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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?
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!
Seagate took a big step in the history of disk drives yesterday, although it may take a while for it to be seen as such.
Seagate announced the availability of a slew of self-encrypting drives (SED) for enterprise applications. Because these drives plug and play with secure TCG-standard controllers available from LSI and Intel, fully secure servers and storage systems can now be built as easily as any other system.
Chris Mellor at The Register grasped the implications, as did Joe Kovar at CRN.
Encryption is not new. What is new is that the building blocks are now in place for any system builder to make a fully secure, fully encrypted system. Seagate’s Teresa Worth says it well: “Strong enough for National Security, simple enough for the one-man IT shop.”
What does “fully secure” mean?
As a matter of fact, Seagate’s self-encrypting drive technology is so secure that it has been endorsed by the National Security Agency.
Instant Secure Erase
“Fully secure” also means that drives can be totally erased instantly by simply deleting the encryption password. That’s huge for businesses everywhere that currently retire tens of thousands of drives, many (most) of which still contain sensitive data.
Instant Secure Erase alone makes these secure systems worth adopting.
We’re at the cusp of a new era of secure servers and storage. Before long, most if not all business systems will be populated with self-encrypting disk drives. It may even be mandated.
Which system builders will grab hold of this opportunity and take the early lead in this space?
SearchStorage is reporting today on the lengths to which companies go to destroy their old data. It’s not as easy as you might think.
They quote an Enterprise Strategy Group survey from June 2009 that shows how serious this data demolition business is for most companies:
Some say that the latter two groups are at risk, that there’s no efficient, effective way to completely erase data short of destruction. And the Brute Forcers are filling landfills with disk drive remains.
None of these solutions is ideal. Until self-encrypting drives came along, that is.
Drives like the Seagate Momentus (for notebooks) and the Seagate Cheetah, Savvio and Constellation (for servers and storage systems) can be fully self-encrypted, which means totally secure erasure is as simple as deleting the password. Poof! It’s done.
Seagate calls this Instant Secure Erase, and it’s included in every self-encrypting drive.
And there is no performance impact due to encryption, because it’s all done in hardware. Check out this video to see for yourself.
Instant, complete erasure, no performance impact, no user action required. Sounds pretty good, huh? Expect to see self-encrypting popping up everywhere.
Robin Harris talks about capacity growth in 2.5″ notebook drives, and wonders what it portends for the enterprise. No doubt that 1 TB ‘mobile’ drives, available from Seagate later this quarter, are interesting. But the enterprise is affected in a way not discussed by StorageMojo.
He’s absolutely right that the enterprise is moving to 2.5″ SAS and SATA. But the 2.5″ notebook device world has little to do with it, other than general learning curve efficiencies in the factory.
That’s because unlike the 3.5″ form factor, 2.5″ ‘mobile’ drives have very little to do with enterprise drives. Even the width of the drives are different. This has lead to a new-to-the-world class of 2.5″ 7200 rpm enterprise drives, since notebook drives won’t ever have what it takes to support enterprise. These new drives come in SAS or SATA (which says a lot, given the idealogical differences between the SAS and SATA disk drive contingents), currently up to 500GB.
It’s rare these days to see a totally new animal in the disk drive world. Seagate’s version is called Constellation. It’s the (till now) missing link for the 2.5″ enterprise form factor to go “all the way”.
Check it out.
Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.7 is the biggest, baddest 15K rpm drive in the world. It weighs in at 600 GB, twice the capacity of its predecessor. And even though it is blazingly fast, the drive makes use of Seagate’s PowerTrim technology to reduce power consumption. It is now available through Seagate’s distributors and is expected to be very popular.
But isn’t the IT world moving to 2.5″ drives?
Yes, but the economic downturn have slashed IT budgets. Companies everywhere are making do with what they have for now. Cheetah 15K.7 is a coping strategy for stretched storage infrastructures. As Seagate’s Teresa Worth explains:
“It’s easier for customers to upgrade their existing 3.5-inch form factor chassis with higher capacity drives. Customers definitely want to move to systems based on small form factor drives, but everybody is trying to make their investments in IT last longer.”
Cheetah 15K.7 is not “settling” by any means. With its 6 GB SAS interface and capacity doubling, this drive is one of the most productive and efficient on the planet.
So keep planning for 2.5″. But if budget isn’t there, or 3.5″ is your plan of record, look to Cheetah 15K.7 to juice your current environment until the money starts flowing again.
Photo source: abraxis.net
