marvel-media.com

marvel-media.com



We’ve written about hard drive performance several times: Current drives are using a technique called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), although other techniques, such as self-ordered magnetic arrays, are also being investigated. * Lower power consumption Should your drive be at least several years old, you can expect to get several benefits from a new drive: o CtiStore Devices in the iPod family are designed around a central scroll wheel (except for the iPod shuffle) and provide a simple user interface. o $179.99 * o $159.99 The full-sized model stores media on a built-in hard drive, while the smaller iPod nano and iPod shuffle use flash memory. * Significantly higher capacity at lower cost As of July 2006, the lineup consists of the 5th generation iPod, with a video player; the iPod nano, with a color screen; and the iPod shuffle. Among the vendors, there has been some consolidation among drive makers, with the market for the smallest hard drives. Only Toshiba and Samsung make 1.8-inch drives, with Toshiba seemingly most committed and now shipping a 160GB drive. (It's no surprise that Apple's largest-capacity iPod is also 160GB.) But in part because 1.8-inch drives have been slower than traditional 2.5-inch drives, they haven't seen as much use in notebooks. Instead, the vendors seem more focused on 2.5-inch drives, with Seagate introducing a 500GB 2.5-in drive that's only 7mm thick. o $189.00 Solid-state drives (SSDs) have gotten a lot of attention in small capacities for netbooks, and in larger capacities for notebooks, where their thin profiles and fast read times show some benefit. For smaller capacities, around 16GB or less, they can compete with hard drives on price, but for larger capacities they are significantly more expensive. Still, we're seeing more of a push for tiered storage, where data is split either manually or automatically among SSDs (for the most immediately needed data, often used almost like a cache), fast Fiber Channel drives (which are larger, and used for information that isn't used quite as often, but still needs to be accessible). And of course, many people are still archiving to tape. Other features getting more attention are replication, snapshots, and as always, better management tools. It's not so much that there are completely new technologies hitting in these areas, but some of the things that have been around for a bit are becoming more popular. Just about every storage maker offers some form of storage virtualization, making it easier to move storage from one physical location to another without the application knowing about the change. as that's the key reason for SANs in the first place. SSDs—typically very fast drives made from SLC flash and special controllers—are getting more attention, particularly in applications where fast reads can help a system handle more transactions. Personal computers, the computer hardware familiar to most people, form only a small minority of computers (about 0.2% of all new computers produced in 2003) Market statistics. Many storage