Storage - Page 112

Well, this is interesting: physicists have reportedly discovered a new method of recording data onto hard drives, where the fruits of their labor could see mechanical-based hard drives jump in speeds, up to hundreds of times faster. Heat is the key.

A hard disk drive is a magnetic storage device, which, unlike magnetic tapes, allows random access. The recording surface of a hard drive consists of hundreds of billions of tiny portions that can be magnetized in a particular polar direction to represent 0s or 1s. Recording data flips the direction, which is currently done using an external magnetic field.

A team of researchers led by Thomas Ostler at the University of York, UK have discovered that a short burst of heat can do the job much faster. This is where things get karazay. Up until now, it was thought that heat could only assist in remagnetisation when used in conjunction with a magnetic field. This knowledge base has changed: zapping a magnet with a laser for less than one trillionth of a second, momentarily raising the temperature by over 800-degrees Celcius, can have the same effect.

Samsung have today released two new firmware updates for their SSD 830 Series of solid-state drives. The first update, named CXM02B1Q, was released two weeks ago, but due to CES, no one really noticed it.

The release notes state that the update fixes a BSOD or hang issue when waking the computer up from hibernation mode. The 830 Series has been said to be one of the most reliable SATA 6Gb/s SSDs, with the issue not affecting all users, it still affects some. Samsung also claim that the update fixes partition issues with some enclosures and laptops.

The second update, named CXM03B1Q, was released last Thursday and it's identical to the earlier update, but sports improved compatibility and stability of the update tool. If you want to grab the latest firmware for the Samsung 830, download it here. As always, do so at your own risk and perform data backups beforehand.

Network Attached Storage heroes, Thecus have released the new V5.02.02 firmware which adds new features, protocol updates, and of course, the usual tweaking. The new update is available for all V5-compatible models.

Quick access models gets a nice upgrade, where there is now the possibility to add an extra button on the login screen where you can choose the desired module and login with the proper user account. Third-party developers can now set their own icon if they wish.

A handy feature included in V5.02.02 firmware is the ability to back up all local users, groups and permissions. You can save them on a RAID volume and restore when required. There's also the ability to export them to another NAS if required. General upgrades and tweaks are below:

CES 2012 - This little bit of news had to wait till I arrived back at home since I don't carry a scanner with me on my work trips. In our meeting Patriot didn't mention the new additions but they were included in the product catalog we were issued. The Patriot Wildfire leap to the the top of our performance charts in our reviews and it was one of the finest drives of 2011. The Wildfire products also included all of the accessories we like to get with our SSDs and included a solid warranty.

First up is the Wildfire PRO model. The specs of this one are similar to the already reviewed Wildfire other than the user capacity. Patriot has changed the user capacity back to the previous overprovisioning rate found on early SandForce SF-1200 based products, 100GB, 200GB and 400GB. That leaves a lot of space for background tasks and that means these would work really, really well in RAID. Speaking of RAID, we're just about finished up with our RAID Report with 4 Patriot Wildfire 120GB drives that introduces a new test that will be in our 2012 reviews.

Next up is Wildfire SE. We have no idea what separates the SE from the standard Wildfire but we have some ideas. The original Wildfire used Toshiba 3Xnm Toggle Mode flash. Could this be one of the first SandForce drives with Toshiba 24nm flash? We think so but what the hell do we know.

CES 2012 - With the CES attendees safe at home we can now tell you the full story behind the ioSafe Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self Event. By now you've certainly seen the 8 foot tall tesla coil that put on an amazing display. The tesla testing was actually part of an interactive magic show. The ioSafe Rugged Portable Thunderbolt drive did take several direct hits from the simulated lightening but the results were as expected, the drive survived and held the data we put on.

The drive was filled with several documents and other files, one you can see here. The drive was then blasted, we were there and smelled the ions in the air. The data survived.

What you haven't heard yet is what happened next. To protect all of our electronics equipment from the charged air our backpacks and cell phones were placed in a protective cage that was grounded. Being ioSafe, the company who delivered the first waterproof data backup system none of us thought anything about the giant tub of water sitting close by. Dunking drives in water is actually on the tame side with ioSafe.

CES 2012 - RunCore made the trip to CES this year and brought with them a glimpse of next generation SSD technology.

With Samsung and Apple soaking up supply of Samsung 20nm NAND flash, Toshiba 24nm in limited supply and SandForce staying quiet for the first half of the year, companies are turning to Marvell to bring something fresh to the SSD market. RunCore is no exception and they will have a new Marvell high performance SSD on the market soon. With speed of around 550MB/s read and 450MB/s write we are starting to get excited to see more of these drives.

RunCore is in several different markets and over the coming years the company will grow by a large margin. Here we see two new SSD-on-chip designs where the controller and the flash is built into the same package that reduces power and heat. These products will be built into military systems that need high speed in places where space is limited.

CES 2012 - Cameron is still in Vegas for a couple of more days but I darted back home to coach youth basketball. After spending the last two days of CES in a steak coma I'm ready to get back to work and finish up the CES coverage. The show was really good this year with more than 152,000 visitors and more than 20,000 products launched.

OWC (macsales.com) was exhibiting on the show floor with a booth that was absolutely jam packed with enthusiasts. Industry insider Andy Marken from Marken Communications personally gave us the tour. The first stop of the day tipped up a little PCIe action. Here we see a new OWC PCIe SSD that uses a Marvell RAID controller and four custom SandForce SF-2281 controlled SSDs. Each SSD uses Toshiba NAND flash and different capacity sizes should be available. The capacity will ramp up quickly with four slots. The Marvell controller supports several different levels of RAID including 0,1,5 and 10. Performance will only be limited by the PCIe 2.0 4 lane link so we are expecting some amazing performance out of this product.

OWC is also venturing into the miniSAS market with new external drive systems from the Jupiter product family.

CES 2012 - This morning we ventured out to the Las Vegas Country Club where the folks over at ioSafe held one of their now famous CES demo-lition events. In previous years they've done things like take media to a shooting arrange to blast the hell out of their drives and have done other things like run over the drive with massive earth movers and such.

This year Robb Moore and his team at ioSafe decided to do something new and setup a "Cage of Death" with a near enough to one million volt Tesla coil operated by Telsa expert Doctor Megavolt. Media were put into a nearby cage at a fairly safe distance from the proceeding bolts of lightning and inside the main cage the brand new ioSafe Thunderbolt drive was put to the test to see how it could with standard an extreme amount of electricity coming right at the device.

After the demo CEO Robb Moore of ioSafe reconnected the drive back to the system and it ended up working just fine. There were a few other little "magic tricks" during the show but we cannot reveal that at this stage since other media are still going to be attending the event tomorrow. The main message was that ioSafe is very serious about protecting your data and will go to big lengths to make that happen.

CES 2012 - One of the most interesting stories to come from CES 2012 has to do with Mushkin. Mushkin is an old timer, been around this market for a long time. Remember who made the first PC-150 SDRAM? Yeah, now you get it. Well Mushkin has some new backing and they bring the two things needed to return a company to greatness, money and engineers.

So how many engineers you might be wondering, let's just say enough to pull off a PCIe card with built in RAID on 2, 4 or 8 SSDs on board. All of the power requirements are handled by the main PCB and the SSDs are on daughter cards. The controller is different on all three cards but at this time they are Marvell based. Mushkin is looking at some of the new upcoming LSI controllers so nothing is set in stone at this time. Either way they go, look for this to compete on the high end enthusiast market and steer into some entry level enterprise systems.

mSATA is about to take off and Mushkin is getting ready to dive right in as well. Here we see two modules, one with 25nm IMFT asynchronous flash the other with 24nm Toshiba Toggle flash. Mushkin is looking to hit both the entry level and those of us with a need for the highest speeds possible today.

CES 2012 - We managed to sneak into the OCZ suite here in Las Vegas before anyone else and we got a look at their range of new enterprise storage solutions and the one that stood out for me was the demo of two Z-Drive R4 RM1616 PCI-E 2.0 drives running together in RAID 0 to produce some really mind-blowing performance numbers.

The Z-Drive R4 RM1616 is not a desktop part and easily out of reach for pretty much all consumers, if you have the big bucks, this is the ultimate storage though. The drives come with no less than 16 SandForce 2500 series controllers and up to 16TB of storage capacity. In the video of the demo you can see above, OCZ had two RM1616 drives setup in one system running together in RAID 0 mode.

This outrageousness is able to produce almost 13GB/s (yes - we are talking 13,000MB/s) and close enough to 100,000 IOPS with random 128k reads. And with random 4k reads IOPS hit a crazy 1.4 million IOPS and that is being limited by an Intel X79 system. With a faster computer, OCZ reckons the solution can hit up to 2 million IOPS in the 4k read range.