Entries tagged as ‘disk drive’
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:
- Core technology shifts take decades
- SSDs cost 5X - 10X their equivalent in disk drive storage
- SSDs in notebooks don’t make much difference in performance, battery life or reliability
- SSD long-term reliability is iffy so far
- Solutions makers are still looking for a mainstream market for flash beyond $19.99 $15.99 $9.99 thumb drives
- Many thoughtful industry voices are saying the same thing
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, Microsoft, Flash, 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
I counted:
- Home PC (500GB)
- Office laptop (100GB) - upgraded from 40GB
- Home backup (500GB)
- Office local backup (500GB)
- Tivo (80GB) - it’s getting long in the tooth
- 2 mobile drives (~80GB each) - I rotate copies of my home data and keep them at work. Presto! Remote storage.
- Pocket drive (6 GB)
- Video camera (40GB)
- Update: forgot about my 2006-era iPod (8GB)
- and my kids’ 8-yr old PC (40GB?)
My company bought some of these on my behalf.
That’s 9 11 drives for me. How many do you own?
Categories: Random
Tagged: disk drive
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
Tenfold notebook failure rates for SSDs vs. disk drives
Engadget reports a 10X failure rate for SSDs in notebook PCs compared to hard drives. Can you say “early adopter”? SSDs are an exciting future, but a future still for mainstream markets.
Reliability is relative, especially in terms of the technology being replaced. The same goes for pricing - see my Flash tags posts.
Any flash early adopters out there? What’s your experience with returns or failures, either personally or through solutions you’ve sold to someone?
Update: Yet another issue with flash as a near-term disk drive replacement: potential patent infringement issues.
Categories: Industry trends · Laptop PC
Tagged: Big Tech, Bill Watkins, disk drive, failure rate, Flash, Fortune, Jon Fortt, notebook, SSD
Moving from exciting technology to real-world product is not trivial
Robin Harris posted yesterday and last week on flash - both are interesting reading. My takeaway is that the more flash is applied, the more real-world wrinkles bubble to the surface. That’s exactly as it should be - new technology buzz always begins with what’s possible, then moves to “OK, now how exactly will that work in my solution today?”
Borrowing from disk drives to make flash work
Also noticed how most of the issues and workarounds are things that have already been addressed with today’s disk drives. Just goes to show that storage devices are more than the media. Seagate’s in a great position as they enter the flash solutions world because of their depth in experience in making storage devices out of storage media.
What do you think?
Comments welcome! How do you think you will use your first flash storage (beyond thumb drives)? Have you already?
Categories: Industry trends
Tagged: disk drive, Flash, Robin Harris, Solid State Drive, SSD, StorageMojo
