ICY News: Research team designs and builds a disk drive that stores data for a million years

"A research team out of the Netherlands has produced a storage medium that can last a million years. Standard magnetic disk drive storage, which was introduced nearly 70 years ago by IBM, has improved significantly over the years in many ways, but the duration in which the data can be stored largely remained the same. Current disk drives offer about a decade of reliable data storage. "

To read more: Full Story 

ICY News: TDK Develops Hard Drive Technology Capable Of 40TB Capacity

"It sounds like a pipe dream, but for those who have followed the industry, you'll know that we've been dreaming about multi-terabyte hard drives for quite some time and capacities up to 4TB exist today. Prototypes have already made the rounds once or twice, but TDK has a new project that could enable 40TB hard drives by 2020. That's right, folks: 40TB on a single drive. At once, all of your archiving problems would be solved... until you outgrew even that, of course.

Presently, HDD recording density is boosted by the use of a technology called "high magnetic coercivity," but as you could probably guess from the lack of true increases recently, that's about at its limit. TDK's approach involves a heat-assisted recording technology. According to the company, in the new system "the coercivity of the medium, or the amount of reverse magnetic field required to change the value of the stored data, is temporarily reduced by heating it with a laser, which enables writing. As a result, the recording density is further increased."

Link to the entire Article: TDK Develops Hard Drive Technology Capable Of 40TB Capacity

ICY News: WD Black HDD Enhancements Announced

"WD has announced updates across the WD Black line of high-performance 7,200 RPM 3.5-inch hard drives. The WD Black family is available in capacities from 1TB to 4TB and is engineered for applications such as workstations, gaming PCs, and all-in-one devices that benefit from higher performance and high capacity. The refreshed drives feature model numbers in the format of WD(#)003FZEX where the third digit represents the capacity in terabytes.

According to WD, design improvements made possible through the company’s dual core processor technology have resulted in performance increases that range from a 26% increase for the 1TB drive up to a 48% increase for the 4TB model. WD has also added a new high resolution controller that doubles the processing capacity of the controller itself, which improves tracking precision and thereby speeds up both read and write operations. Each of the drives features 6 Gb/s SATA connectivity." 


Since Western Digital is improving their HDD quality, would you still buy their HDD or just get a SSD instead?


Link to the article: WD Black HDD Enhancements Announced (StorageReview)

ICY News: Six SSD DC S3500 Drives And Intel's RST: Performance In RAID, Tested

"Intel lent us six SSD DC S3500 drives with its home-brewed 6 Gb/s SATA controller inside. We match them up to the Z87/C226 chipset's six corresponding ports, a handful of software-based RAID modes, and two operating systems to test their performance.

Intel hasn't launched any desktop-oriented drives based on its own SATA 6Gb/s controller yet. Those are reserved for some of the company's more enterprise-class SSDs. Both the SSD DC S3700 and S3500, which we reviewed in Intel SSD DC S3700 Review: Benchmarking Consistency and The SSD DC S3500 Review: Intel's 6 Gb/s Controller And 20 nm NAND, benefit from the processor's exceptional consistency, even if that latter model is better suited to read-heavy applications.

We're actually seeing an increasing number of drives similar to the SSD DC S3500, which are built to handle very specific workloads. Comparatively lower prices and solid performance in the applications they're designed for make up for the fact that all-around utility isn't a selling point. Given what you save on the initial investment, it's cheaper to simply tear the old drive out when it fails and pop in a new one. In certain environments, that's actually preferable to spending big on a high-endurance SSD from the outset, which may never need the pricier enterprise-class storage inside."

Link to the entire article: Six SSD DC S3500 Drives And Intel's RST: Performance In RAID, Tested

ICY News: Samsung's SAS SSD Certified for Use with VMware Virtual SAN Enterprise Storage Systems.

"Samsung Electronics, a leading maker of solid-state drives, has announced that Samsung's SM1625 SSD, a high-performing solid state drive with high density and low power consumption has been certified by VMware as an optimized solution for VMware Virtual SAN.

The SM1625 SSD, Samsung's first dual-ported SAS SSD – available in densities of 100GB, 200GB, 400GB and 800GB – has been certified for VMware Virtual SAN for use in data centers and other enterprise applications. VMware Virtual SAN is a new offering that allows customers to pool server disks and flash resources to create a resilient, high-performance and dynamic shared storage solution for virtual machines."

Link to the entire article: Samsung's SAS SSD Certified for Use with VMware Virtual SAN Enterprise Storage Systems