Seagate, ProStor build faster, higher capacity drives

ComputerWorld ^ | January 17, 2007 | Deni Connor

[Zakeet]

Seagate Technology this week introduced a hard drive that it claims is the fastest hard drive available in a 2.5 inch form factor. Meanwhile ProStor Systems Inc. announced a new high-capacity removable disk drive as a replacement for tape media for workstations and servers in small and midsize markets.

The Seagate Savvio 15K drive is a 15,000rpm serial attached SCSI drive (SAS). It is designed for use in both rack-mounted servers and blade servers.

The Savvio drive is 70% smaller than other 15K drives on the market and has 30% less power consumption, the company said. The drive has a mean time between failure of 1.6 million hours. The Savvio 15K drives will ship in 36GB and 73GB capacities.

[Snip]

ProStor Systems, in Boulder, Colo., added higher-capacity cartridges to its portfolio of removable disk systems. The new cartridges have a capacity of 160GB, a 33% increase over previous drives. RDX media is available in 40GB, 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities and allow users to substitute them for tape media.

[Snip]

The RDX cartridges and drives can back up more than 125GB of data per hour and archive data for as long as ten years. Both Imation Corp. and Tandberg Data ASA manufacture RDX drives.

[Zakeet]

15,000 RPM 2.5 inch 70GB hard drives.

160GB backup media with a 125 GB/Hr backup rate.

Free Enterprise is great!

[Obadiah]

Yeah, but that 15k 2.5" drive is SCSI. Not much home application there.

[The Great RJ]

The real breakthrough is pushing flash drive technology to greater capacities. Hard drives are still mechanical devices and operating at high RPM are subject to serious failure. Solid state flash drives have no moving parts are rugged and use little power. The $60 thumb sized 2GB flash drive around my neck has more storage space than my first two computers combined.

[Young Werther]

The 2GB thumbnail is advertised for $29.95 in today's paper, (probably a mail in rebate).

My first hard drive was a 5MB which came with my Apple III! It was only $4995.00 and came with Advanced Visicalc and an operating system that included a (gulp) tree structured directory!

Ain't Technology wunnerful?

[savedbygrace]

This is what they mean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

[Jeff F]

My first hard drive was a 5MB which came with my Apple III!

And who can forget the multimedia presentation on that shoe box of a drive featuring Dick Cavett expounding upon the wonders of the Apple ///. The short presentation filled more than half of the drive!

[Calvin Locke]

Yeah, how many times can you write to it, as compared to a hard drive? That is, doesn't the flash memory wear out?

So, writing to it a couple of time a day for a couple of years may be okay, but using it for intensive writing operations may not.

[AFreeBird]

Yeah, but that 15k 2.5" drive is SCSI. Not much home application there.

Adding a SCSI controller to your system ain't a big thing, and a lot of new drive tech starts out being SCSI, but works its way to EIDE and or SATA configurations eventually.

A MTBF of 1.6 million hours? Holy $#!t

[TChris]

For tech advancement reminiscing, I remember:

• My first experience with a computer was the system my father bought for his business. It was an Alpha Micro AM-100 with a 10 megabyte Control Data (CDC) (5 MB fixed, 5 MB removable 14 in. hard disk cartridge) drive. This drive was the size of a trash compactor and cost about $20,000
• He later added a 20 MB Winchester disk drive that would fit inside the bottom of the CDC unit, for about $10,000. I was amazed at the progress then.
• The company's first PCs were NEC V-20 (8088 compatible) machines with 640 KB of RAM, Hercules monochrome graphics and a 10 mb, 5 1/4 in. full-height MFM hard disk.
• My first PC was a 386DX-33 machine with 4MB of RAM, VGA graphics, a 120 MB 3.5 in. half-height IDE hard disk and MS-DOS 5.0 with Windows 3.1
• Currently, I can find a 750 gigabyte 3.5 in. half-height SATA hard disk for less than $350, and a 128 MB--larger AND faster than the system disk on my first PC--USB 2.0 flash memory stick can be had for less than $10.

Astonishing progress over 30-some years, and it shows no signs of slowing.

[AFreeBird]

Yeah, how many times can you write to it, as compared to a hard drive? That is, doesn't the flash memory wear out?

You're kidding right?

You know how many times you write to the memory in your computer every day?

Flash memory isn't really all that different from RAM, it's just non-volatile, and whatever read/write cycles that might limit usability, were long ago as they now meet or exceed HD failure rates.

In fact SanDisk 32G SSD claims a MTBF of 2 million hours or about 228 years.

Solid State drives are the future. Less space, Less power which means less heat, and longer battery life and faster access times.

[Calvin Locke]

No. I was perusing some Linux boards last month, and there were discussions of wearing out the flash memory from treating it like a hard drive in terms of constant writes.

And you forgot to include "noise level" in your list of positives on flash drives...