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A terabyte disk drive stores one million million bytes of data. The Register posting Four 1TB hard drives on test tests and rates 4 drives.

The results are:

Product Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Verdict The Hitachi set a decent benchmark for performance as a standalone drive.

Rating 70%

Product Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ

Verdict It’s a straight fight between the Seagate and Samsung, and on balance we favour the Sammy despite its higher price.

Rating 85%

Product Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340NS

Verdict The Seagate delivers sterling performance with the minimum of fuss, yet it is the cheapest of the drives on test.

Rating 80%

Product Western Digital WD1000FYPS RE2-GP

Verdict We’re all in favour of reducing our dependence on electricity but the RE2-GP lagged behind in every one of our tests.

Rating 60%

Bottom Line

All four Terabyte drives in this round-up offer a colossal amount of storage at a very reasonable price. The Hitachi is showing its age but still delivers decent performance, but we were less convinced by the green power saving features of the Western digital. If you want high performance – and who doesn’t? - it’s a straight fight between the Seagate and Samsung, and on balance we favour the Sammy despite its higher price.

Read the posting for details and performance graphs.

…John

The Register Hardware posting DroboShare network storage ‘robot’ reviews the Data Robotics, Inc. dynamic duo Drobo and DroboShare.

Drobo is an external storage system designed with a high level of data resilience. DroboShare is an add-on that allows a couple of Drobos to be accessed over a network.

(Credit: Data Robotics, Inc.)

Read the posting for all the details.

Verdict

There’s no question that Drobo and DroboShare make data resilience and storage capacity expansion really easy. Both are smart-looking boxes packed with even smarter technology to keep your files safe from drive failures and provide you with scope to expand their storage capacity for as long as Seagate, Fujitsu and co. make SATA hard drives.

We liked the Drobo and DroboShare, and we think Data Robotics has come up with something special. But the company needs to get the price down if it’s to win over the kind of users who’ll benefit most from its technology.

I agree. Data Robotics, Inc. has a pricey winner.

…John

The InfoStor posting Data de-duplication: Questions and answers

Eight questions that every IT organization should ask about data de-duplication before they deploy or upgrade.

Just what is data de-duplication?

Data de-duplication is arguably one of the most important new technologies to hit the storage market in years, and it’s a game-changing technology that can have an immediate impact on end-user environments.

By reducing the amount of physical disk capacity that is needed to store information, data de-duplication allows organizations to keep more information on disk-based systems-making it more accessible to the people and applications that need it.

What data de-duplication ratios can I expect? Survey says

De-duplication trade-offs

Currently, there are two distinct types of data de-duplication available: inline and post-process. Which is which can be determined by the answer to the following simple question: When is backup data de-duped? If it’s done before it is written to the target, then it is inline de-duplication. If it’s done after, then it is post-process.

There can be some performance degradation with inline de-duplication approaches as data is being ingested, and there is an up-front capacity consideration with post-process approaches. The performance impact of the inline approach depends on a number of variables, including the de-duplication technology itself, the size of the backup volume, the granularity of the de-duplication process, the aggregate throughput of the architecture, and the scalability of the solution. Some inline functions occur at the server, some as a “bump in the wire,” but most take place at the target itself.

With the post-process approach, more disk capacity is needed up-front to store the backup volume. But the size of this capacity reserve also depends on a number of variables, including the amount of data being backed up and how long the data de-duplication technology needs to hold onto the capacity before releasing it. Solutions that wait for the entire backup process to complete before releasing capacity have a greater “capacity overhead” than solutions that start the de-duplication process earlier as backup data is being stored.

Read the article for the rest of the Qs and As.

…John

The News.com posting A flash memory notebook: The sounds of silence is a first hand account of living with a solid-state drive installed in a notebook.

(Credit: Samsung)

Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don’t require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises.

Is the quiet and extra battery life worth nearly a $900 premium? In a word, no, but you’ve got to look at the future. Although in the price stratosphere now, flash drives will start to compete more directly with drives over the next four years. Flash memory density continues to increase at a rapid pace, doubling almost every year, and large manufacturers like Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk and Intel have or are opening factories geared at churning out flash. Taken together, this will lead to an easy availability of chips, better capabilities, and recurring price wars.

The drawback is the price. The same Latitude with an 80GB standard hard drive currently sells for $869 on Dell’s site. Swapping the drive for a 64GB flash hard drive adds $899 to the price. The upgrade more than doubles the price of the notebook to $1,768 and slightly eliminates storage.

Let the price wars begin.

…John

The Information Week posting Blu-ray Basics: Using The High-Definition DVD Format On Your PC asks the question

Now that the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray is over and PC makers are adding Blu-ray as a regular option with new systems, people are asking: What’s the big win with Blu-ray?

The first half of the posting discusses Blue-ray (BD) video playback and copy protection issues. My primary interest is Blue-ray for data. The second half of the posting discusses this topic.

BD for Data

(Credit: Lite-On)

The primary question is BD worth the price? My answer is no. I won’t be investing in BD technology any time soon.

The first and most major outlay of cash is, of course, for the drive itself, and right now the least expensive Blu-ray burner drives weigh in at something like $400. NewEgg.com features a Lite-On model for that much; Sony’s own Blu-ray disc burner comes in at a wallet-shredding $600.

The question isn’t whether or not the costs will come down on these drives — they will — but whether they’ll come down in a timely enough way and to enough of a price point that it wouldn’t simply be more economical to buy one or more external hard drives to get the same storage space at a better price premium. Then there’s the question of the cost of blank media. At NewEgg.com, a blank single-layer (25-Gbyte) Blu-ray disc costs anywhere from $10 to $14, depending on which manufacturer you choose. A dual-layer (50-Gbyte) disc is only around $16, so if your drive can write to dual-layer media, there’s little point in buying single-layer discs since you can double the capacity for only a few dollars more.

This works out to about $0.32 a gigabyte. (Not all drives burn to dual-layer BD media, which is another gotcha.) There’s also the possibility that future iterations of writeable BD media could contain more than just two layers (Sony has talked repeatedly about 200-Gbyte discs being a possibility), but there’s no guarantee such discs would be compatible with existing players.

At current market prices, assume $600 for a dual-layer drive and $16 for each piece of 50-Gbyte media. Compare that to a 500-Gbyte SATA hard drive from Western Digital, which retails for $100 — that’s $0.20 per gigabyte. To get the same price per gigabyte for BD, you’d have to discount the cost of the drive entirely (for instance, if you were buying it anyway as part of a system) and have blank dual-layer media drop to $10 a pop.

On the plus side, a BD drive means being able to add storage in 25 to 50-Gbyte increments without having to buy a whole new drive. It’s in many ways a redux of the same dilemmas that cropped up when DVD and CD drives themselves first appeared.

Instead, I’m more tempted to sink money into a Drobo.

Drobo

(Credit: Drobo)

This storage device delivers a practical way of keeping up in the never ending storage race. When one of the drives is filling up, the green light next to it turns yellow. The light turns red when data is not save on the drive. Simply pop the drive out and replace it with a larger one.

When Drobo is full, simply replace the smallest drive with a larger one. Cool!

…John