It’s been a little while since TDK has made some news in the neverending race for next big hard drive breakthrough, but it looks like that could be changing fairly soon, with a recently revealed roadmap indicating that the company currently has some 640GB drive platters suitable for a 3.5-inch drive going through qualification tests by its OEMs. (Engadget)

Get ready to have even more space for your stuff. Unless there is a quantum leap in optical storage, the DVD and even Blue Ray disk are done as archival storage. Expect 2 TB drives to race towards $100 as the capacity continues to grow.

You couple this that the Boss reported earlier with the mindset below and you know where the bus is headed. Over a cliff. –

A US financial analyst expects Seagate to announce the closure of one or two US plants by the end of May, predicting 800 to 1000 redundancies.

The target at Seagate is to drive its quarterly operating expenses below $300m, according to Stifel Nikolaus analyst Aaron Rakers. This will be achieved, he thinks, by shutting down one or two US plants, which will achieve a faster operating expense reduction than closing overseas facilities. There could be up a thousand employees laid off as a result.

Rakers also considers that Seagate has caught up with Western Digital and other competitors on small form factor areal density, with 320GB/platter capacity levels being reached. An announcement of 2.5-inch products with 320 and 640GB capacities could occur in the third quarter of this year, with shipments in the fourth quarter or very early 2010.

It was fun watching the American Tech scene. Most of it will head overseas in short order to avoid American taxation. For the Giants like HP and IBM maybe never. But for middle tier players its the South China Sea rim or die. All I can say is — “Thanks for the memories”.

Linky.

Beginning with Release Candidate 1 of Windows 7, the operating system will no longer display AutoRun when most removable media is connected. Up to now, the feature has automatically opened a window each time a drive is connected that presents a list of tasks the user can instruct Windows to carry out. Malware purveyors have long manipulated the feature to display options that say things like “open folder to view files” but install malware when clicked instead.

“With these changes, if you insert a USB flash drive that has photos and has been infected by malware, you can be confident that the tasks displayed are all from software already on your computer,” Arik Cohen, a program manager on the Microsoft’s core user experience team writes here. The changes eventually will be added to Vista and XP.

Excellent move Microsoft. Yes its a minor thing but one that is long over due. The ease of manipulation that that panel offered was a gripe by many a tech.

Nor is this minor peve limited to Microsoft. Ubuntu and other Linux distros will do this too. The saving grace is that Linux is more immune to such attacks.

Linky.

GE’s researchers have managed to make holographic storage work in the lab. That means that those shiny plastic disks we almost quit using because hard drives got so cheap could be about to make a comeback.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

ETA for these to get cheap enough to matter to us Tightwads is 5 years according to GE. If the tech is real, I’d bet that we’re looking at about half that long. Since we’re still waiting on cheap Blue Ray players not to mention affordable writers and media, this development could signal a short life for Sony’s big investment.

The folks that gave us the mini-ITX platform, VIA, have brought forth an small form factor data storage unit.

With eight 3.5″ hard drive bays in a 2U form factor rackmount chassis, the VIA NSR7800 offers system integrators the perfect balance of power-efficiency, performance and capacity. Powered by an energy-efficient 1.5GHz VIA C7 processor, the VIA NSR7800 is an ideal base for a variety of rackmount server applications including email, file and web server products.

Key Features include:

* 2U rackmount design
* Supports 8 S-ATA II hard drives
* 8 easy-access, lockable drive bays
* Bootable Compact Flash Type I socket
* Dual Gigabit LAN

The VIA NSR7800 has eight S-ATA II drive bays are easily accessible through lockable front levers that allow hard drives to be securely installed in moments. Dual Gigabit LAN ensures fast data transfer speeds.

The VIA NSR7800 supports a type-1 compact flash slot for embedded OS installations and uses PCI-Express-based Gigabit networking to handle file transfers quickly and efficiently. A mini-PCI port is also available for additional security related add-in cards such as hardware VPN or anti-virus modules. The device can address 8 drives so the potential is 15Tb of storage. –

LEDs include individual S-ATA port activity, overall hard drive activity, network activity and power. There are also custom LED control and push button backup and recovery options.

The VIA NSR7800 supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2007, Windows Home Server and Linux. System monitoring and management includes Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Alarm and Watch Dog Timer. A complete driver and SDK is available to customers.

pricing is not known at this time. There is also a tower like configuration with the same specs. Not exactly a Tightwad type of purchase except maybe if you are a over-monied videophile. The cheapest RTM video storage today is around $4k. If I added up what is probably in this VIA unit it would come out to about $2k. So it quite possible that this unit will deliver a cheaper cost per Gb for the videophile than most current storage offers.

Linky.

Belkin apparently is not a lone wolf in the review washing department. It has now been discovered that Carbonite, a online backup service has been caught with its VP of marketing pulling the same trick. The extent of the laundry cycle is not known. –

Bruce Goldsteinberg signed up for the service from Boston-based Carbonite, and everything went well until a system crash when he found that the restore process broke. He phoned Carbonite support, taking time off work to do so, chose not to pay $20 for a premium response and so, as he wrote on his blog, was put on hold for an hour. Eventually he got help but the restore process took several days, meaning more time off work, and it finally failed to complete with some files being lost for good. He got a refund of his subscription.

He looked online for other users’ views on Carbonite and came across a posting by trw41 in the Carbonite Online Backup Forum on Amazon.com. This suggested that some gushing ‘reviews’ of Carbonite were actually written by Carbonite employees, such as its VP of marketing, Swami Kumaresan.

I might suggest to Amazon that this issue is more a burden to them than they may suspect. Sad considering Amazon is not the one doing this. The point is, many who come to Amazon to make purchases do so partly because of the review system they have in place. It give the buyer a level of confidence that the product they are considering has had a fair shake at a peer review. If it is found to be bogus due to manipulation then Amazon sales will crater as a result. They need to get a handle on this for their own good. A few bannings would go a long way to convincing suppliers that they mean business.

Linky.

The hard drive business may be in for more consolidation as Fujitsu prepares to exit the business. Storage, both silicon and magnetic have been fiercely competitive businesses with elusive profits for those brave few who continue in them. It’s great news for the Tightwad as prices for these basic components that the DIY types love keep falling. When the recession ends, it’s certain there will be fewer players in the hard drive business.

The decision comes at a 56 million dollar facilities-related loss to the company, as it already invested into a component manufacturing plant located in Nagano City, Japan.  Fujitsu will retain its employees though, and the plant will continue to make other components, such as printed circuit boards

for servers.

As for Fujitsu’s overall HDD business, the company is in continuing negatiations with several companies over a possible sale.  According to Yahoo! Tech News, Toshiba has stated that it is in talks about a possible purchase of Fujitsu’s HDD business. (Toms Hardware)

Intel has decided to be a player in the SSD game. Somewhat unusual considering they are not as big a player in the RAM market as several korean and japanese mfrs are. –

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Intel Corporation has begun shipping its highest- performing solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel® X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive, aimed at server, workstation and storage systems. Unlike mechanical drives, the SSDs contain no moving parts and instead feature 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. Systems equipped with these drives will not suffer from the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional drives. By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times.

“Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore’s Law” said Kirk Skaugen, general manager, Intel Server Platforms group. “Intel’s high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads”

It will be interesting to see how the SSD market works out against their mechanical brotheren. The SSD makers would seem to have a natural advantage in the storage performance curve due to the manufacturing techniques used vs traditional disk. But just when you think that SSD has eclipsed them the likes of Western Digital, IBM and Seagate seem to pull another storage rabbit out of the hat.

Linky.

If you run a small business (SMB) and are concerned about the protection of your client lists, AR and AP then you know that backup is essential. Many an SMB looks at a more professional solution like hardware raid controllers. But by the time you add up the controller card, SCSI drives, downtime and tech time the bill very quickly gets the other side of 4 figures. Not a tightwad territory.

But there are alternatives. For those of the Linux bent there is software raid and LVM2 that we have covered earlier. It pays to have a core duo processor or better in those cases as the CPU is doing what the controller would have. Your next step? How about software raid and the appropriate south bridge controller? Tom’s hardware covers the Ciprico software RAID solution here. –

Where VST Pro Makes Real Sense…

As a matter of fact, Intel’s ICH10R chipset including Matrix Storage technology is already quite a powerful option for home and certain SMB users, as it has made it possible to create various arrays, or to create two arrays across the same set of hard drives. But the Intel solution is far from the comprehensive feature set that is offered by Ciprico, and is less flexible as well when you have to deal with the worst case scenario and replace a faulty hard drive.

We believe that VST Pro 2008 makes a lot of sense for people who need to create a storage solution under a lot of time pressure, while keeping an upgrade path in mind. VST Pro 2008 allows you to recycle an older desktop PC (with an Intel chipset) by simply installing the software and creating the RAID arrays you require. Once your system is up and running, you can upgrade hard drives, add a RAIDCore controller card http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller with high-performance SAS drives, add SATA drives for extra capacity, or even move the entire storage array to another host system. Thanks to the drive roaming feature, you don’t even need to remember the exact port to which each drive was connected.

… and Where it Doesn’t

However, VST Pro 2008 does not make sense if you have very specific requirements, or if you know that your storage requirements won’t increase any time soon. If you can live with up to six hard drives, or if you know that you probably will never change the RAID level, add drives or need more performance, then integrated chipset features will suffice. And you will probably go for a full-blown RAID controller right away if there is a performance profile you have to match.

So if you main machine already has the ICH10R chipset then $49 for the software and the price of say three SATA drives will have you a poor man’s RAID 5 in a jiffy. The next move up would be a 4 port Ciprico SATA controller for $149. After that its buy and additional controller or move up to a dedicated RAID device ala the big boys use in server farms.

A nice server for the up and coming SMB? Target price $1500. For the money, An Intel server board for $375. A Xeon Up for $420. !Gb memory for $225. 4 500Gb SATA drives for $250. Controller & software for $150. Case for $50. Power Supply for $100. Centos5 Linux for free. Configure one of the SATA’s as straight storage for the OS and noncritical apps. Place all your critical materials in the RAID array. Occasionally take a snapshot of your nonRAID disk and put it on the RAID. And backup the RAID on an a recommended schedule. Belts and suspenders, belts and suspenders. You can sleep at night.

No it won’t outperform a Dell 2950 with its high performance custom RAID controller. But most small businesses with <20 employees its Good Enough. There would be room to grow even with this base configuration long before you would start looking for higher end solutions.

Read the whole thing here.

I want to follow up on the Boss’s coverage of the latest from Seagate. First its great to hear. But we TightWads know that unless your homebrew media PC is screaming for more storage wait 3 months. The prices will come down a little.

But what I really want to explore is the fact that once your get above 500mb on a drive I think the rules of the game change. Especially for those of the Linux persuasion. Think about it. What were the rules under the old game about disk management? Format, partition, backup, restore. Any linux distro still treats the physical that way. But consider how long will that 1.5Tb sucker take to format? Or worse yet back the sucker up. And if you had to resize some partitiions? Forget it. By the time you do the backups, resqueeze everything the way you want it; you will be so old that you won’t be trusted as you are now ‘The Man’. Either that or you buy 2 1.5Tb drives and RAID 1 the puppies.

Better way? Yep. At a minimum LVM2 if you are doing linux. LDM or Veritas if you are dancing with Windows. Then to gild the lily, do Virtual Machines on top of that. Virtual PC, VirtualBox, Parallels, VMWare to name a few. The combination of the two tools is the only way to go.

Using LVM/LDM you can manage your virtual partitions [Volume Groups is the common term used] as you wish. If you need to grow your MP3 collection volume you may do so with little pain, as long as you can define the physical space to grow into. Sorry volume management does not make a hard drive bigger. Using volume management keeps you from becoming ‘The Man’. The second piece is that using virtual machines permits one to envelope your entire componentary in a easy package. Used to be to manage multiple projects I used removable HD packs. Pull Project X HD out, Load Project Y HD and mount. Now I do that all in VM’s. Need a MySQL server? I have one already built. I just move over from external storage and initialize. Mail server? Same thing. I can pull several VM’s in, set up the virtual networking and have a test environment up in no time now. All on a single 64bit box.

Downsides? Minor. Yes there is a learning curve. Yes since this is wrapped in software it is a tad slower. Maybe 1-2% for most configs. But most people never notice. Yes it requires some thought to lay it out. But even if you louse it up, you can recover.

Tools? Well for the Linux folks learn mdadmin. Its the command line tool. Several distros also have GUI tools as well. Enterprise Volume Management System is a good one. You windows folks its LDM. If you want something more enterprise based, Veritas is very good. Everyone one else, check with your vendor.

If you buy that 1.5Tb drive and don’t use some form of volume management, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

P.S.: My gut says that the Intel-AMD folks will in the next 3-4 years be selling nothing but processors that support hardware virtualization. The likes of Atom uP won’t need it. But for anything else they will come virtual aware. The multicore - virtual environment benefits are too great too ignore.

One example. Enterprise desktops. The more advanced management schemes use a shadow space to keep a copy of the original install around. If you had a machine that ran a VM as its natural state at boot up you could have a snapshot done nightly as backup. The savings in labor for not having to reload using a tech would pay for the uptick in processor cost.