
All the drives still in the factory and inventory have been reworked and are free of the virus.
We’re providing a free 60-day version of Kaspersky Lab 7.0 to those who bought a drive that may have been infected.
The virus is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and gaming websites and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other molar viruses and can disable virus detection software.
It affects the following games and gaming sites (all Chinese except World of Warcraft):
WSGame, 91.com, QQ, Woool, rxjh.17game.com, TianLongBaBu, AskTao, Perfect World (Wanmei Shijie), World of Warcraft
The drives were infected accidentally; it was not malicious.
The manufacturing process has been changed so that every drive is scanned for viruses before being shipped.
Maxtor products are manufactured by Seagate, which bought Maxtor about a year and a half ago.
This was an unfortunate, accidental event. I’m relieved at least that it was limited in scope, and that we at Seagate seem to be learning from it.
