ICY News: Seagate Debuts Data Rescue and Hardware Replacement Services

"Seagate today announced its entry into the market for subscription-based consumer data recovery services with Seagate Rescue and Seagate Rescue and Replace. Both plans are available for internal and external HDDs and SSDs regardless of whether Seagate was the manufacturer, and are start at $29.99 for two years. The plans cover data recovery for data lost due to physical damage, corruption or accidental deletion, including a replacement drive for customers enrolled in the Rescue and Replace program.

In the case of a catastrophic failure, the cost of recovering data from a damaged or corrupted drive can reach into the thousands of dollars for technicians and lab expenses. While a data recovery service cannot replace good backup practices for ensuring the safety of critical data, the Seagate services work more like an insurance policy than an extended warranty for important drives and network storage devices." 

Would it be worth it to get the program? 

Link to the article: Seagate Debuts Data Rescue and Hardware Replacement Services

ICY News: Intel Announces New Business-Oriented SSD Pro 1500 Family, Supports New DevSleep Power Saving Mode

"Intel has announced a new family of SSD hardware aimed at business deployments with support for 256-bit AES encryption, the Trusted Computing Group's Opal management specification, and support for the vPro features inside Haswell. This last is a bit inaccuracy -- while the new drives do apparently support some vPro capabilities for remote management, Haswell didn't actually include any new features for vPro that Ivy Bridge doesn't support. Haswell's vPro implementation is supposed to be faster in certain circumstances, however.

With this new family, Intel is talking up Trusted Computing and remote management capabilities, and emphasizing the fact that these products are designed to hit ultra-low power consumption targets and failure rates below 1% per year. Actual drive performance is typical for SATA 6G products, with sequential read/write speeds up to 540MB/s and 490MB/s for the new hardware. Power consumption in what Intel calls DevSleep is 5 milliwatts, with power consumption in DevSleep mode as low as 200 microwatts (0.2 milliwatts). 

DevSleep, if you haven't heard of it before, is a new power-saving mode that's supported on Haswell chipsets. The goal is to further lowerSSD power consumption while enabling smartphone style instant-on operation. Bringing power consumption down as low as 0.2mW in idle will help prevent the stealth battery drain that kicks in when a system is left in sleep mode for significant periods of time.  "


Link to the Entire Article:  Intel Announces New Business-Oriented SSD Pro 1500 Family, Supports New DevSleep Power Saving Mode

ICY News: Fragging wonderful: The truth about defragging your SSD

"With smarter file systems and faster disks and PCs, file fragmentation isn’t the performance suck it once was. Older computers had a habit of splitting files and spreading the parts all over your hard drives, but modern ones don’t do this as much. Not even close. That said, a bimonthly pass with a capable defragger can help you maintain peak performance on a heavily used hard drive.

However, solid-state drives, which use flash memory instead of a hard-drive platter to store data, are another story: My tests showed little or no benefit from running a number of disk defragmenters on a heavily used SSD.

"I found no hard evidence about SSD defragging anywhere I looked, so I decided to gather my own."

Conventional logic dictates that you should never defrag an SSD, because the SSD controller writes data in a scattershot-fashion to multiple NAND chips and locations, using algorithms that only the controller understands. The operating system sees it as a hard drive with sectors, but the data is spread all over the drive by the controller. Defragging these “sectors” is like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded: You can feel parts of the pattern, but you can’t see the whole picture. In addition, NAND is good for only a few thousand write cycles, so defragging can reduce the SSD’s lifespan by unnecessarily writing data to it."

Link to Entire Article: PCWorld: Fragging wonderful: The truth about defragging your SSD

ICY News: Intel Demonstrates Overclocking SSDs At PAX Prime 2013 But Is It Worth It?

"At PAX Prime 2013, Intel hosted a short hands-on workshop showcasing their latest bleeding edge idea: overclocking SSDs. The demonstration was simple: run an Intel 480GB (6Gb/s SATA) SSD at stock speeds, then overclock the onboard controller, and then overclock the NAND bus frequency to demonstrate the performance improvement that can be achieved.

“The real question,” says Intel’s Product Marketing Manager Kei Kobayashi, “is whether or not we can squeeze enough performance out of the drive to justify the risk versus the reward.”

The Demo

We used AS SSD Benchmark v1.6 to first run a test of the SSD at standard speeds.

Intel 480GB SSD AS SSD Benchmark results with no overclocking

For the next test ,we used Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility to increase the NAND bus frequency on the SSD from its default 83Mhz to 100Mhz, and then ran the test again. This yielded a very modest increase of around 20MB/s for sequential reads and 30MB/s for write speeds."

Link to Entire Article: HotHardware: Intel Demonstrates Overclocking SSDs At PAX Prime 2013

ICY News: WD Red 6Gb SATA HDDs for NAS With More Capacity

2.5-inch at 1TB ($99) and 3.5-inch at 4TB ($229) like Seagate offering
WD announced the expansion of its WD Red line of SATA HDDs specifically designed for home and small office NAS systems with one- to five-drive bays. 



WD Red HDDs are now available in a 2.5-inch form factor offering 1TB and 750GB capacities and a new 3.5-inch 4TB capacity. 

Link to the Entire Article: Storagenewsletter: WD Red 6Gb SATA HDDs for NAS With More Capacity