Storage News - Page 99

Hitachi have only just unleashed some 4TB consumer hard drives, and throughout the the Thailand flood crisis, one would think we wouldn't see any new hard-drive announcements, well, you were wrong.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have just unveiled something for the enterprise market, the Ultrastar C10K900 series. This new series comes in 300, 450, 600 and 900GB sizes, which all feature a 2.5-inch form factor, a SAS 6Gbps interface, 64MB of cache, an average seek time of 3.8 milliseconds, an average latency of 3.0ms, and an operating/idle power draw of just 5.8/3.0W. A Bulk Data Encryption option will also be available on specific models.

According to Hitachi, the new Ultrastar drives deliver 18-percent higher sequential and up to 17-percent higher random performance than their nearest competitor, and are said to be perfect for Tier 1 enterprise networked storage arrays, or for blades and other rack-mounted servers.

Why didn't OCZ use the line high-octane in this new SSD... feel free to use that line, OCZ. OCZ have released yet another SSD onto the market, a new range line called "Petrol." Petrol is based on a 6Gbps SATA interface and comes in the usual 2.5-inch form factor. Ryan Peterson, CEO of OCZ Technology says:

Until today, SSD adoption has been limited to high performance applications due to the high cost of SSDs in relation to slower rotating discs, and we are proud to once again close the gap in pricing without sacrificing durability. The new Petrol Series showcases the flexibility of the Indilinx Everest platform and NDurance™ Technology, allowing OCZ to deliver the benefits of SSDs to a wide new set of applications while retaining the superior real world performance and reduced latency that separate Everest-based SSDs from our competitors.

The Petrol SSD is based on the Indilinx Everest SSD processor, which is capable of 400MB/sec bandwidth and 35,000 IOPS. The chip also features advanced features for longevity like proprietary page mapping algorithms. Those allow for more stable mixed-workload environment. Latency in the SSD is reduced to as low as 0.6ms.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) have just announced the industry's highest capacity 4TB storage solutions in the form of the Deskstar 5K4000 Internal Hard Drive Kit and the Touro Desk External Hard Drive. The Hitachi 4TB Deskstar 5K4000 hard drive is a 3.5-inch drive with a 32MB cache and also sports Hitachi's CoolSpin technology. CoolSpin, along with other Hitachi power management techniques, give the Deskstar 5K4000 up to 28-percent idle power savings over the Deskstar 7K3000 7,200 RPM drives.

The suggest retail price on the drive is $399.99. The kit comes inclusive of mounting screws, step-by-step instructions and a software download that allows both 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and Linux-based systems to access the full capacity and power of the 4TB drive.

The second drive announced by Hitachi is their 4TB Touro Desk External Drive which has the ability to be placed vertically, or horizontally, depending on you of course. It sports a smooth black, textured body and is the perfect solution for all of your high-def video, pictures, music or just to add another whopping 4TB of storage to your ever-growing collection of HDDs. It includes the fast USB 3.0 interface and comes in 3TB, 2TB and also 1TB capacities.

STEC have just unveiled a new SSD at the Server Design Summit today, dubbed ZeusIOPS XE. ZeusIOPS XE is the industry's highest endurance enterprise-class MLC flash-based SSD which is an extension to their flagship ZeusIOPS SSD family and enables at least 30 full capacity writes per day, every day, for five years.

Impressive, isn't it? STEC's CellCare technology is the behind-the-scenes driver that when applied to MLC flash, extends the performance, endurance and reliability of the ZeusIOPS EX drives.

The drive can fully write roughly 33 Petabytres of data over the working life of a 600GB drive, which is how it works out to 30 times per day over five years. Where STEC's CellCare technology comes in is with its unique ability to measure and manage the wear of the drive using adaptive flash management algorithms and advanced signal processing techniques.

With all of the X79 news coming out on the 14th you may have missed the Revisiting the Legend: OCZ Vertex LE article that was posted. Our friends at MyDigitalDiscount.com uncovered a batch of drives in a warehouse and are blowing them out.

TweakTown has teamed up with My Digital Discount to offer a coupon code to get the legend for right around $1 per GB on the 240GB model. The coupon code, TT30off240LE is still in effect but only a few drives remain.

The Vertex LE is one of the fastest SATA II drives ever released and was ahead of it's time. It featured 3Xnm flash with 15K P/E cycles, a rarity these days in a world filled with 25nm flash rated at just 5K P/E cycles. After the coupon you can't find a better deal and the 285MB/s read, 270MB/s write speed is pretty nice too:)

The WarpDrive has been a really good product for LSI and datacenter owners. The product has been so successful the successor has already been announced and production is ramping up quickly for a Q4 or early Q1 launch. That information has been public for the last month or so, released at IDF.

LSI is already working on an even newer product, one that they don't really want to talk too much about. So without an official name I'm going to designate this one WarpCache.

The LSI MegaRAID controllers have two distinct add-ons. We've covered them both in the past, FastPath, an IOPS accelerator and CacheCade, an HDD cache system fed by solid state drives. By placing an SSD or an array of SSDs in front of the HDDs to hold hot data the data can be read at the pace of SSDs. This also reduces wear on the traditional platter drives as frequently read data is pulled from the much faster SSD cache.With CacheCade 2.0 the SSD cache can write incoming data as well, a large bonus for write intensive apps.

Newegg are currently running a special on OCZ SSD drives, all you need is the coupon code "BLKNOVSSD". The specials are pretty good and include both the Vertex 3 and Agility 3 drives from OCZ. The specials include all three drive sizes, 60, 120 and 240GB.

Vertex 3 in 60, 120 and 240GB have original prices of $109, $190 and $475, respectively. With the 15-percent off and mail-in rebate, this brings the pricing down to $73, $142 and $374 for the 60, 120, and 240GB drives, respectively. For the Agility 3 drives, we see the same discount apply, 60, 120, 240GB drives with original prices of $107, $171 and $360, respectively, taken down to $71, $125, and $276, respectively, after the 15-percent off and mail-in rebate.

These are some seriously nice prices for the SSD drives from OCZ and would make quite the Christmas present if Mrs TweakTown reader is watching. Get one and stuff it into your partners' stocking for some Christmas morning SSD surprise!

Toshiba 24nm MLC flash isn't exactly breaking news, SandForce had this drive on display at IDF 2011. We did learn today that Toshiba's 24nm flash should cost less than IMFT 25nm flash so all of those SandForce SF-2281 controlled drives could become a little cheaper in 2012.

We still are scratching our heads on what performance will be like but Toshiba's 3Xnm flash with the 2281 is the current speed king on the market today. Drives like the OCZ Technology MaxIOPS, Patriot Wildfire and OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G are just a few examples that use Toshiba flash already.

Also on display at AIS 2011 were several non-standard form factors produced by companies that are supplied with SandForce controllers.

Forget just wanting my two front teeth for Christmas, this puppy has just gone straight to the top. All I want for Christmas is OCZ's newly announced RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS solid state drive. This devil combines a proven cutting-edge PCI Express-based architecture and OCZ proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 flash virtualization layer with premium NAND flash components that deliver exceptional 4KB random write performance of up to 245,000 IOPS, as well as increased transfer rates of 1900MB/sec reads and 1725MB/sec writes.

Daryl Lang, VP of Product Management for OCZ Technology Group says:

The new RevoDrive 3 Max IOPS solid state drives further expand on our original PCIe series, and are designed to deliver even more bandwidth for the most demanding applications. Engineered to leverage the benefits of multi-threaded processors and applications, the Max IOPS provides both the performance and features required by clients to address the most intensive workloads common in high performance computing and workstation environments.

Buffalo is now preparing shipments of its BDXL-format supporting "BRXL-PCW6U2-BK" external/portable Blu-ray writer.

The unit connects via USB 2.0 and includes support for both 3-layer (100GB) and 4-layer (128GB) BDXL discs. The drive runs measurements of 145 x 19 x 153 mm with a weight of 340 grams. It will ship with a couple built-in USB cables whereby one acts as the data path and the other for power.

As for write speeds, the drive can do up to 4x for BDXL media, 6x for BD-R (single- and dual-layer), 2x for BD-RE, 8x for DVD-R/+R/+RW, 6x for DVD-R DL/+R DL/-RW, 5x for DVD-RAM, 24x for CD-R and 16x for CD-RW.