Storage World

Samsung Demos Awesome 24-SSD RAID

You’d have to be crazy to build a 24-drive RAID array. Crazy like a fox, as Samsung showed us when the company strung together 24 SSDs to create 6TB of solid state storage, with a theoretical throughput of 2GB/s.

The video of the escapade got more than 2.6 million views, and even though the drives weren’t all technically on the same controller (two RAID controllers along with all of the motherboard’s onboard ports were used), it proved that SSDs are serious business.

Tags: Memory, storage

Imagine storing 10,000 standard-definition movies on one disc. Sound impossible?

Not to a team of Australian researchers. The team recently published a report in the journal Nature in which it details its development of a five-dimensional storage medium that promises to store up 10 terabytes on a single disc.

Peter Zijlstra, James W.M. Chon, and MinGu of the Swinburne University of Technology found a way to combine addressing data using wavelength, polarization, and three spatial dimensions, creating the so-called five dimensions of addressable space. The approach allows for a storage density of a terabit of information in just a cubic centimetre of space.

Mixing and matching different methods of addressing data has been tried using individual methods, the researchers said. In fact, writing data to a three-dimensional storage medium has been one of the hallmarks of holographic storage. But for five dimensional storage, the team projected information into the material using different colour wavelengths. Additional information was then added by polarizing the light, first at a fixed orientation and then by rotating the filter 90 degrees. Data was read using a technique called longitudinal SPR mediated 2-photon luminescence.

It’s difficult to say, however, how easily a solution like this might be moved into production, since the medium used to store the information is a network of gold nano-rods. “The major hurdle is the lack of a suitable recording medium that is extremely selective in the domains of wavelength and polarization,” the researchers wrote in an abstract. Nonetheless, companies such as Samsung have already expressed interest.

Source:JULY 2009 PC MAGAZINE

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The 15-inch MacBook Pro has been totally re-engineered. Apple’s “unibody architecture” builds it out of a single piece of aluminium, which, says Apple, reduces construction failures. The design is easier to service, too.

We looked at a 2.53-GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 5400rpm, 320GB hard drive. The ports, including Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, two USB, audio-in and -out, and an ExpressCard/34 slot-are on the left. The slot-loading SuperDrive and a Kensington lock slot sit on the right. At a minimum weight of 5.5 pounds, it’s about 1 ounce heavier than the older model.

The 15.4-inch, 1440-by-900- pixel wide-screen monitor is a joy to behold. Inside is nVidia’s Hybrid SLI pairing of two GPUs (one on the motherboard, the other discrete). You can toggle between the two for better video performance or longer battery life.

It got a respectable 93 in our WorldBench 6 tests due largely to the nVidia GeForce 9600GT M GPU riding shotgun. Battery life is trickier. We run our benchmarks in Windows, which meant we could not test the MacBook in its battery-saving mode. At high power, though, it lasted for 1 hour, 54 minutes.

The entire 4.13-by-3-inch trackpad acts as a button. It’s so big, you might end up using the extensive array of supported hand gestures instead. As for the keyboard, the generous, flat-topped keys have just enough travel, and register a solid press.

Apple MacBook Pro MB471LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop (2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, Slot Loading SuperDrive)

Source: PC World Jan 2009

Tags: storage

A joint venture between two of the world’s largest chip firms plans to release a new alternative to Flash memory this year.

Numonyx, formed from the memory units of Intel and STMicroelectronics to commercialize phase-change memory, was created to commercialize Phase Change Memory (PCM), which is said to combine the read speed of NOR Flash and write speed of NAND.

PCM memory also degrades far more slowly than Flash memory and requires no erase cycle.

Phase-change memory works by using tiny heaters to switch cells of chalcogenide glass between a low-resistance crystalline state and an amorphous form with a much higher resistance.

Intel said in February that it had produced PCM cells that store two bits instead on one, which could make the technology price competitive with Flash for purposes such as solid-state disks.

Initial applications are likely to be in mobile phones but the technology is unlikely to go mainstream for at least two years.

Website: www.numonyx.com

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The continuing evolution of processors tends to spark impressive innovation in other component areas, because no manufacturer wants its technology to be a data bottleneck in new systems. As such, the storage arena has made significant progress in recent years, particularly with solid-state drives, and now IBM is pushing that technology even farther.

IBM has released details on a solid-state storage technology dubbed racetrack, named after the technology’s penchant for racing data around a track. This technology could allow handheld devices to store 100 times more data than devices hold today, at a lower cost and using less power. These drives would also be much more reliable, because there are no moving parts.

“It has been an exciting adventure to have been involved with research into metal spintronics since
its inception almost 20 years ago with our work on spin-valve structures,” says IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin. “The combination of extraordinarily interesting physics and spintronic materials engineering, one atomic layer at a time, continues to be highly challenging and very rewarding.”

That challenge is likely daunting for Parkin, as spintronics is a sophisticated form of quantum computing that relies on spinning electrons to read and write data. Although storing information in magnetic domain walls has been researched for almost 50 years, IBM claims to have overcome obstacles of cost, complexity, and power by blending spin-polarized current with magnetization.

Tags: storage

With the prices of traditional hard drives continuing to drop faster than a lead balloon, manufacturers are seeking technologies that not only can surpass those drives in performance and flexibility, but that can also deliver a higher financial return. On both counts, the SSD, or solidstate drive, appears to be the technology of choice.

In December, Intel unveiled its Z-P140 PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) SSD line of tiny drives with relatively tiny (2GB and 4GB) capacities. Although the drives are smaller than a penny, their application is limited to small mobile devices and likely expensive ones, at that. But the company has indicated that it soon plans to ship SATA (Serial ATA)-II SSDs in 1.8- and 2.5-inch sizes in capacities up to 160GB. Intel also said these drives will boast better read speeds than a competing drive from Samsung and that SSDs will see price drops of 50% in 2009 and another 50% in 2010.

OCZ also is entering the SSD arena, offering drives with capacities of 32GB and 64GB and impressive read speeds of 120MB per second and write speeds of 100MB per second. Like other SSDs, the OCZ entries have no moving parts, feature low power consumption, and have high shock resistance.

Tags: hard disk

Gateway may have its price, as we learned in late August when Acer bought the cow hided company for a reported $700-plus million, but Seagate isn’t on the selling block, says CEO Bill Watkins, despite rumored interest from Chinese, Korean, and Japanese companies in obtaining ownership of the U.S. hard drive maker. Although the buying and selling of tech companies has become somewhat back-page news in recent years, the interest by a Chinese company in buying Seagate got the attention of U.S. governmental officials with national security concerns, according to quotes from Hawkins. Despite the attention, Seagate managed to release new Maxtor OneTouch 4 drives in September, including a $359.99, 1TB Plus version.

If you’re a big-time notebook user, you have to be big-time happy with news of Toshiba’s new MK-52GSX 2.5-inch SATA notebook drive, which maxes out at a bigtime and world-best 320GB. The two-plattered giant runs at 5,400rpm and sports an 8MB buffer and 12ms average seek time. Expect production to start yet this year.

Elsewhere, Toshiba also recently took memory card storage to unprecedented heights with a new 32GB SDHC card. Although that capacity won’t be ready until January, expect new 16GB SDHC and 8GB mini-SDHC cards in October. Finally, Japanese manufacturer DTS has released details of its mCell cyperDrive, which combines an 80/120/160GB 2.5-inch SATA drive with a real-time OS, CPU, and 1GB DDR RAM, all residing in a 3.5-inch case. Transfer rates reportedly hit 110MBps.

Manufacturers continue to work overtime to create quiet components for computers. In addition to power supplies, CPU cooling units, and graphics cards, hard drives are also receiving attention, and for good reason drives are a notorious noise source.

One of the latest developments in this realm is the SpinPoint S166 series of “ultra-silent” hard drives from Samsung. These drives use the company’s proprietary SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies to increase speeds while reducing noise, meaning that consumers won’t have to sacrifice performance for silence.

How much quieter are these drives? According to Samsung, which benchmarked the 80GB and 160GB S166 drives against competing drives, the new drives generate 2.4 bels (1 bel equals 10 decibels) in idle mode and 2.75 bels in seek mode, compared with 2.8 bels and 3.2 bels, respectively, in competing drives.

The S166 drives feature 7,200rpm speeds, an 8MB buffer, a SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) 3Gbps (gigabits per second) interface, and NCQ (Native Command Queuing) technology, which boosts the internal read-write optimization of the drives. Also included is improved “fly-height” control technology that increases readwrite sensitivity and an optimized actuator assembly that reinforces the mechanical function of the drives.

NEC and Hitachi say the new liquid-cooling system they jointly developed for desktops reduces PC-related noise to just 25db, which they say is quieter than the average home DVR. In addition to using Hitachi’s CPU liquid-cooling plate and wrapping the drive in noise-absorbing material and vibration insulation (which reduced hard drive noise by 10db), the companies claim the cooling system relies on the world’s first hard drive liquid cooling plate, which the pair developed together. Look for the system in NEC desktops selling in the Japan market “in the near future.” No word, though, on U.S. availability.