Storage News

Toshiba upgrades 2.5 inch drives

vink — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:36:49 +0000

Toshiba is about to release a new series of 2.5 inch Small Form Factor drives that offer a combination of high capacity and performance. The new MBF range comes in 300, 450 and 600 GB capacities, each doing 10.025 rpms. Yes, you read that correctly; 10.025. Their press release has the text “over 10.000 rpm” [...]Related posts:

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Overland adding SAN products

vink — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:11:18 +0000

Overland Storage, known mostly for their tape products, is expanding into the SAN business. This seems like a logical step; they were already offering disk-based Virtual Tape Libraries, and disk-based systems are replacing tape libraries at a fast pace.

Their first SAN product is the S2000. It’s being released under the SnapServer brand they acquired [...]Related posts:

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CMS Products add server backups to their portfolio

vink — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:34:31 +0000

CMS Products just announced the availability of their latest backup product: BounceBack Server. The software works just like their regular BounceBack offering; it makes a copy of your files to an external hard drive, which you can boot from in case of emergency.

For a full feature description check their product page; basically a list [...]Related posts:

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Free full system image backup software EASUS, a company I’ve admittedly never heard of before, just...
FarStone bundles DriveClone software with custom hardware FarStone, known for its DriveClone image-based backup software for both...

Stamp-sized 1TB SSDs coming soon?

vink — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:12:51 +0000

Crunchgear reports about a breakthrough in flash memory production; a Japanese team of scientists have developed a technology that allows a 90% reduction in SSD size, while also reducing power usage and costs.

The full report can be read in The Nikkei; the chip supposedly uses radio communication instead of traditional copper interconnects between individual flash [...]Related posts:

Apacer offers new SSDs targeted at gamers Apacer Europe has just announced three Solid State Drives targeted...
SSD-news from OCZ: 1TB drive and garbage collection HotHardware has an article about garbage collection for SSD drives....
Retro SSD drive: parallel ATA interface reappears It’s been a while since I last saw a Solid...

Isilon adding SSD options to scale-out NAS

vink — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:19:53 +0000

Isilon Systems is adding Solid State Drives to their S- and X-series products. Unlike other manufacturers, Isilon is specifically targeting SSDs for use in metadata storage; apparently these are currently a bottleneck in some systems.

“As the next-generation data center becomes a reality, SSDs are already playing a critical role in transforming enterprise data storage,” [...]Related posts:

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Micron buys flash maker Numonyx

vink — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:34:13 +0000

Micron Technology, one of the world’s leading memory manufacturers, has announced they will acquire flash maker Numonyx. The deal is an all-stock transaction, worth about $1.27 billion.

The deal makes Micron the number two memory maker behind Samsung Electronics, switching places with the new number three Hynix. Interestingly, Numonyx currently has a joint venture with Hynix [...]Related posts:

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Riverbed adding solid state storage to WAN accelerators

vink — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:47:18 +0000

Riverbed is turning to Solid State Drives to increase the speed of their WAN acceleration products. The two new Steelhead 7050 models can deliver up to 1 Gbps of WAN capacity for data center workloads, and 622 Mbps for remote office scenario’s; the previous-generation 6050 maxed out at 310 Mbps.

The 7050 comes in two flavors. [...]Related posts:

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New Density Dynamics product: JetX10 Density Dynamics released a new product based on their Jet.IO...

Nasuni shows beta of cloud storage gateway

vink — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:26:42 +0000

Nasuni, a cloud storage start-up founded by storage veterans Andres Rodriguez and Robert Mason early last year, has just released a beta of their first product. The Nasuni Filer is a virtual NAS appliance that can be installed in VMware, and creates a gateway between your local network and your choice of cloud-based storage.

The filer [...]Related posts:

CloudBerry offers beta of new backup utility CloudBerry, known mostly for their S3 explorer for easily browsing...
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Dataram gives more details about their mystery product The mystery new product Dataram has been talking about appears...

3TB hard drives coming later this year?

vink — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:22:52 +0000

TDK’s most recent roadmap shows some new developments. The most important thing I found in this presentation was a roadmap for the next generation of HDD read/write heads.

Drive manufacturers are currently testing heads for 320 and 375 GB platters meant for 2.5″ drives. Models with two platters and 640GB capacity have already been announced; we [...]Related posts:

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InPhase shutting down?

vink — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:13:22 +0000

InPhase, one of the pioneers of holographic storage technology, appears to be shutting down. As I wrote last year, while the technology sounds promising it still has a long way to go. There is no real use case, and the price per gigabyte is still higher than for other storage media.

The local newspaper Longmont Times-Call [...]Related posts:

Holographic storage: still a long way to go Holographic storage made headlines yesterday for the first time in...
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Hybrid solution combining SSD and traditional hard drive

vink — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:11:20 +0000

SilverStone has come up with a nice idea to combine the excellent capacity and value of a traditional hard drive with the speed advantages of Solid State Drives. By combining a normal hard drive and a SSD into a single “virtual” drive, they promise a speed increase of up to 70%.

The basic idea is that [...]Related posts:

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Plextor enters SSD market Plextor, widely known for their CD-ROM and DVD drives, has...

Intel/Micron joint venture readying 25nm flash memory

vink — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:20:03 +0000

IMFT, an Intel/Micron joint venture, announced they are sampling flash memory produced on their next-generation, 25nm production process. This latest shrink enables Intel to reach densities of 8 gigabytes per chip, reducing chip count for larger SSD’s and other memory devices.

The IMFT joint venture was formed in 2006, with a 50nm production process. This is [...]Related posts:

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Retro SSD drive: parallel ATA interface reappears

vink — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:54:25 +0000

It’s been a while since I last saw a Solid State Drive with a parallel ATA interface, but at least one company is still developing them. Active Media Products announced a new 128GB SSD earlier this week, targeted at systems that are limited to an old PATA interface.

The new SaberTooth drive is available in three [...]Related posts:

Seagate first to add 6 Gbps SATA interface to a 2TB drive The new 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT is the first 2TB...
Plextor enters SSD market Plextor, widely known for their CD-ROM and DVD drives, has...
SSD news from Super Talent: new drives up to 512GB Super Talent just presented their new UltraDrive DX Solid State...

Texas Memory Systems announces open source drivers for PCIe Flash

vink — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:00:36 +0000

Texas Memory Systems (TMS) just announced they are providing open source drivers for their RamSan-20: a PCIe based flash solution that offers lower latency and higher bandwidth than a normal Solid State Drive connected via a SAS or SATA connector.

Drivers are available for both Linus and Solaris operating systems, which are traditionally used more than [...]Related posts:

TMS launches 100TB Flash Memory system Texas Memory Systems, the company known mostly for their RamSan...
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Avere Systems adds SSD to their FXT appliances

vink — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:41:19 +0000

SSD released a new product in their FXT range of NAS accelerators: the FXT2700. The two older models, FXT2300 and FXT2500, relied on a combination of RAM and 15k rpm SAS disks for caching data that is used often; the FXT2700 combines RAM and SSD for even faster access.

For those that haven’t heard of this [...]Related posts:

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3PAR adds VMware backup and management tools

vink — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:57:21 +0000

3PAR has announced two new plugins for VMware’s vCenter. The first sounds pretty standard, but the second one promises to change backup procedures forever.

The first plugin is a “standard” management plugin that allows administrators to view details about a virtual machine’s storage, such as the RAID level and type of drives used in the underlying [...]Related posts:

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New memory cards: capacity, wireless transfers

vink — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:37:59 +0000

There has been a lot of news about memory cards for digital cameras, media players and mobile phones lately. Two notable announcements managed to escape my attention earlier this month; a huge 128GB compact flash card, and a new card from Sony that supports wireless data transfers.

The CF card is made by Silicon Power, [...]Related posts:

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Lockheed Martin offering secure USB sticks

vink — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:47:50 +0000

Lockheed Martin, a firm that’s primarily known for their physical security products such as jet fighters, helicopters and naval ships, is now getting into computer security as well. Their first product was announced today: a secure USB stick powered by IronKey technology.

Lockheed Martin adds some extra technology to the IronKey drive that allows the drive [...]Related posts:

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EC2 performance issues, what about S3 and EBS?

vink — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:09:31 +0000

As reported around the web, it looks like several people have noticed performance issues with Amazons EC2 cloud computing service. While this was to be expected, some people are surprised nonetheless. For those that are surprised: please read “the truth about overselling“. It’s about web hosting, but much of the contents are true for cloud [...]Related posts:

Intel boosts X25-M SSD performance with firmware update Intel just released a firmware update for their X25-M Solid...

SuperMicro adding double-sided storage server chassis

vink — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:13:12 +0000

SuperMicro, one of the largest suppliers for “white-box” computer makers, presented their solution for high-density storage servers last month. Most traditional storage servers offer twelve 3.5 inch SAS or SATA drives per 2U of rackspace; the only exception to this are vendors offering top-loading drives such as Sun, and those offering disk trays holding more [...]Related posts:

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New Density Dynamics product: JetX10

vink — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:36:04 +0000

Density Dynamics released a new product based on their Jet.IO RAM drives. The JetX10 Acceleration Appliance bundles four Jet.IO drives, eight SAS or SATA drives and a huge amount (up to 144GB) of RAM into a single server running Windows 2008. External connectivity is provided by either FC or iSCSI over 8Gbps FC links or [...]Related posts:

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Samsung also readying 64GB NAND flash modules

vink — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:35:56 +0000

Following Toshiba’s announcement last month, Samsung has provided details about their next generation of NAND flash modules. Like Toshiba, the new modules offered by Samsung will be 16-layer stacks of 32 Gbit flash chips, providing a total of 64GB of storage per chip.

In addition to the new flash modules, they also announced a new microSD card [...]Related posts:

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Plextor enters SSD market

vink — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:13:33 +0000

Plextor, widely known for their CD-ROM and DVD drives, has announced they are entering the SSD business. According to the announcement made at the CES, the first drives will be 64 and 128GB units based on a Marvell chipset.

The 64GB model just appeared on their website; it’s based on MLC flash memory, but promises to [...]Related posts:

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IronKey responds to secure flash drive vulnerabilities

vink — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:30:10 +0000

Following the recent news about attacks against “secure” flash drives from Kingston, Verbatim and SanDisk other manufacturers have been rather quiet. This might mean they are checking their own products for similar vulnerabilities, or even working on patches for those before making any announcements. IronKey however is sure their products are safe, and want the [...]No related posts.

Do consumers need enterprise-class drives?

vink — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:12:56 +0000

A post over at PC Pro got me wondering about the difference between “consumer” and “enterprise” hard drives. Tim Danton ask whether “Windows 7 is killing your hard disks”; while I’m sure that Windows 7 is not doing just that, there might actually be some relation between your choice of operating system and hard drive [...]Related posts:

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How green are those 2.5 inch drives? We’ve long heard stories about how 2.5 inch drives would...
Western Digital announces new My Book and My Passport external drives WD has revealed updates for their My Book and My...