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Xbit Labs performed the mother of all SAS drive tests. Seventeen SAS 3.5″ drives run through the gauntlet on performance, capacity, power – you name it.
It’s like Enter the Dragon for disk drives.
After 22 web pages of detailed results, who was the last drive standing?
“The Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 is the indisputable leader of this test session. Its fantastic mix of high performance and large capacity leaves a strong impression.”
The history of the disk drive industry is a long series of relentless “firsts”. The latest Seagate Cheetah 15k drive stands out as a particularly impressive milestone.
Barefeats was able to use two Cheetah 15K.7 drives on uncompressed video in a way that required ten drives in the past: four 15K SAS drives and six 7200 rpm SATA drives. Speed and performance in and enterprise drive!
“The Cheetah 15K.7 is the fastest SAS drive we’ve ever tested plus it now offers storage capacity up to 600GB.”
Barefeats also noted that the new Cheetah “now rivals the fastest SSDs” in large sequential transfer speed.
TweakTown found the Cheetah 15K.7 to be just as big and fast, but noted another milestone: the first 15K rpm drive to drop below the $1 per GB barrier.
Big, fast and less expensive. Somehow disk drives continue their march to the beat of Moore’s Law - or is it Kryder’s Law have an even faster beat?
Check out Greg Shulz’s recommendations
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Healthcare brings out a lot of passion in people these days. Many of the topics stridently debated are surprisingly relevant to enterprise storage:
Universal coverage
All business data isn’t created equal, but there is a threshold of storage, management, protection and security below which any business data should not fall. Sometimes people lose sight of where that line is, to their company’s and their career’s detriment.
Cost control
Data volume continues to grow faster than even my annual health benefits contribution. Businesses do the math – they just can’t increase their storage costs to match. Much like healthcare, one solution is to provide ‘good enough’ storage for low maintenance data and optional premium services for data that needs more performance and additional protection from risk. But how good is good enough?
Robin Harris has an opinion on this.
Who gets premium services?
Like healthcare, some of the most passionate debate is what data sets require that extra care. Storage technology is now starting to make these decisions automatically based on activity or other metrics. Still, mainstream IT struggles with knowing when to take data from the ’premium plan’ – mission-critical enterprise solutions – to slower, high-capacity options.
Who pays?
Healthcare costs are going up for everyone, and employees are carrying a heavier burden. Some say this incents people to make more efficient choices on medical costs. Data owners are seeing the IT version of a high deductible plan with more aggressive and granular chargeback policies.
Whatever the outcome of the Grand Healthcare Debate of 2009 and the less-momentus-but-still-important storage debate, we all benefit from the conversation.
What do you think?
In 1980, many said that IBM was missing the boat in the nascent personal computing market. The Apple II was selling like hotcakes. Even Radio Shack was beating them with the TRS-80.
A year later IBM unveiled the IBM PC. With it, IBM redefined personal computers and changed the trajectory of one of the most significant markets in history. From then on, very few would consider IBM late to the party; rather, they were right on time.
Fast forward to 2009
Seagate is not the first vendor to enter the SSD market, much to the chagrin of many who thought they were missing the boat. Now that Seagate has announced their first SSD product, some analysts see their entry as just what this young market needs:
“It’s great for Seagate to be getting involved and great for the NAND side to see someone of Seagate’s knowledge moving into that area.” – Bob Merritt, Convergent Semiconductors
Coincidentally, reports out this week show evidence that the SSD market is not as far along as previously thought.
Time will tell if Seagate’s timing in the SSD market pays off for Seagate like the Personal Computer did for IBM. That said, it’s encouraging to see external affirmation for a similar approach to this significant change in the storage device industry.
Reducing power consumption in the data center has moved from a nice-to-have to a necessity. No surprise that a ‘green’ drive sounds appealing for servers and storage systems.
Drive manufacturers have responded with new drives that use much less power than previous models.
Just be careful not to throw the enterprise ‘baby’ out with the bathwater. Green enterprise drives use less power, but are still enterprise drives under the covers. That means enterprise-level performance, reliability, RAID integration features.
IT administrators that focus on low power at the expense of other features have gotten burned with drives that may be labeled enterprise, but don’t cut the mustard when it comes to getting the job done.
Seagate enterprise drives, like the new Constellation drive, have ‘green’ features like PowerTrim and PowerChoice that reduce power while still meeting enterprise server and multi-drive storage requirements.
Photo courtesy of ispeech.org
It’s like HDTV.
First we had HD televisions without any content. Then we had some HD broadcasts, and some HD DVDs in the stores.
Then – inflection point! – all the pieces were there. TVs, DVRs, broadcast, DVDs, web content. The whole thing took off faster than you can say “Blockbuster fire sale”.
End-to-end 6Gb/s SAS has arrived
LSI, SuperMicro and Seagate demonstrated the 6Gb/s SAS equivalent. It’s just a matter of time before 3Gb SAS is a quaint relic of days gone by. This opens the 6G/s door wide for system builders too.
Seagate has 6Gb/s SAS available on the following products:
If you haven’t built 6Gb/s SAS into your plans, time to get crackin’.
Benchmarkreviews.com has a lot to say about the Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 – - twelve web pages worth. In sum, they were very impressed.
The Cheetah 15K.7 drive scored 8.75 out of 10 points and was given the Benchmark Reviews Silver Tachometer Award. Some highlights:
- “demonstrated a dominance over existing enterprise storage solutions”
- “improved…transfer speeds at the same time it saves electrical energy costs.”
- “probably the best constructed hard drive in the world.”
Thanks for the kudos guys!
TechGadgets created an arresting visual image in my mind as they described the problem being solved by Seagate’s new self-encrypting enterprise drives:
“There isn’t an organization, large or small, that does not face the threat of data spilling or leaking.”
Think Exxon Valdez. The loss or theft of sensitive data can sink a company or expose millions of consumers to identity theft. A pretty functional analogy I think.
Encryption has been known to be the optimal solution for data at rest for a long time. The challenge has been in how to deploy this advanced technology in a manageable way.
Seagate’s enterprise self-encrypting drives (SED) allow incredibly sophisticated security to be implemented in servers and storage systems by the simple replacement of two components: SED disk drives and SED-friendly controllers from LSI and Intel.
The drives perform exactly the same as their unsecure replacements. There is no performance loss because the encryption takes place real-time within the drive hardware.
