Check it out at my new digs on seagate.com!
Yes, I’m moving on up to a better place in the Mother Ship.
Storage Effect’s location is changing, but not the content. Expect to see more of the same, including the first installment of the continuing saga of my frozen Seagate FreeAgent Go portable drive.
The new url is http://media.seagate.com/center/storage-effect . Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed for the new page.
Hope to see you there soon!
Categories: Random
Tagged: disk drive, FreeAgent Go, frozen, Ice rink, Pete Steege, Seagate, storage effect
75% less power and 70% less space than 3.5″ drives
HP’s making the move to 300GB 2.5″ SAS drives. The Seagate-built drive is twice the capacity of previous 2.5″ SAS drives. HP began shipping the Savvio 10K 300GB SAS drive worldwide to resellers this week.
This is another step in the rapid enterprise storage form factor transition underway. 2.5″ is mainstream for datacenters starting now.
Categories: Business Solutions · Datacenter · Storage Systems
Tagged: 2.5", 300GB, disk drive, HP, Pete Steege, SAS, Savvio, Seagate, storage, storage effect
SSDs will be an almost ideal addition to enterprise storage systems. Notebooks? Not so much.
1. Many drives vs. one drive. SSDs replace multiple disk drives in high-end enterprise systems. Notebooks use SSDs as a one-for-one replacement, which wastes most of the game-changing advantages of flash.
2. Servers need speed, notebooks need capacity. Servers can use SSD’s blazing performance without requiring much capacity. SSD performance matters little to a notebook, but hundreds of gigabytes are needed per drive. SSDs biggest weakness is cost per gigabyte.
3. SSD power consumption matters more to the enterprise. Notebooks care about power, but the drive’s share of a notebook’s power draw doesn’t make that much difference in battery life. High-end enterprise systems have a heat problem from multiple drives in a small space that SSD will help to alleviate.
4. Notebooks don’t leverage SSD speed. A notebook’s boot time and performance depend on many factors beyond access time. High-end systems use many drives striped in parallel to maximize performance – a perfect opportunity for a much faster device.
Even in Enterprise, the devil is in the details
So let’s go, right? Not so fast, cowboy! One way SSD is less suited for the data center than notebooks is in durability. Unlike notebooks, high-end systems work storage devices like dogs. SSDs are improving, but today’s products can wear out before their time. Losing data in a notebook doesn’t compare with losing it in a high-end business application. And standards are a bigger deal in the data center.
Ready-for-prime-time versions will be available starting in 2009. In the meantime, it’s smart to start playing with the technology now so you’re ready to implement in volume next year.
Buy a fancy SSD notebook, too, if you’re a Techie or want to act like one. If not, it’s probably a waste of your money.
Categories: Datacenter · Laptop PC · SSD
Tagged: battery life, disk drive, enterprise, Flash, laptop, notebook, performance, power, SSD, storage
Daniel Dern’s eight steps to less power in your SMB
Daniel Dern’s common-sense summary of what SMBs can do to reduce their storage energy costs and footprint rings true for companies of all sizes. It’s uniquely practical – he avoids the “silver bullet” approach common to this topic. Like most things, it takes a lot of little steps to make a big difference.
His recommendations:
1. Store less data. Good luck! But maybe growth can be slowed.
2. Use fewer disks. Fill up the ones you have, and combine multiple disks into today’s high-capacity behemoths.
3. Turn off idle disks. Like turning off the light when you leave a room, it’s a little added work that can add up to real savings.
4. Use the right disks. Match storage with the performance and recall demands of the data.
5. Use more efficient disks. Converting to 2.5″ enterprise drives reduces power and speeds up I/Os.
6. Use more efficient storage systems. Some storage systems leverage disk-level energy efficiency features with system-level power savings.
7. Improve cooling. Sometimes it’s as simple as keeping things in proper working order.
8. Exploit “Green” rebates. Get full credit for your efforts with Utility and government incentives.
Who’s got additional ideas to add to Daniel’s list?
Categories: Datacenter
Tagged: Daniel Dern, Datacenter, disk drive, green, power consumption, power efficiency, searchSMBstorage
SSDs are exciting, but disk drives will do the heavy lifting for a while
Fast Company’s Tech Watch interviewed Sherman Black, the General Manager of Seagate’s Enterprise group, and came away seemingly surprised that disk drives are a vibrant technology.
The hype for SSDs is deafening these days, so step out of the Spin Room and let’s think about this calmly for a moment:
Yes, there are promising niches. Seagate sees segments of the enterprise market as a great place for its upcoming SSD solutions.
Sherman, by the way, is a perfect spokesperson for this topic from Seagate. He’s always got a smile and firm handshake for you, but you can see the steel in his eyes. Seagate and the rest of the disk drive industry are driven, racing to push the disk drive envelope even further.
Disk technology is in the prime of its life, accelerating rather than slowing. And the smart disk drive makers are adding SSDs to their bag of tricks even as they make their drives better.
It’s a great time to be in the storage business!
Categories: Datacenter · Industry trends · Laptop PC
Tagged: disk drive, Fast Company, Flash, Seagate, Sherman Black, SSD, Tech Watch
Because Disk looks more and more like Tape
Chris Evans points out the challenges of disk drive capacity outgrowing performance. Sound familiar? Until recently, these complaints were perennially aimed at linear-access tape technology, with random-access disk in the role of savior.
As disk now faces the same “can’t get the data out fast enough” problem, the solution is clear: SSDs. Flash is the new access king in storage. Or will be, because early products are struggling with reliability, write performance, and other capabilities that disk drive device and interface technology have fine-tuned over the decades. You can’t expect a breakthrough technology to hit the ground running.
Yesterday I found this Microsoft presentation in the blogosphere on the topic from 2006: flash_is_good
I guess I wasn’t original with my “Disk is the New Tape” thing. Makes the idea all the more interesting!
Next question: Is there room in the flash future for SSD, Disk and Tape?
Categories: Industry trends · Servers
Tagged: disk drive, Flash, Microsoft, SSD, tape
Thanks to Ruptured Monkey for this campy but cool IBM video from the Fifities on how their RAMAC (and the disk drive) was created.
(photo courtesy of IBM.com)
Categories: Random
Tagged: disk drive, IBM, RAMAC
The difference between specifications and reality
Tom’s Hardware compared the power draw of SSDs and 7200 rpm disk drives in notebooks under real-world usage scenarios. The SSD-based notebooks had shorter battery life!
How can this be, given that the idle and active power ratings of both devices are comparable?
Disk drives almost always run at or close to idle power consumption rates. SSDs do not. Read the Tom’s Hardware post for a detailed explanation.
This throws another bucket of the cold water of Reality on notebook SSD hype.
The lesson here is to thoroughly evaluate new technologies like SSD in your environment before jumping off the deep end. SSD is no doubt exciting; it just needs a little time to mature.
Can anyone confirm that their SSD laptop has less battery life than their drived version?
Categories: Laptop PC
Tagged: disk drive, notebook, power consumption, SSD, Tom's Hardware
A lesson from light beer
Calling a disk drive “green” is like calling a light beer “healthy”. In both cases, the means to achieve a goal are being confused with the goal itself.
Just as switching from regular to light beer might help someone (a little) improve their health, lower power disk drives can reduce the power consumption (and carbon footprint) of a datacenter, DVR or PC.
Seagate gets this. They don’t slap a big “Green” label on their drives. Yet in general, Seagate’s products are the most power efficient at any specific performance/capacity point. That means that using Seagate drives can result in the lowest overall power consumption for your system, whatever it may be.
Look beyond the label of your storage components when trying to configure the most power efficient solution.
Agree or disagree? Let’s discuss this further.
Categories: Datacenter
Tagged: data center, disk drive, green, light beer, power efficiency
99% of data recovered from a drive in the tragic crash
It’s amazing and somehow very sad that engineers were able to recover the data from a Seagate disk drive found in the wreckage of the shuttle Columbia.
When things get tough at work, a colleague of mine is fond of saying “they’re just disk drives.” This kind of brings that home.
More on the story from Engadget.
Update: more on this story from Blocks and Files. Dave Reinsel at IDC has written a detailed report as well, accessible to subscribers for a fee. Intriguing perspectives about the persistence of data in disk drives for good and ill.
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Categories: Data Security · Random
Tagged: Blocks and Files, Columbia, data recovery, disk drive, Kroll, recovery, shuttle
