Survey of interesting events in the market of information carriers. March-April 2009

This article wants to open a cycle of reviews of interesting events in the IT world. This first review focuses on storage devices. This format was born unexpectedly, and, I hope, will be of interest to readers. Please do not see analogies with the popular edition of Cooler-Online . Although no, there is probably an analogy, just different people are interested in different things, so our topics will most likely not intersect strongly. The chosen format is convenient when you want to share an interesting thought about some new IT product, but it doesn’t hold out before the article, but just give a link - there are all sorts of tweeters.

In the future, the periodicity of the review is seen about 1 time per week, but it all depends on the number of interesting events. The expressed thoughts and comments along the way are naturally their own opinions.

New plate capacity
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Not so long ago there was a significant event in the world of discbuilding - the transition to 500-gigabyte plates. The first was, as far as I remember, WD with its green series , followed by Seagate with the 7200.12 line and the omnipresent Samsung with its Spinpoint F2 .







This transition means several important points:

• all further output volumes will be a multiple of 500 for a while, until they reinvent the 533 Gb plate;
  
• low-end discs for not very demanding people become single plate, because volume above 500 gigabytes is not needed by all; my reasoning on this topic can be found here ;
  
• due to the decrease in the number of plates / heads, the noise, heating and power consumption of the disks decreased, the reliability increased;
  
• with the arrival of 500 gigabytes in the area of ​​2.5-inch disks, we will see even more compact and cold portable media such as WD MyPassport ; but this is still quite a distant future for this form factor - now 500-GB models are made on two 250-gigabyte plates.
  

In general, good news in all respects.

New maximum volume

The second important milestone directly connected with the first one is the output of 2 terabyte disks.

Although, here so far only WD produces models of this volume on the most capacious plates. This is still the same green series Caviar Green WD20EADS and a faster “corporate” version of the WD2002FYPS RE4-GP with 64 MB cache and two processors - a replay of the successful terabyte model WD1000FYPS RE2-GP.

And, of course, WD MyBook external drives did not stand aside - the whole line was supplemented with single-disk terabyte devices.



After the nightmare with the firmware, Seagate is promoting the new 7200.12 series more carefully, limiting itself so far only to terabyte models on 2 plates. But here in the fashionable environmentally friendly LP line, a volume of 2 terabytes has already appeared .

In general, it is possible that we will not see the next tenth capacity of classic hard drives. I remember that 2 GB disks appeared approximately in 1997. 6 years have passed and in 2003 200 gigabyte models were released. After another 6 years - 2 terabytes. Those. no acceleration, if you count on a logarithmic scale :) In 2015, we are promised a complete dominance of SSD. I must say that the flash memory is not so simple. Just look at the picture I found in the journal Oleg Artamonov in the article " Insanely cheapening flash-memory ."



Well, let's see how tenacious the good old hard drive will be.

Reduced disc rotation speed

Another interesting tendency to return to a smaller number of revolutions. It all started a long time ago and, as usual, from WD, from the first versions of Green Power. For some time they seemed to be embarrassed to admit that their plates were spinning more slowly and talked about some kind of intellectual mechanism that varied the rotational speed depending on the load. Now, however, 5400 are honestly writing. Now here is the Samsung EcoGreen. And Seagate decided to show off, and made a non-standard 5900 rpm in the LP series. Finally, manufacturers began to understand that in the race for speed we should not forget about ergonomics - the silence of the workplace is for many more important. Well, at the same time there was a reason to draw a green leaf on the package - an extra advertisement in the conditions of the energy crisis.

Capable home storage - cheaper and better

Reading the abandoned iXBT subscription a month ago, I came across not interesting news . The company Raidsonic has released a very interesting case for the HDD ICY BOX IB-NAS902.



Even the name of the model emphasizes that this is a full-fledged NAS with Ethernet, eSATA and USB ports. At a cost of 77 euros is a great solution for the home. I kept looking in the direction of the WD MyBook with an Ethernet port . Now I decided to wait for this miracle. He has, however, one minus, but very annoying - it is compatible with disks no more than 1 Terabyte. Again, the notorious "market positioning." But the trend is visible. I think similar models from other manufacturers with support for large volumes will appear very soon. Or for this to come fresh firmware.

Find for photographers and video operators

With the increase in the volume of memory cards, I stopped being interested in photobank devices for throwing off footage away from civilization. However, the new Nexto drive forced to look at them again.



The fact is that in addition to supporting standard memory cards at high speed (up to 80 megabytes / sec) and non-standard fast SxS , the device is equipped with a FireWare input, which, theoretically, makes it possible to shoot high-resolution video directly to this drive, including HDV camera type Canon HV-20. For me, this is also important from the point of view that the tape drive mechanism in the new camera turned out to be unacceptably loud, and the recording on FireWare will help not to use tapes at all. Capacity from 160 to 500 gigabytes leaves far behind even heaped HD cameras like the Sony HDR-SR . In addition, this thing is also well protected - it even contains a free-fall sensor. It remains only to find out how much such a miracle of technology will cost. Now the price of specialized devices for recording via FireWare starts from 20,000 rubles.

miscellanea

And finally, just curious news from the world of SSD (the only one from the current section, which is peeped at Cooler ). Texas Instruments has released another server monster - drive RamSan-620.



This is a whole rack of SSD capacity from 2 to 5 Terabytes. Bandwidth 3 GB / sec. True, it is limited to the Fiber Channel interface with a speed of 4 Gigabit / s, but as far as I know, you can install additional channels and thereby bring the speed closer to the theoretical one.

The price of a 2-terabyte model is $ 88,000, a 5-terabyte model is $ 220,000. And you say SSD to the masses :) But in fact, this is a very specialized thing - in addition to the drive, it is equipped with a powerful processor, huge caches and its own OS.

I had a job dealing with a similar device of the previous generation, the volume, however, only 64 Gigabytes, but the price at that time was also about $ 100,000. And in reality I saw how files are copied at a speed of 400 megabytes per second. The database of our system has earned it as a jet, even compared to the previously used CX-300, built on the same architecture, but using standard magnetic disks.

Well, now there is no more time. Until next release!