by Anand Lal Shimpi, AnandTech
Just over a year ago Seagate introduced the world’s first 3TB hard drive. Although it shipped in an enclosure for external use, the Seagate GoFlex Desk was available with the very first 3.5” 3TB SATA hard drive. A couple of months later Seagate and Western Digital both followed up with standalone [...]

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By Henry Newman
Both tape-based and disk-based archives are growing at tremendous rates that are exceeding the density increases in storage technology and the reliability of storage. Humans are pack rats and the amount of data we save keeps growing, and this is unlikely to change. Part of the reason is that we do not know [...]

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by Michael Ewan
This paper discusses recent (Originally Published On January 23, 2009) research and testing of clustered, parallel file systems and object storage technology. Also included is an overview of product announcements from HP, IBM and Panasas in these areas.

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In conjunction with Microsoft, Intel recently announced that it surpassed one million I/Os per second (IOPS) in an iSCSI performance test. See the Webcast link near the bottom of this post if you want detailed information on the tests and configurations, but basically the test configuration included a standard server with one Intel 10 Gigabit [...]

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We’ve already seen the advent of storage virtualization that allows us to create pools of storage that can be accessed by multiple applications and servers. But as more virtual machines get piled on top of multiple sets of multi-core processors, I/O bandwidth is going to be a challenge.
There’s no doubt that storage companies across the [...]

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by Charles Leiserson
When multicore-enabling a C/C++ application, it’s common to discover that malloc() (or new) is a bottleneck that limits the speedup your parallelized application can obtain. This article explains the four basic problems that a good parallel storage allocator solves:
* Thread safety
* Overhead
[...]

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The ability to store and retrieve data is an important component of today’s computers, as well as other modern electronic devices such as cell phones, video game consoles, and camcorders. Since their invention in the 1950s, magnetic-based hard disk drives (HDDs) have been the primary method of nonvolatile storage. However, researchers are currently developing several [...]

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Multi-core processing is rapidly becoming a necessity in embedded computing with the convergence of two conflicting trends: demand for high density storage and a requirement for smaller footprints. To address this demand for increased storage and smaller real estate, manufacturers are turning to MLC NAND. Consumers refuse to pay the performance penalty that often accompanies [...]

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By Lucas Mearian
Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data — 50 times the capacity of today’s best silicon-based chip technologies.
The engineers, from North Carolina State University, said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, “far [...]

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by Geoff Gasior
Much has happened in the hard drive world since 2005. Old-school “parallel” ATA has all but been wiped from our collective consciousness by Serial ATA, banishing bulky ribbon cables from our systems. Mechanical hard drives have switched from longitudinal to perpendicular recording, enabling substantial increases in areal density and overall drive capacity. Hard [...]

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Akhtar Pasha looks at the new approach to enterprise storage technology—NAND-based flash SSDs in the wake of DRAM-based SSDs that are still going strong
The debate for supremacy in disk technologies continues to center around DRAM-based Solid State Disks or SSDs and NAND-based flash SSDs. While the former have been used in blade servers and enterprise [...]

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by Walter Bright
“I recently replaced the hard disk drive in my crusty old laptop with an SSD (Solid State Drive). It really seems barbaric in our digital age that we all have motors and levers and gears and spinning things in our boxes. I was anxious to step into the next revolution.
The improvement was dramatic. [...]

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The solid-state drive (SSD) market is growing as more enterprise customers see the advantages of the power savings that the drives offer. SSDs are also offered in many laptop and netbook computers currently on the market, but in the consumer realm, the traditional hard drive is still tops when it comes to storage.
Full Story

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Slashdot points to an article by Allyn Malventano that looks at Intel X25-M SSDs performance over a period of time shows that write speeds are dramatically reduced from everyday usage patterns. Average write speeds are shown to drop to half (40MB/s) or less in the worst cases, though the author does describe ways that users [...]

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When multicore-enabling a C/C++ application, it’s common to discover that malloc()(or new) is a bottleneck that limits the speedup your parallelized application can obtain. This article explains the four basic problems that a good parallel storage allocator solves:
1. thread safety,
2. overhead,
3. contention,
4. [...]

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By George Crump, Founder and President, Storage Switzerland and Storage Switzerland Events
No longer is the business mantra merely to just “Do More With Less.” It’s more like “Do More With Nothing!” In the midst of a Category Five economic hurricane, IT budgets are being cast asunder while IT managers are still expected to shrink the [...]

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Toshiba unveils a 43nm MLC SSD with 512GB of storage
Among the issues that some users have with SSDs are price and storage capacity. It’s easy to recognize that SSD perform better than a traditional HDD, but it’s very difficult to argue that the increased performance justifies the often many fold increase in price an SSD [...]

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By Mary Shacklett for Byte and Switch
Improving storage performance is a complex task that involves defining and implementing standards, orchestrating test lab and vendor activity, working with leading-edge customers, and then presenting the market with systems that combine value, affordability, and future scalability. The process usually takes time and money. A potential disruption to this [...]

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Samsung Electronics today announced that it is mass-producing 256GB solid-state disk drives that deliver double the performance rate of its earlier 64GB and 128GB drives. The new SSDs are designed for use in laptop and desktop PCs and are available for resellers today.
Samsung said it has been able to narrow the disparity between read and [...]

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By Brian Jackson, Xilinx
Input/Output (I/O) pin assignment is one of the main challenges facing designers integrating large FPGA devices onto PCBs. Many designers find the process of defining the I/O pin configuration, or “pinout,” of large FPGA devices and their advanced BGA packages an increasingly difficult task for a seemingly ever-expanding number of reasons. But [...]

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