Guest post by Greg Schulz or StorageIO

This follows the first of a two-part series on my latest experiences with Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD’s) and Solid State Devices (SSD’s). In my ongoing last momentus moment post I discussed what I have done with HHDD’s and setting the stage for expanded SSD use. I have the newer HHDD’s, e.g. Seagate Momentus XT II 750GB (8GB SLC nand flash) installed and have since bought another from Amazon as well as having some of the older 500GB (4GB SLC nand flash) in various systems. Those are all functioning great, however still waiting and looking forward to the rumored firmware enhancements to boost write capabilities.

This brings me up to the latest momentus moment which now includes SSD’s.

Well its two years later and I now have a 256GB (usable capacity is lower) Samsung SSD that I bought from Amazon.com and installed in one of my laptops and just as when I made the first switch to HHDD’s, I also have a backup copy/clone to fall back to in case of emergency.

Was it worth the wait? Yes, particularly using the HHDD’s to bridge the gap and enable some productivity gain which more than paid for them based on some different projects. I’m already seeing productivity improvements that will make future upgrades more easy to justify (to myself).

I deviated from my strategy a bit and installed the SSD about six months earlier than I was planning to do so because of a physical barrier. That physical barrier was my new traveling laptop only accepts 7mm height 2.5 inch small form factor devices and the 750GB HHDD that I had planned on installing was 2.5mm to thick which pushed up the SSD installation.

What will become of the 750GB HHDD? Its being redeployed to help speed up file serving, backups and other functions.

Will I replace the HHDD’s in my other workstations and laptops now with SSD’s? Across the board no, not yet, however there is one other system that is a prime candidate to maybe upgrade in a month or two (maybe less).

Will I stick with the Samsung SSD’s or look at other options? I’m keeping my options open and using this as a gauge to test and compare other options in a real world working environment as opposed to a lab bench test simulation. In other words, taking the next step past the lab test and product reviews, gaining comfort and confidence and then trying out with real use activity.

What will happen in the future as I install more SSD’s and have surplus HHDD’s? Redeployed them of course into file or NAS servers, backup targets that in turn will replace HDD’s that will either get retired, or redeployed to replace older, smaller capacity, higher cost to handle HDD’s used for offsite protection.

I tried using the software that came with the SSD to do the cloning and should have known better, however wanted to see what the latest version of ghost was like (it was a waste of time to be polite). Instead I used Seagate Discwizard (aka Acronis) which requires at least one Seagate product (source or target) for cloning.

Cloning from the Seagate HHDD that have been previously cloned from the Hitachi HDD that came with the laptop, was a none issue. However, I wanted to see what would happen if I attached the Samsung SSD to the Seagate Goflex cable and clone directly from the Hitachi HDD, it worked. Hence another reason to have some of the Seagate Goflex cables (USB and eSATA) like the ones I bought at Amazon.com around in your toolbox.

While I do not have concrete empirical numbers to share, cloning from a HDD to a SSD is shall we say fast, however, what’s really fun to watch is cloning from a HHDD to a SSD using an eSata (GoFlex) connector adapter. The reason I say that it is fun is that you don’t have to sit and wait for hours, it’s not minutes to move 100s of GBs, however you can very much see the progress bar move at a good pace.

Also, I put the HHDD on an eSata port and try that out as a backup or data dump target if you have the need for speed, capacity and cost effectiveness, yes its fast, has lots of capacity and so forth. Now if Seagate and Synology or EMC Iomega would get their acts together and add support for the HHDD’s in those different unified SMB and SOHO NAS solutions, that would be way cool.

Will I be racing to put SSD’s in my other laptops or workstations soon? Probably not as there are things in the works and working their way into and through the market place that I wanted to wait for, and thus will wait for now, that is unless a more interesting opportunity pops up.

Note:  For clarification, Greg refers to Seagate’s solid state hybrid drives (SSHD) as hybrid hard disk drives (HHDD). They are one in the same.

Related StorageIO Hybrid Posts:

More Storage IO momentus HHDD and SSD moments part I
New Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive (SSD and HDD)
Other Momentus XT moments posts here here, here, here and here

Cloud storage is everywhere…and the competition for your files is heating up now that Facebook is in the running.

Some may argue that Facebook has always been in the cloud storage space.  It was just focused on photo sharing.  After all, 250 Million photos are uploaded a day to Facebook, and that is some serious online storage, but let’s get down to brass tacks on this whole cloud storage craze…the purpose.

Each cloud storage provider has a purpose in their message – something of value they offer a consumer or business for storing their files in the provider’s data center cloud.  For many, it may be data protection or backup, for others their message may be around personal mobility, collaboration, syncing, or sharing.  Some may offer a combination of all of the above.

Based on the comparison, the most common “marketing messages” :  share, simple, secure, and perhaps sync.  Obviously, these words were not created in a vacuum. There are plenty of really smart people at these companies, with all kinds of research to support the messages they have developed for their cloud storage offering.  For consumers, my bet is on those with the most “simplistic” message:  Google, DropBox, and Apple…with Facebook being the one I am leaning towards the most for 5 simple reasons:

1. Facebook doesn’t need a tagline or special messaging because…
2. they have the installed base which means…
3. they have the daily traffic and integration with our devices & apps , so…
4. they can provide us a one-stop-shop, meaning…
5. sharing, securing, even syncing our content should be relatively simple.

Of course, Apple and Google can say the same thing…hence we’re back to the big 3.

If you had to pick one…who would you choose?

Related Posts:

Network storage, cloud storage, removable storage…floppy disk?

Why trust will reign supreme in a broader storage war

What would/could you do with 5GB of free storage?

Image by: http://askq8.com/blogs

Here’s a concept:  what if your hard drive grew more capacity on its own? This discovery is all over the news – if you travel in the high profile, fast moving world of data storage

That is what scientists from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology are working on. According to an ExtremeTech article, “researchers identified and extracted the protein responsible for converting iron into magnetite — Mms6.” Granted, the research has only proven to match the capacity Seagate’s recent demonstration of HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) of 1TB per square inch. But, as the ExtremeTech article points out…

“the real appeal here is that we might eventually be able to grow non-volatile storage, rather than manufacture it. Imagine if your computer had a hard drive that simply grew another platter when it approached capacity; imagine if repartitioning a hard drive actually split your hard drive platter into multiple fragments, which could then be re-grown to become complete platters.”

It’s safe to assume, the technology may not be cheap, but in terms of scaling to your storage needs, it seems much more appealing for a drive to simply expand on its own versus you having to upgrade your storage, or add more storage as your capacity needs grow.  Of course, there are numerous variables at play here. The same variables that go into designing a hard drive whether its Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), or this new concept of bacterial magnetic recording…I’ll call it BMR for consistency’s sake.

Reliability is the number one variable, and what goes into designing a single hard drive (and even moreso, different types of hard drives — desktop, laptop, enterprise, consumer electronics) is painstakingly technical.  Hundreds of thousands of hours and tens of millions of dollars go into ensuring the product will operate at a wide range of temperatures, altitudes, humidity levels, and workloads, not to mention with thousands of different applications, in hundreds of different systems, and for hundreds of thousands of consecutive hours of operation.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the innovation and science that is being applied to making hard drives bigger, faster, more reliable, cost effective, and sustainable, and given the growth of data, there seems to be a lot of investment in the areas of science needed to advance drive technology.  Here is what we have seen just in the past year:

• Bacterial magnetic recording
• HAMR
• Superman Crystals
• Molecule-sized magnets

Data growth is a powerful thing…it’s driving some of the world’s top research institutions to find new and better ways of storing information. And considering the amount of data we are generating, it’s a welcome sight. Let’s not get too excited though.  Research and discovery is one thing, putting the technology into real world use is where the magic really happens.

Do you want bacteria growing in your PC?

Related Posts:

Paving the way for big hard drive capacity gains

Seagate clears the air on HAMR vs BPM

Storage capacity science…take it with a grain of salt

A 3000TB hard drive?…it comes all down to chemistry

HAMR follows PMR to keep disks driving

Remember your first magazine subscription?  What was it?  Highlights, Boys Life?  Mine was Sports Illustrated of course.  Today, I don’t have any traditional subscriptions…everything is online.

Well, before the internet, blogs, RSS feeds, tablets, the cloud…there was the idea to put a magazine on a floppy. Way back in 1987!  One of my favorite blogs – Paleofuture on Smithsonian.com, describes the “floppyzine” as…

“In 1987, a small Dallas-based company launched a floppy disk magazine that was supposed to be a grand experiment in the future of the medium. At $19.95 an issue, The New Aladdin was a bi-monthly general-interest magazine that hoped to give readers an entirely new kind of interactive experience; complete with animated graphics, computer games, music, puzzles, and feature stories that allowed you to ask questions.”

I suggest you check it out: “The Magazine of the Future (on floppy disk!).” It’s a great look at the creative thinking that perhaps was a pre-cursor to what we have today. When you think about it, the web is basically what was envisioned for The New Aladdin…an interactive experience including animation, games, photos, videos, news, and we even get to ask questions and make comments. Heck, we even get to create our own magazines in the form blogs, content curation, etc.

The big differences…scale and price. What was once proposed on a single floppy disk is now on millions of hard drives and solid state drives scattered across the globe. And, what was once $20 per issue for one magazine, now is $20 or $40 a month for endless magazines, newpapers from around the world, streaming online radio, unlimited photo and video storage, (or whatever).

Cool.

Image by: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture

Image by: themetapicture.com

To a person that lives and breathes storage everyday, the term NAS, which stands for network attach storage, is probably one of the most widely used and coveted acronyms out there.

Why?

Because nearly every company that sells storage today wants a piece of the action, and the numbers say why. A recent research report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. says the worldwide market for NAS is projected to reach US$7.0 billion by the year 2017. According to a Storage Newsletter.com post on the subject, “Growth will be primarily driven by the increase in the number of home and small business networks, continued data explosion, and the growing need for data backup and archiving.”

I could go into all of the numbers floating around about data growth over the next 8 years, but I will spare you the numbers game.  It’s somewhere between 7 and 35 thousand exabytes by 2020. Need less to say, it’s a lot of data, and home users and small business users are not immune to the growth.

What this does tell me is with all this talk about the cloud, and the success companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, among others have experienced, there still remains some heavy growth in the small business and home storage market. Ironically, the same markets that have predominantly adopted public cloud storage.

So what gives?

I am not about to refute the research, because I do believe that network storage is the most cost effective way to backup and archive your digital files. But it also provides the flexibility to do much more.  Maybe that is the difference between network storage growth vs. cloud storage growth.  Flexibility vs simplicity. My home NAS is ideal for backup, but I can also use it as a personal server for my music, photos, videos, etc. I even have the ability to share my content with numerous devices as well as friends and family.

In the cloud, it’s all about simplicity…I use DropBox and Google for the most part, but mostly for documents I want to have access to whether I am at home or in the office.  I think of it as a replacement to the floppy disk, then zip disk, then CD, thumb drive…etc. I don’t think I even have a single piece of removable media left that I use. So is that what cloud storage is?  A glorified floppy disk, or thumb drive?

I guess for me it is…at least right now. Who know what the future “has in store” (pun intended).

How about you?  Do you have a home NAS?  Are you still carrying around a thumb drive?  Don’t tell me you still use a floppy disk…I won’t believe you

Related Posts:

Who is the largest cloud customer? You.

Why is the gap widening? Connected devices to storage devices.

GoFlex Home is now GoFlex Away too

Guest post by Greg Schulz or StorageIO

This is the first of a two part series on my latest experiences with HHDD and SSD’s

About two years ago I wanted to start installing solid state devices (SSD’s) into my workstations and laptops. Like many others, I found the expensive price for the limited capacity gains of the then generation SSD’s did not make for a good business decision based on my needs. Don’t get me wrong, I have been a huge fan of SSD for decades as an IT user, vendor, analysts, consultant and consumer and still am. In fact I have some SSD’s used for different purposes as well as many Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD’s). Almost two years ago when I first tested the HHDD’s, I did an first post in this ongoing series and this two-part post is part of that string of experiences observed evolving from HDD’s to HHDD’s to SSD’s

As a refresher, HHDD’s like the Seagate Momentus XT combine a traditional 7,200 RPM 2.5 inch 500GB or 750GB HDD with an integrated single level cell (SLC) nand flash SSD within the actual device. The SSD in the HHDD’s is part of the HDD’s controller complementing the existing DRAM buffer by adding 4GB (500GB models) or 8GB (750GB models) of fast nand flash SSD cache. This means that no external special controller, adapter, data movement or migration software are required to get the performance boost over a traditional HDD and the capacity above a SSD at an affordable cost. In other words, the HHDD’s bridge the gap between those who need large capacity and some performance increases, without having to spend a lot on a lower capacity SSD.

However based on my needs or business requirements two years ago I found the justification to get all the extra performance of  SSD not quite there when. Back two years ago my thinking was that it would be about two maybe three years before the right point for a mix of performance, availability (or reliability e.g.duty cycles), capacity and economics aligned.

Note that this was based on my specific needs and requirements as opposed to my wants or wishes (I wanted SSD back then, however my budget needed to go elsewhere). My requirements and performance needs are probably not the same as yours or others might be. I also wanted to see the incremental technology, product and integration improvements ranging from duty cycle or program/erase cycles (P/E)with newer firmware and flash translation layers (FTLs) among other things. Particularly with multilevel cell (MLC) or enhanced multilevel cell (eMLC) which helps bring the cost down while boosting the capacity, I’m seeing enough to have more confidence in those devices. Note that for the past couple of years I have used single level cell (SLC) nand flash SSD technology in my HHDD’s, the same SSD flash technology that has been found in enterprise class storage.

While I wanted SSD’s two years ago in my laptops and workstations to improve productivity which involves a lot of content creation in addition to consumption, however as mentioned above, there were barriers. So instead of sitting on the sidelines, waiting for SSD’s to either become lower cost, or more capacity for a given cost, or wishing somebody would send me some free stuff (that may or may not have worked), I took a different route. That route was to try the HHDD’s such as Seagate Momentus XT.

Disclosure: Seagate sent me my first HHDD for first testing and verifications before buying several more from Amazon.com and installing them in all laptops, workstations and a server (not all servers have the HHDD’s, or at least yet).

The main reason I went with the HHDD’s two years ago and continue to use them today is to bridge the gap and gain some benefit vs. waiting and wishing and talking about what SSD’s would enable me to do in the future while missing out on productivity enhancements.

The HHDD’s also appealed to me in that my laptops are space constrained for putting two drives and playing the hybrid configuration game of installing both a small SSD and HDD and migrating data back and forth. Sure I could do that for in the office or carry an extra external device around however been there, done that in the past and want to move away from those types of models where possible.

Note:  For clarification, Greg refers to Seagate’s solid state hybrid drives (SSHD) as hybrid hard disk drives (HHDD). They are one in the same.

Related Posts by Storage IO:
More Storage IO momentus HHDD and SSD moments part II
New Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive (SSD and HDD)
Other Momentus moments posts here here, here, here and here

The crazy truth about a good set of headphones…they can be more expensive than the very storage you keep your music on.  Maybe it’s a style thing…headphones are a fashion statement, or have become fashionably accepted to wear as part of the ensemble.  Last I checked, no one was walking around with a GoFlex Satellite drive clipped to their belt. Maybe I’m onto something…

What’s your headphone fashion statement?  If you don’t care then…who makes the best headphones in terms of audio quality? … I’m in the market.

Image by: marketo

We have all heard “Library of Congress” (LOC) comparisons when it comes to storage.  Companies far and wide that deal with large amounts of digital content or data always seem to be compared to the amount of data stored by the Library of Congress.  I think we (Seagate) have even used such comparisons in the past…

• Future Storage Technology: How to Store the Entire U.S. Library of Congress on a Coin
• Library of Congress comes to Flickr

I came across this great post by Leslie Johnston on The Signal blog on the LOC website:  ”How many Libraries of Congress does it take…?”  Leslie’s post provides some examples of such comparisons.  Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Every Six Hours, the NSA Gathers as Much Data as Is Stored in the Entire Library of Congress.”
• “Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.”
• “There are 25 Petabytes (10^15) created every day and thrown into the internet.  This is 70 times larger than the Library of Congress.”
• “The size of Facebook’s data retention database alone would be larger than all of the content that the Library of Congress has put online to date.”

 Related Posts:

Paving the way for big hard drive capacity gains

When was the last time you went to the library?

The land before drives: at the library

Image by: ars technica

Cloud storage is all the rage these days, especially given Microsoft and Google’s announcements this past week, but as Woody Leonhard says on InfoWeek, “Cloud storage booming, but trouble brewing.”

When you compare Cloud Storage providers, you can obviously look at things like price, capacity, mobile compatibility and integration with apps (Great Cloud Storage Comparison chart for consumers by Ars Technica), but as Woody contends, with security and privacy concerns, illegal distribution of content (i.e. Megaupload), the number one factor in this all out war for your content storage needs is trust.

But, this is nothing new to traditional (pre-cloud storage) storage suppliers, except before, trust was mostly related to reliability. Do you trust Company ABC’s hard drives to store your precious digital content?

With Cloud Storage, this shifts a bit. Sure, reliability is still a factor, but Cloud trust is more related to security, privacy, and quite frankly longevity. Is the cloud storage provider reputable, honest, and in good financial standing?  Because, if they go away, so does your content. Fear mongering aside, consumers never had to think about this before when it came to storage. The only fear was mechanical failure, hence the backup, backup, backup mantra storage companies have been saying for decades. But the fear of mechanical failure is something we have to deal with for almost everything we own…appliances, cars, phones, televisions, air conditioning, heating, water systems, alarm systems, you name it. But there are always precautions we can take to feel safer in our investment whether they be extended warranties, backups, or routine maintenance contracts.

With cloud storage, trust must be built not only in the terms and conditions (which yes we should all read instead of just clicking “accept” or “I agree”), but also in how the company operates, how it enforces misconduct by subscribers/users, who it shares information with, and how much access they have to yours.

Yes, cloud storage is here to stay, and with innovation and technology advancement, it can only get faster, safer, and more cost effective. The question is, who will be around for the long haul?  The answer lies in who you trust the most.

Who do you think is or will be the most trustworthy cloud storage provider?

Related Posts:

What would/could you do with 5GB of free storage?

Do you live in a data privacy hot zone?

Who is the largest cloud customer? You.

Image by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/antmcneill/5712892342/

All this talk about the post PC era (which I don’t necessarily agree with when it comes to those that say the PC is dead) garners a lot of attention in the storage space – especially for hard drive suppliers.  Yes, I have covered the topic in the past…

• The PC is dead. No alive. I mean dead. No sorry, alive. What do you believe?
• When it comes to forecasts, who do you believe?
• The death of the hard drive? C’mon people…

Instead of appearing on the defensive about the subject, I thought I would attempt to embrace the post PC era and look at it from another angle:  The PC in pieces.

We all remember the traditional personal computer (PC)…a beige colored tower or desktop equipped with a motherboard, processor, memory, OS, and hard drives – all in one nice neat package. Over the years, the PC got more feature rich, faster, and with more mass storage. It even changed color from beige to black, but as we sought to break away from the office, the traditional PC lacked mobility, and the notebook or laptop was born. But still, it was simply a smaller lighter version of a motherboard, processor, memory, OS, and hard drive. Then wireless came along, thanks to Intel’s Centrino (remember that?) and our minds were opened to the opportunities of accessing content from more than our desks, from the coffee shop, the airport…and mobile hotspots were born. Our infatuation with the web, combined with our hunger for even faster and more widely available access to the internet gave birth to mobile broadband and the smartphone was born. The smartphone carved the path for tablets, and here we are today.

Yes, we still have desktops and notebooks. But, more and more people have smartphones, and tablets (thanks to Apple). Such rapid adoption of  smartphones and tablets has given some level of credence to the thought of a Post PC era. No doubt, desktop sales have been on the decline, as are notebook sales (as of late).  Of course, Intel hopes to resurrect the notebook in the form of the Ultrabook and they are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars to make it happen. Yet, Ultrabooks, even smartphones and tablets are still motherboard, processor, memory, and OS. Sure, they all have storage, but not mass storage…flash storage.

But – some argue that Ultrabook manufacturers will be forced to adopt Solid State Hybrid Drives (Flash combined with spinning disk) to make the platform cost competitive and attractive to consumers. 

Needless to say, the hard drive has been yanked from a majority of the devices shipping today.  Begging the question – is the hard drive the defining factor of a PC?  Go with me on this one…

If “experts” say we are in the Post PC Era, and the traditional PC was defined as motherboard, processor, memory, OS, and hard drive, yet today’s devices still have motherboard, processor, memory, and OS, then the hard drive must be what ultimately defines a PC….Right? And, here I thought Intel processors and Microsoft OS defined the PC for the last 2 decades.

Oh yeah, but I almost forgot … all those smart phones and tablets do still use mass storage (more hard drives than ever)! It’s in the cloud.

Related Posts:

The PC is dead. No alive. I mean dead. No sorry, alive. What do you believe?

When it comes to forecasts, who do you believe?

The death of the hard drive? C’mon people…