Thursday, January 29, 2009

Storage Technologies

Before I lose this link *again* I thought I'd blog it. IOMAX in Australia resells the Fusion-io SSD storage devices. The pricing is in the "oh, wow!" range, but they are rather snappy.

Samsung has made their 256 GB MLC SSD device available for sale finally. But to large OEMs only, unfortunately. They are going for about US$1k. That's not bad for an SSD that reads at 220 MB/ses sustained and writes sequential data at around 200 MB/sec sustained. I'm just waiting for them to become available at prices (and sizes) that will compete with tape drives, allowing us to finally replace tapes with a better, faster medium. Hard drives will never achieve those goals.

Speaking of hard drives, Seagate has had some *serious* issues with their 1 TB drives recently - crappy firmware. They released an even crappier firmware to replace it and then pulled that from the site. It appears as though they have released an update that they are comfortable for people to download now. There are also updated firmwares for other model drives available from that page.

Western Digital have released their WD20EADS 2.0 TB "Green" hard drive. It has a variable spindle speed, however despite this, it appears as though it can actually outrun the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1 TB drive which is quite impressive as that was the fastest of the 7200 rpm SATA 3.0 Gbps drives on the market. According to Hot Hardware, HD Tach shows an average read speed of 90MB/s and average writes at 80MB/s.

The joys of progress! :)

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

1 comment:

stryqx said...

It's taken 30 years for SSD to gain some traction in the market place, so the progress hasn't really been rapid.

If anyone's planning on looking at SSD for the first time, http://www.storagesearch.com/ is an excellent resource to add to your reading list.