Entries tagged as ‘Cheetah’
Seagate and SAS/SATA flexibility get the nod for their Big Guns of Business platform
When it comes to storage, Tom’s Hardware gets it.
It’s not because they chose Seagate’s Cheetah 15K SAS and Barracuda ES SATA drives for their Big Guns of Business workstation platform. It’s that they understand the truly revolutionary benefits of SAS and SATA in combination.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is taking workstations (and servers, and storage systems) where SCSI never could because of native mix-and-match compatibility with SATA.
That means you can have screamin’ SAS, massive SATA, or both. And change it up tomorrow if you want.
More and more system vendors are getting this. Strongly consider SAS-based systems from here on out.
Categories: Business Solutions · Products
Tagged: SAS, SCSI, Barracuda ES, SATA, Cheetah, 15K, Tom's Hardware
Cool, but encryption is a kindler and gentler way to retire disk drives
Blocks and Files highlighted this very physical solution to a data management problem: how to be sure sensitive data on retired disk drives never again sees the light of day. It’s a do-it-yourself version of industrial disk crushers.
Verity’s quite excited about the Hard Drive Destroyer, and I know it fills a desperate need. But it’s not very resource-efficient nor environmentally friendly. That’s a perfectly good drive! Can’t someone else use it?
The renewable alternative: self-encrypting hard drives like the Momentus FDE and BlackArmor. When it’s time to retire, throw away the AES-grade encryption key, and Poof! - what was once written will never be seen again. Certifiably so.
Momentus FDE is a notebook drive. The first enterprise FDE drive will be the Seagate Cheetah 15K . Stay tuned.
Who’s destroying drives out there? Anyone willing to admit they’re ignoring this problem and reusing drives?
Categories: Data Security · Digital Home · Laptop PC
Tagged: 15K, BlackArmor, Cheetah, FDE, Hard Drive Destroyer, Momentus, Verity
Even best-in-class rebuild times expose data to hours of risk
Blocks and Files points to an Demartek study (sponsored by Pillar) showing that the Pillar Axiom 500 rebuild times are much shorter on high capacity arrays that similar EMC or NetApp systems.
The glaring data beyond Pillar’s performance, though, is the teeth-clenchingly long times that data is one drive failure away from catastrophic loss in every case.
The tests were conducted with about 50 500GB drives per system using RAID 5 (RAID 4 for NetApp), meaning the arrays can be rebuilt if one drive fails, but not two. So during the rebuilds of from 3 to 23 hours, if another drive fails, all data is lost.
Insert 1 TB drives into the equation, and your rebuild time (and vulnerability) doubles.
RAID 6 and other dual-failure protective schemes make this problem go away, but cost a little in capacity.
How are you dealing with this? I’ve heard that RAID 6 is gaining traction for 7200 rpm high capacity enterprise drives like Seagate’s Barracuda ES that are less reliable than 15K SAS enterprise drives (see Seagate’s 3.5″ Cheetah and 2.5″ Savvio for reference).
Does your RAID vary by drive class? What other magic do you apply to make this work?
Categories: Backup · Data Security · Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: Seagate, EMC, Savvio, Cheetah, RAID, NetApp, Pillar Data, Axiom 500, RAID 5, RAID 6, Barraucuda ES, Blocks and Files, Demartek
Common-sense storage innovations slash storage energy use
Xyratex has taken a second step into the lower-power storage arena with the OneStor SP1224s that uses 2.5″ SAS drives. In February they added software to their RAID platform that allows OEMs to selectively spin down drives not in use.
Lisa Hart at Xyratex says “This is like having a light switch on your wall.” Exactly! Everyone understands that leaving lights on in an empty room is a waste. Storage is not so different:
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Use smaller drives. The OneStor SP1224s provides double the performance & half the watts with high performance
2.5″ SAS drives instead of 3.5″ drives. This is the equivalent of having a smaller room that gets plenty bright with a smaller bulb.
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Turn off drives when not in use. MAID technology is going mainstream after pioneering efforts by Copan and others. It’s not for every application, but hits the spot for many of today’s high-growth capacity apps.
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Turn off parts of drives when not in use. Seagate’s PowerTrim technology on
Barracuda ES and
Cheetah 15K 3.5″ drives takes the MAID approach to the drive level by selectively turning off the lights in some “rooms” of the drive’s electronics in a smart way that doesn’t impact performance.
Expect to see more vendors applying smart power management at all leveles to make a big dent in data center Watts per terabyte (or petabyte!).
Comments please: who’s using MAID, PowerTrim or 2.5″ SAS today? Who’s planning to?
Categories: Random
Tagged: Savvio, SAS, Barracuda ES, green, Cheetah, power, Xyatex, SP1224s, MAID
The Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 drive has higher performance and lower power consumption
There’s been lots of talk in the blogs about how SSDs are the future for performance storage in the enterprise. Absolutely! But that future is years away for broad adoption.
15K drives now, SSDs later
Today, 15K disk drives are powering the performance servers out there. Glad to see Seagate is upping the ante on what these drives can do.
Seagate’s new Cheetah 15K.6 has 28% faster data transfers and uses 61% less power at idle. This is incremental, Moore’s Law-ish progress, just what is needed for transaction-strained servers and storage systems.
Hard to believe that performance15K drives now go up to 450GB!
Has anyone tested this drive yet?
I’m watching for reviews of this product…anyone had a chance to test it yet?
Categories: Datacenter · Products
Tagged: 15K.6, Cheetah, disk drive, performance, power, Seagate, server
Enterprise drives now offer performance and capacity
Back in the day, high performance enterprise drives were all about performance, with little capacity to speak of. The performance is still there in spades, as you can see in this review. But maximum capacity has gone through the roof.
This is yet another sign of the sea change in business use of information, exponentially increasing content volume and capacity requirements for even the most rigorous enterprise applications.
By the way, Seagate has launched the next generation of these high capacity, high performance drives. The Cheetah 15K.6 ships with up to 450GB (almost a half terabyte!), and it’s faster yet.
Categories: Datacenter · Products
Tagged: storage, Seagate, SAS, Hitachi, Cheetah, 15K, 300GB, 450GB
