Seagate
The Storage Effect [blog]: Test Freaks freak over Barracuda XT http://ow.ly/1llx7

Storage Review looks “under the covers” of the Seagate Constellation ES

SRLogoEarlier this week, StorageReview took a good look under the covers of the new Constellation ES hard drive and determined that with its’ “512GB, 1TB, and 2TB configurations offered in SAS and SATA interfaces with plenty of security and power savings options make the Seagate Constellation ES line a solid drive for high-capacity enterprise storage needs.”
In addition to the “solid performance” of the drive, Thomas Sullivan calls out the feature rich choices that make it appealing to businesses of all sizes:
“Seagate puts a strong emphasis on energy savings with the Constellation ES, offering PowerChoice to reduce power during slow or idle periods. In our tests with the drive in an active state we saw an idle power draw of 6.46w which was just under the advertised power draw of 7w.
“For users with security in mind Seagate also offers Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) as an option.”
“Factor in that there’s also a SAS model and the Constellation ES has its bases covered.”
Thomas concludes “With a spec sheet like this, it’s hard to imagine wanting anything else in a high-capacity enterprise-class storage solution.”

Get yours today at CDW .

Rorke Data & Seagate Rock the Media & Entertainment World

Hollywood2In the world of broadcasting and entertainment, there are several new major advances in technology driving high-end content creation which in turn is driving demand for high performance, high capacity systems with hard disk drives that support this infrastructure.

Technologies like HD Video, 3D, VFX, DPX (digital picture exchange) film are all driving large volumes of data for tasks like image capturing, film editing and post-production work. As the digital media and entertainment industry gathers next month in Las Vegas for the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, they’ll discover the brave new world of filmmaking supported by products like the Galaxy Aurora RAID system from Rorke Data. Under the covers of the Aurora system, you’ll find Seagate enterprise drives including the Savvio and Constellation families with their fast 6Gb/s SAS interfaces to help ensure the performance and reliability needed for this fast-paced world of media and entertainment.
Check out this video on how the Rorke Data has enabled DreamWorld Studios to keep running efficiently and reliably to support their 24×7 media production environment.

I want a Yottabyte drive!

 

I remember thinking fondly as a teenager about how my new computer with its 500 Megabyte drive would store everything I could ever need. And of course I’ve heard similar stories from people older than me thinking that way about their revolutionary 5 Megabyte drives. And now we have 2 Terabytes of information available to us from a single 3.5-inch drive. Amazing truly, but sometimes now days it’s easy for us to think: Ho hum. So what’s next?

Less than a decade ago, Seagate's Barracuda 180 model stored what was considered a massive 180 gigabytes of information but required 12 platters! Now Seagate drives can store up to 2 Terabytes using only four platters.

Less than a decade ago, Seagate's Barracuda 180 model stored what was considered massive: 180 Gigabytes of information, but requiring 12 platters! Now Seagate drives can store up to 2 Terabytes using only four platters.

Storage as a whole has simply grown to become so large, inexpensive, and ubiquitous, that it’s easy to take for granted just how much of it we consume. And there certainly doesn’t seem to be any slowing of demand. IDC estimated that 988 Exabytes of digital information is produced every year. Looking at that number can seem difficult or meaningless to grasp, unless we try to visualize and put into perspective just how much storage that truly is.

So let’s have some fun and look at the bits and bytes and see how the information stacks up, with some of the information here sourced from whatsabyte.com.

Bit: The smallest unit of information a computer can use. A digital “yes” or “no”
Byte: (8-bits)
1 byte: a single typed character
10 bytes: a single word
Kilobyte: (1000 bytes)
1 Kilobyte: a small paragraph of information
100 Kilobytes: a low-resolution photograph
Megabyte: (1000 kilobytes)
1 Megabyte: a short novel
5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare or 30 seconds of TV-quality video
10 Megabytes: One minute of high-fidelity sound
100 Megabytes: Two volumes of encyclopedias
700 Megabytes: One CD-ROM
Gigabyte (1000 Megabytes)
1 Gigabyte: a TV-quality movie
4.7 Gigabytes: A single DVD
100 Gigabytes: A floor of academic journals
Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes)
1 Terabyte: 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or about 300 hours of good quality video
10 Terabytes: The entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress
Petabyte (1000 Terabytes)
1 Petabyte: 20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text or about 500 billion printed pages
2 Petabytes: The content of all US academic research libraries
Exabyte (1000 Petabytes)
1 Exabyte: 1 billion Gigabytes of information
5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings
988 Exabytes: Almost one Zettabyte!

The list goes on with Zettabytes, Yottabytes, Brontobytes, and Geopbytes each growing by multiples of 1000. It is difficult to visually think about just how massive these additional storage capacities are. But the simple fact that these terms exist means that someone is certainly thinking about the need of our future storage consumption and that we’ll someday get there.

And who knows, perhaps a Yottabyte will become a commonplace capacity sooner than we think, as we move there 988 Exabytes at a time annually. Nevermind the fact that, according to Whatsabyte.com, it would take 11 trillion years to download a single Yottabyte-sized file using a broadband connection today. We will just have to hope that by the time we need that amount of capacity individually, we’ll have the broadband puzzle figured out too.

RSA is the place to be for a security geek

With the threat of cyber attacks / cyber warfare growing daily, it’s important to understand enterprise cyber security – and the best place (in the USA) to learn about what’s going on in this dynamic field is at the annual RSA Conference this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.  This is the place to be if you’re a security geek (or simply an IT professional charged with protecting sensitive company information). 

RSA Conference 2010 Banner

 

 

 

 

This year’s event is focused on three security themes: evolving Google attacks, private and public cloud models and critical infrastructure protection.  With over 18 tracks and 250 sessions, this conference is loaded with information to meet your individual needs.  If you’re interested in data encryption– stop by the IBM (#1316), Wave Systems (#1849), and WinMagic (#939) booths to speak with a Seagate security expert and see how these market leaders are using Seagate Secure™ Self-Encrypting Drives to provide best-in-class data protection.

Constellation ES – the brightest new star in the Seagate Enterprise galaxy!

stars3This 4th generation 7200-RPM drive with its’ 2TB capacity is a perfect fit for the data-hungry organization that needs to house up to 76TB of data in every square foot of floor space in their data center or data closet and doing so without breaking the bank.

The 3.5-inch Seagate® Constellation™ ES drive enables cost-effective, highly efficient storage with the highest capacities, best-in-class reliability, leading 6Gb/s performance, optimized power and cooling, and government-grade security, all backed by Seagate’s enterprise service and support. With the lowest power consumption and highest temperature tolerance, the Constellation ES drive optimizes chassis performance in tiered storage solutions. It is the only drive on the market offering a choice of traditional Enterprise SATA 3Gb/s interface for seamless integration, or the industry-leading 6Gb/s SAS interface for a more reliable, scalable and sustainable high-performance enterprise solution.

 UMLan gives it 9 out of 10 award stars for it’s high capacity, vibration tolerance, government-approved encryption, PowerChoice low power options and great transfer speeds.   http://umlan.com/reviews/hardware/h109.html   Constellation Award

And LANOC gave it an 8 out of 10 award stars stating “It Outperforms the Velociraptor by almost 20mb/s on maximum read performance, and with 2TB of space it puts the 300GB  capacity of the Velociraptor to shame. So, for once you can have your cake and eat it too.” 

http://lanoc.org/review/hardware/storage/2204-seagate-constellation-2tb-hard-drive

Kudos to the team that delivered the biggest, brightest star on the horizon for enterprise storage.

Data Rich, Cash Poor? Constellation ES Can Help!

Do you have a ton of important data you need to store, but not much money in the storage budget? Constellation™ ES could just be the answer to your prayers.  This fourth generation 3.5-inch, 7200-RPM drive for enterprise environments delivers the $/GB value you need in a 2TB HDD with the best-in-class reliability and support, 6Gb/s SAS and Enterprise SATA interface performance, optimized power and cooling efficiencies and government grade Self-Encrypting Drive data security you expect from the world leader in enterprise storage.

“Want insights into the current state of the HDD industry?”

Seagate executives will speak live at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference next Monday. Get the scoop from the worldwide leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions on the latest happenings and trends in the storage industry.You can listen to the live event from Seagate’s Investor Relations website at seagate.com/investors on Monday, March 1, 2010 at 8:45 a.m. PT / 11:45 a.m. ET. If you can’t make the live event, it will be archived for your convenience.

Following the event, let us know your thoughts.

665 million drives expected to ship in 2010

TrendFocus reported that the industry shipped a record 557 million drives last year. And according to additional TrendFocus figures published by StorageNewsletter.com, this year things will only get better, with another record-setting year expected as volumes reach more than 665 million drives in 2010. That is a LOT of storage – a 19% increase over 2009 numbers – and shows that demand remains strong in a storage industry driven by the world’s growing appetite to consume and create information.

It’s interesting to think about just what exactly is driving all this storage. How much of it is from the back-end storage systems that are running traditional business apps vs. those same systems storing user-generated content like YouTube or blogs? And how much more storage consumption will we see ahead as high-definition video becomes more mainstream?

Get the latest Review on why Cheetah NS.2 is great for 3D video editing and composing

Björn’s 3D World (www.bjorn3d.com) just finished an independent review of Seagate’s Cheetah NS.2 10,000RPM 6.0Gbit/s SAS hard drives.  Click here to see why they recommend this drive for 3D film makers and people on a budget.  Get their take on how different interfaces affect system speed, and how hard disk drives (HDDs) compare to Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Top Reliability with Seagate’s New Savvio 10K Drive

While it seems that ”unreliability” is a concept that’s keeping us from driving even the most economical of cars these days, it’s nice to see that the hard drive industry is moving in the opposite direction.  Seagate announced that they are standing firmly behind the reliability of their mission critical drives by extending the mean-time-between-failure of Savvio 10K drive by 25% or 2M hours MTBF. This works out to a .44% annualized failure rate – the industry’s lowest! This should reduce service and support calls and helps improve the total return on investment.  Couple this great MTBF with it’s increased data integrity through the industry’s first implementation of protection information (PI) (which protects in-flight data between the host and the drive) and IT managers can rest easy  – on or off the road!