NewsRambus Shows Off Hardware From ItsTerabyte Bandwidth Initiative
Posted 08/26/08 at 11:12:02 AM by Paul Lilly
Rambus, the company most known for its rampage of patent lawsuits on all things memory, may soon be better known for something else. The company announced a Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative last year, in which it set a goal of developing a future memory architecture capable of delivering a terabyte per second of memory bandwidth to a single System-on-Chip (SoC), and Rambus showed at IDF that it's getting ever closer to that goal.
On display was a DRAM emulator pushing 16Gbps, a key hurdle in making a terabyte of bandwidth possible. However, the test chips were only single channel, putting a slight damper on the display. Still, if Rambus can bring to fruition its new memory architecture, which it looks to be well on its way to doing, it could usher in a new era of high performance memory products.
NewsIBM Introduces Industry's Fastest One Terabyte Tape Drive
Posted 07/25/08 at 10:58:01 PM by Paul Lilly
Sun can lay claim as the first company to release a one terabyte tape drive with its StorageTek T10000B, but the company didn't have long to celebrate. Raining on their parade, IBM has released a one terabyte tape drive of its own, only this one runs 33 percent faster than Sun's.
The new IBM TS1130 tape drive can store up to one terabyte of uncompressed data per cartridge at 160MB/sec, or 40MB/sec faster than the T10000B, allowing the new model to complete backups up to 54 percent faster than the previous generation drive.
IBM describes the tape drives as being able to hold the text of one million books, and to keep that data from becoming corrupt, the TS1130 uses a special head overcoat technology IBM claims will lengthen the overall life expectancy of the drive. The TS1130 also utilizes a "Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) head design that leverages IBM's world-record achievement of developing a more sensitive read-write head for the magnetic tape system." In other words, expect fewer data read errors.
The new drive uses existing 3592 rewritable and WORM (Write Once Read Many) cartridges, offering backwards compatibility with Gen 1, 2, and 3 formats supporting both read and write for Gen 2 and read only for Gen 1. And backwards compatibility is a good thing too, as IBM says the TS1130 will carry a starting price of $39,050, with an upgrade option from existing drives for a more manageable $19,500. Ouch.
NewsSeagate Launches Industry-First 1.5TB Desktop Drive, Destroys Storage Worldstone
Posted 07/10/08 at 12:34:22 PM by David Murphy
Put a feather in Seagate's cap. The storage titan has sprinted to the finish line and scored an exclusive: the world's first 1.5-terabyte hard drive. The 7,200rpm drive uses a mere four platters to achieve its huge capacity point -- that's 375GB per platter of areal density. Beefy.
Seagate is claming a sustained data rate of 120MB/s for its drive, which might very well be enough to place this little guy above Samsung's 333GB-per-platter HD103UJ drive. Other than that, the bulging Barracuda seems similar to every other high-capacity drive on the market: expect a 3Gb/s SATA interface and a typical 32MB of cache. Check out the full release below!
NewsThe "Tera Era" Begins Today: Hitachi Launches Three-Platter Terabyte Drive
Posted 07/09/08 at 02:01:01 AM by David Murphy
Calling it the "Dawn of the Tera Era," Hitachi has announced its first three-platter terabyte drive. Billed as the Deskstar 7K1000.B, this is the second terabyte-class drive the company has produced since the launch of its first-to-the-market five-platter drive last year. But here's the weird part: the company has announced no concrete plans to phase out its second-generation drives before 2009. Nor is Hitachi coming in at a lower price point -- or comparable feature-set -- when compared to the other terabyte drives on the market today.
Check out our (confused) analysis after the jump! And yes, it appears Hitachi has modeled its "Tera Era" marketing after Hair:
NewsHitachi to Harvest 5TB Hard Drive by 2010
Posted 07/07/08 at 09:49:21 AM by Paul Lilly
While SSDs continue to come down in price and up in performance, hard disk drives keep ballooning in size. And just when we thought we were becoming spoiled with storage space, Hitachi hits us with a humdinger by announcing plans to release a 5TB hard drive by 2010. That's FIVE freaking terabytes in a single 3.5" drive, or half the storage capacity of the human brain, claims Dr. Yoshihiro Shiroishi from Hitachi. In more concrete terms, 5TB equates to about 5,000 hours of video, or more than a million songs. Throw two drives together and you could store a human brain's worth of porn!
Hitachi's pledge trumps an earlier prediction the company made back in October 2007 when it said 4TB of storage would be likely by 2011. Instead, Hitachi will employ Current-Perpendicular-to-Plant Giant Magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR) magnetic read heads to pack an additional terabyte than initially anticipated, and a year sooner than predicted. CPP-GMR will make it possible to achieve data densities of 1TB or more per square inch, paving the way for even larger hard drives.
Home theater buffs will undoubtedly herald Hitachi's announcement, but what about everyone else? Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns in terms of hard drive space? Post your thoughts in the comments section.
NewsA Spoonful of Caviar
Posted 06/10/08 at 01:22:04 PM by David Murphy
Western Digital's late to the party with its three-platter, high-performance terabyte drive, but here it is nevertheless: the Caviar Black.
NewsBill Watkins Versus the Solid-State Drive
Posted 05/14/08 at 04:07:34 PM by David Murphy
If the storage market shifts to flash memory, Seagate's CEO wants to be first to the party. He'll have plenty of parking too, if Seagate succeeds in using the law to tow every other manufacturer out of the way.
ReviewsLaCie Ethernet Big Disk
Posted 11/09/07 at 01:26:40 PM by David Murphy
The 2TB LaCie Ethernet Big Disk is appropriately named, we suppose. Other potential monikers: the LaCie Ethernet Big Headache, the LaCie Ethernet Sucks at Networking, or perhaps even the LaCie Ethernet Where Did My Drive Go. We jest, but there’s truth to our ramblings–the LaCie Ethernet Big Disk is horrific as a network-attached storage device, mainly due to our frequent failures to get Windows to even see the drive.
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