Entries tagged as ‘1 TB’
SAS drives are thriving outside the data center, despite SATA’s cost advantage
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was created to replace SCSI, the long-standing enterprise hard drive interface. It has done that, but there have been sightings far from the datacenter. Places like Ravelry, a seemingly home-hosted knitting website:
Rather than shrink in the face of lower priced SATA drives, SAS drives are expanding into SATA’s domain. What’s going on here?
- SATA compatibility. SATA drives interoperate with SAS, so many entry server backplanes and PC motherboards are switching to SAS to cover both interfaces. This has created a virtual “Storage Foreign Exchange Program” as SATA drives are adopted in the enterprise, and SAS drives are tried in homes and small businesses.
- Cost. New 1 TB 7200 RPM SAS drives like the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 cost about $50 more than their SATA equivalents.
- Capacity. The newest SAS enterprise-class drives like Seagate’s 450GB Cheetah 15K.6 offer more capacity than past enterprise drives. This makes them more affordable on a cost-per-GB basis.
- Physical size. The server market has adopted 2.5″ SAS drives en masse, and the storage system market will follow. These drives use a lot less power and space than conventional enterprise drives without sacrificing performance. There are no reasonable SATA 2.5″ alternatives today.
If you’re still stuck in a SCSI/SATA mindset, consider a crash course on SAS.
Who’s replaced SATA or IDE with SAS recently?
Categories: Business Solutions · Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: 1 TB, SAS, Barracuda ES, SATA, 2.5", Cheetah 15K, 450 GB, Ravelry
SAS drives get bigger and smaller to take share from SATA for business applications
IDC data from InfoStor shows this year and next are the golden age of SATA drives in the enterprise.
It’s not that the trend for high capacity storage abates in the future; it’s that SAS drives are expanding their capabilities to replace SATA in many applications.
Why settle for an interface originally designed for PCs if you can get the same thing in SAS for a little bit more?
SATA drives won’t go away of course - they still provide the most capacity for the dollar. If it’s good enough for an application, people will continue to use it.
Have you made the jump to SAS? Why or why not?
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Random · Servers · Storage Systems
Tagged: 1 TB, Savvio, SAS, Barracuda ES, SATA, InfoStor, IDC, 2.5"
More room to save all those movies - and your cable company is happy too
Seagate just announced Showcase, add-on storage for DVRs. This is great news for movie hoarders like you and me, but also a big plus for the service providers.
Think about it: your cable company gives you a set-top DVR free or at a discount with their service. They’re not motivated to fill it up with lots of capacity that adds cost for them. Yet HD movies take a lot of room, and more and more consumers want to keep it all.
Showcase will let service providers give their packrat customers what they want - a way to add space to save all those HD TV shows and movies - without adding terabytes of storage as a fixed cost for every customer.
Categories: Digital Home · Products
Tagged: Seagate, 1 TB, DVR, Showcase
Higher performance and redundancy for high-capacity SAS architectures
Web 2.0 storage applications have been a boon to high capacity server-class SATA drives like Seagate’s Barracuda ES. But 7200 rpm SATA will only take you so far. Enterprise-class 15K rpm SAS drives are incredibly robust and full-featured, and priced like it. Shouldn’t there be something in between?
Now there is. Seagate has added a SAS drive to the Barracuda ES family. It costs a little more than the SATA version, but gives back dual ports and more than twice the performance in some applications, along with the 1 TB capacity.
Conventional wisdom is that performance is determined by spin speed. Don’t overlook the power of SAS to jack up the speed of your high-capacity applications.
Categories: Products · Random · Storage Systems
Tagged: 1 TB, Barracuda ES, SAS, SATA, Seagate
Performance delta between vendors highlights different designs
Richard Poelling at The Tech Lounge recently reviewed three 1 terabyte SATA drives. Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 drives came out on top compared to Hitachi’s DeskStar 7K1000 drive.
Additional takeaways:
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The Seagate drives were superior by a significant margin in most of the performance tests, including average Read/Write speed, DiskBench and IOmeter.
- The Hitachi drive is 5 platters (200GB/platter); the Seagate drives are 4 platters (250 GB/platter).
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The reviewer pointed out that reliability is hard to measure, and gave the nod to Seagate based on its 5-year warranty vs. Hitachi’s 3-year warranty.
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Richard recommends the server-class Barracuda ES.2 if the additional price (~$50 based on his data) is not an issue.
1 TB SATA disk drives with blazing speed to boot…this industry has come a long way.
Categories: Products
Tagged: 1 TB, Barracuda, Barracuda ES, DeskStar, disk drive, Hitachi, review, Richard Poelling, Seagate, The Tech Lounge
1 TB in 10 years is a yawner, unless price/performance is truly unique
The latest announcement on the future of storage tech comes from Nanochip, Inc: An array-based flash memory that scales to 1 TB, is cheaper and easier to manufacture than today’s flash, and is supported by Intel and others. Exciting!
Before you get too enthralled, note that the techology is 10 years from production. Two problems with this:
- Flash will have replaced disk in many applications by then, but spinning disk will still be around and will be heading towards a petabyte
a disk per drive by then. This is not a cure-all device that replaces all storage technologies.
- The technology has yet to face the scrutiny that comes with actual existence. Reliability, cost and functionality in a real-world machine are the true tests that tend to morph such visions as they go from “apparate” to “operate”. Ask the guys with flash products out today about this.
Keep filling the pipe with fun technology! But don’t take your eye of the ball on your current storage solution plans for this one.
Categories: Industry trends · Products
Tagged: Inc., 1 TB, Flash, Nanochip, Intel
February 11, 2008 · 1 Comment
Higher resolution content drives growth in photos, music and video
The content explosion continues unabated. Robert Scoble highlights yet another reason it will continue for the foreseeable future. He wants to save all his photos in RAW format…on the web.
Higher resolution content is driving the information Big Bang:
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High Definition video replacing Standard Definition (4X capacity)
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Even higher definition video will follow (see what
VideoGiants is doing)
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High fidelity music (Apple and MusicGiants)
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Raw photos increasingly replacing jpegs
1 TB drives are shipping in the hundreds of thousands to keep all of this content in the back rooms of content companies and the living rooms of consumers.
What format is good enough for you today? Tomorrow? I’d love to hear from you.
Categories: Digital Home · Industry trends
Tagged: 1 TB, video, Apple, High Definition, jpeg, MusicGiant, raw photo
January 16, 2008 · 1 Comment
TechCrunch condensed Steve Jobs’ 90-minute keynote from MacWorld into 60 seconds. How’s that for time management? Thanks Nick.
On the storage front, the most interesting announcement from Apple was Time Capsule. It adds up to 1 terabyte of storage to an Airport Extreme. Apple joins the fight for the Home’s centralized content storage!
Will the PC win? Or Home Servers? Or backup storage external storage?
Categories: Digital Home · Products
Tagged: 1 TB, Apple, MacWorld, Steve Jobs, storage, Time Capsule
IBM acquires XIV: storage technology for a Web 2.0 world
Moshe Yanai, the man who invented the Symmetrix (and therefore EMC) decades ago, has created a game-changing storage solution at XIV, his 5 year-old startup. IBM thinks so too, it seems. They announced today that they had acquired the company.
Enterprise Strategy Group was big on XIV even before IBM announced they would acquire them. Who couldn’t like rebuilding a 1 TB drive in less than 30 minutes? An innovative massively parallel storage architecture creates all kinds of rule-busting capabilities (near-infinite scalability, high performance with SATA drives) that are only available today in massive, custom-built internet data centers.
Categories: Business Solutions · Company Profiles · Datacenter · Industry trends
Tagged: Steve Duplessie, 1 TB, IBM, Enterprise Strategy Group, XIV, Moshe Yanai
December 29, 2007 · 1 Comment
In no particular order, events and trends driving storage in 2007:
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Microsoft Windows Vista. The launch has been touch and go, but eventual broad-based adoption means much
more storage per PC.
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“Lost data” events - TJ Maxx, the UK Government, etc. Lost and stolen customer records in the news have created a whole new category of nightmares for business owners, driving them to invest in data security. Or secure data.
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Data deduplication. Amazing data efficiency is becoming readily available. Rather than reduce the amount of data saved, it’s
expanding the use of archiving.
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External storage drives. Prices dropped this year, spiking sales of 250GB, 500GB, even 1 TB backup drives for homes and small businesses.
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Video surveillance. Analog-to-digital conversion plus image processing innovations have resulted in huge growth in
terabyte-scale surveillance for businesses of all sizes.
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Video downloads. iTunes,
Unbox, even network TV have introduced downloading movies and episodes (and seasons) into the mainstream.
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: Surveillance, 1 TB, 2007, storage trends, data deduplication, Unbox, iTunes
