Therefore Brewer’s group proposes increasing the height of the standard HDD, currently established at an average of one inch for 3.5” disks and 15mm for 2.5” drives, in order to store more platters per HDD – an economical approach from the point of view of packaging, optimal use of printed circuit boards and the drive’s motor actuator.
Tag Archives: hard drives
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead
The SSD Endurance Experiment represents the longest test TR has ever conducted. It’s been a lot of work, but the results have also been gratifying. Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. Errors didn’t strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic.
via The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead – The Tech Report – Page 4.
If you write a lot of data, keep an eye out for warning messages, because SSDs don’t always fail gracefully.
Three-year, 27,000 drive study reveals the most reliable hard drive makers
For this report, Backblaze took a look at 15 different HDD models from the three aforementioned major brands. Earning impressive marks for reliability was the Hitachi 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640) with a 0.9 percent failure rate and an average lifetime of about 2.1 years.
via Three-year, 27,000 drive study reveals the most reliable hard drive makers | PCWorld.
The worst of the bunch, meanwhile was the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda Green (ST1500DL003), with an average lifespan of 0.8 years. Ouch!
What Hard Drive Should I Buy?
At the end of 2013, we had 27,134 consumer-grade drives spinning in Backblaze Storage Pods. The breakdown by brand looks like this:
Hard Drives by Manufacturer
Brand Number
of DrivesTerabytes Average
Age in YearsSeagate 12,765 39,576 1.4 Hitachi 12,956 36,078 2.0 Western Digital 2,838 2,581 2.5 Toshiba 58 174 0.7 Samsung 18 18 3.7
via Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?.
Why do we have the drives we have? Basically, we buy the least expensive drives that will work
There are a lot of numbers tossed around in this article that are difficult to summarize. The above table shows the data set they worked from.
Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet
Called the Kinetic Open Storage Platform, the new approach turns disks themselves into servers, delivering data over the network to applications using an open application interface. The Kinetic platform is a combination of an open programming interface and intelligence and a network interface installed in the storage device itself. It’s targeted mostly at companies looking to adopt the same sort of architecture in their data centers that they use to connect to cloud storage providers such as Amazon
via Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet | Ars Technica.
Hybrid Drives Don’t Need More Than 8GB Of NAND
The study essentially proves that, at least in the workplace, any amount of NAND memory larger than 10GB would have a limited impact on performance. Of course, data-intensive tasks like analytics or video rendering, where fresh data is being accessed all the time, would benefit from larger amounts of faster memory, but an average user is unlikely to notice the difference between SSD and SSHD.
via Seagate: Hybrid Drives Don’t Need More Than 8GB Of NAND.
Dropbox wants to replace your hard disk
With up to 500 developers expected for the inaugural developer conference in San Francisco, the company is bullish about its future prospects. “We are replacing the hard drive,” said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, according to a report on Wired. “I don’t mean that you’re going to unscrew your MacBook and find a Dropbox inside, but the spiritual successor to the hard drive is what we’re launching.”
via Dropbox wants to replace your hard disk | News | PC Pro.
Good luck with that!
Ddrescue
GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors
via Ddrescue – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF).
How SSD power faults scramble your data
The 2 SSDs that had no failures? Both were MLC 2012 model years with a mid-range – $1.17/GB – price.
via How SSD power faults scramble your data | ZDNet.
Yikes!
This paper reminds us that SSDs are very new technology whose idiosyncracies are still being engineered around. We’re still 5 years away from the average enterprise SSD being as reliable as the average enterprise hard drive is today.
SSD onslaught: Hard drives poised for double-digit revenue drop
According to a market report from research firm IHS iSuppli, HDD revenue is set to drop to about $32.7 billion this year, down 11.8% from $37.1 billion last year.
via SSD onslaught: Hard drives poised for double-digit revenue drop – Computerworld.
Much of this has to do with newer devices sold being those that do not use standard hard drives like smartphones and tablets. Perhaps we’re seeing the start of another computing technology headed for the museum.