Storage Effect

Entries tagged as ‘1 TB’

One terabyte Christmas tree

December 23, 2008 · Leave a Comment

christmas-tree

If storage isn’t a big enough part of your work life, how about bringing it home for the Holidays?

This enterprising chap turned 70 old SCSI disk drives into a one terabyte tannenbaum. 

If he had used today’s latest small form factor enterprise  SAS drives (like the 300GB Seagate Savvio), he would have would have had 21 terabytes to string with tinsel. 

Something to plan for next year, Philip?

Happy Holidays to Storage Effect readers wherever you are.  I wish you the very best in 2009.

Categories: Random
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IQstor squeezes 52 TB in 4U

November 20, 2008 · 1 Comment

An up-and-comer for the data-rich crowd?

iqstore_iq5200

Chris Meiller over at The Register highlights IQstor’s new storage array, the IQ5200.  52 1 TB drives in 4U.  That compares favorably with the Equallogic PS5500’s 48 drives in the same space. 

First to qualify 1.5 terabyte drives in these boxes wins the next capacity density crown.

IQStore has been a quiet small OEM supplier up to now.  If the IQ5200 pans out in terms of reliability and performance, that may be changing.

Categories: Products · Storage Systems
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How much storage is in your cubicle?

November 7, 2008 · Leave a Comment

For me it’s 1.2 terabytes

In previous posts I’ve added up the storage in my home office and my living room.  Now it’s time to go to work:

  • Laptop: 100 GB
  • Local backup drive: 500 GB
  • Remote backup drive: 320 GB
  • Personal storage: 250 GB
  • Video camera: 40 GB
  • BlackBerry: 64 MB
  • TOTAL: 1.2 terabytes

My first blog post a year ago was about my full drive on my work PC.  Since then I’ve expanded to 100 gigabytes.  Nothing like my home PC, but work space requirements tend to be lower.

I’m in the midst of changing my backup method from a local desktop backup drive to a BlackArmor portable drive.  It allows me to backup my work remotely.  It’s got Seagate Secure technology, which means it’s hackproof – no worries about losing sensitive information.

I expect my next laptop to have a Seagate Secure encrypted drive inside as well. 

Someday it will be considered stupid – and maybe illegal – to use a hard drive that’s not self-encrypting in a business PC.

Categories: Backup · Business Solutions · Desktop · Laptop PC · Video blog
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SAS is breaking out of the enterprise

July 15, 2008 · 2 Comments

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
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SATA drives may have peaked in the enterprise

June 23, 2008 · Leave a Comment

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
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Add-on storage for DVRs: everybody wins

May 21, 2008 · 2 Comments

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
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Big and SASsy

April 8, 2008 · 3 Comments

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
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Terabyte drive comparison: Seagate takes Gold and Silver

April 1, 2008 · 1 Comment

Performance delta between vendors highlights different designs 

iometer.jpg

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:

  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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
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The 1 TB storage chip

March 24, 2008 · 1 Comment

1 TB in 10 years is a yawner, unless price/performance is truly unique

3-21-08-nanochip.jpg

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
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A Big Bang, not a bubble

February 11, 2008 · 1 Comment

Higher resolution content drives growth in photos, music and video  

robert-scoble.jpg 

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:

  • High Definition video replacing Standard Definition (4X capacity)
  • Even higher definition video will follow (see what VideoGiants is doing)
  • High fidelity music (Apple and MusicGiants)
  • 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
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