Storage - Page 129

Seagate and AMD have put together the first 6Gbps SATA setup. The demonstration was shown at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans.

The new interface was developed after it was realized that current SATA standards were not enough to keep up with the emerging solid state drives.

It is interesting to note that Intel's X25 was a major factor in the creation of the new standard but that AMD is the first to adopt it.

Read the full PR here.

Samsung announced the new 1.5TB EcoGreen F2EG hard drive today. The 1.5TB drive uses only three 500GB platters which reduces power both on startup and continuous operation.

Scientists at the Universit of California, Berkeley, and University of Massachusetts Amherst have figured out a technique to fit 250 DVD's of data onto a surface the size of a quarter, says Sciene Daily.

The technology to do this has been around for a little while. Self-assembling nanoscale elements have been around for a decade, but until recently scientists have been unable to make it work on a large scale.

It looks like the new P55 and P57 will not ship with SATA 3 support.

Despite the fact that AMD is planning one with SATA 3 support for Q1 2010, Intel will not make that feature available on tits next two chipsets.

SATA 3 can support up to 6Gbps (750MBps) while the older SATA 2 only supports up to 3Gbps (375MBps).

Intel is sure to have SATA 3 support soon but it looks like AMD will beat them to the punch.

Read more here at Fudzilla.

We reported yesterday that PcPerspecitve is stating that micro fragmentation caused by write combining and Wear Level algorithms used in the X25M were causing performance loss with certain usage patterns.

Well Intel has responded by casting doubt on the methodology used in the PCPerspective report.

According to an article at CNet, Intel thinks that they tests used do not show average consumer usage and could be very misleading in their results.

A statement by Intel said: "In general, when a PC's drive (SSD or HDD) is full, there will be some reduction in system performance, however the performance reduction reported by PC Perspective is higher than we generally expect, which is why we are looking into the methodology."

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Read more here at CNet.

Diskeeper Corporation has recently released an add-on to its popular on-the-fly defragmentation software "Diskeeper 2009".

HyperFast is a specifically designed application designed to optimize the performance of SSDs on Windows operating systems. They key benefits are said to be faster performance, longer lifespan and avoidance of operating system / SSD design incompatibilities.

But how does it do all of this? Using InvisiTasking processing technology, which works transparently in the background (no scheduling!), HyperFast creates and maintains optimized free space, increasing the controller's ability to write sequentially and thereby enormously increasing the peak speed and life of the SSD, according to the company.

It seems the list of affected Seagate hard disk drives with bad firmware's might be growing.

NimrodAUS from our forums was kind enough to forward us along an email from Seagate Tech Support discussing the issue at hand and providing a link to the latest firmware updates.

Kingston is jumping into the SSD market now with a new product line aimed at the enterprise.

Dubbed SSDNow Kingston will launch two versions to start the SSDNow E and SSDNow M. The E will be for Enterprise class servers while the M is aimed at corporate laptops.

The SSDNow is based on the Intel X25 SSD and should offer some serious performance.

Read more here.

After having acknowledged there's recently been a massive surge in the number of hard disk failures across its desktop Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22 and Barracuda ES.2 SATA drive families (with the 1TB 7200.11 drives fairing worst), Seagate has found that the fault was caused by a bug in the firmware shipped with these drives, making the disks inaccessible when the host system is powered on.

Whilst in attendance at CES, a storage mob by the name of pureSilicon made it big by introducing the world's largest capacity solid state drive released to date; a whopping 1TB model dubbed part of the new Nitro series.

The 1TB Nitro SSD is the most compact SSD per gigabyte: 15.40GB per cubic centimeter in a 2.5-inch form-factor -- at least three times greater than any other SSD on the market. This high density in a small form factor has been achieved through innovative engineering techniques coupled with advanced industrial design that yields an exceptionally thin enclosure.