Tape drives are fast enough, says Quantum
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Rules out LTO as it begins the hunt for DLT's fatter successor
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NEC Corp. researchers have developed a quantum cryptography system with sufficient speed and range to make it commercially viable. It could go on sale in the second half of 2005, the researchers said Thursday.
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Researchers at Japan's NHK have developed an optical disc recording system based on Blu-ray Disc that spins as fast as 15,000 rpm.
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Perpendicular Recording has been promoted as the technology to carry us through the superparamagnetism limit. In conventional longitudinal recording, the magnetization in the bits on a disc is flipped between
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Seagate Technology has started shipping a 400GB hard disk drive for PCs that offers performance closer to that of a 10,000-rpm drive than that of a 7,200 rpm.
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers have demonstrated disk write speeds one hundred times faster than current hard drives. The method uses a laser to heat the recording surface and alter its magnetic field. There is no equivalent read speed increase though. According to a report in Science Now, Dutch scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen used a laser to send flashes of polarized light to a 5-micron-wide spot on a disk surface which was heated. The sheer angular momentum of the photons hitting the recording surface was then able to flip the magnetic field if the light was polarized one way, but left it unaltered if polarized in the other direction. A traditional magnetic field reader was then able to detect binary ones or zeroes accordingly. This shows the promise of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The laser flash duration was 40 femtoseconds -- 40 billionths of a millionth of a second -- which is 100 times shorter than the time needed for a current write head to change the magnetic field direction on a hard drive disk recording bit. Thus there is the promise of increasing data writing speed up to one hundred times. This will enable hard disk data writing speed to better keep up with ever-faster data transfers across networks. However there are problems to be resolved. Firstly the recording area, at 5-microns wide, is very much bigger than the sub-half micron area in today's hard drives. Drive users won't accept a substantial decrease in areal density, meaning lower disk capacity, as the price of a substantial speed increase. However, the researchers expect to get it down to a 10 nanometer area. A second problem is that the read component of the disk head remains magnetic and there is, as yet, no technology promising a hundredfold increase in read speed. Physicist Julius Hohlfeld of the Seagate Research establishment in Pittsburgh says that a third problem is the need to have an affordable laser that can fire 40 femtosecond pulses. Daniel Stanciu, co-author of the research paper, expects a working prototype within ten years, which means that a commercial product could be 13 to 15 years away. That would take us to 2019 or thereabouts. Seagate has suggested that HAMR could increase area density to 50Tbit/sq inch by 2019, meaning a 40-50TB 2.5-inch hard drive would be theoretically possible.
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The family of portable hard drives purportedly outpace typical USB 2.0 products.
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(InfoWorld) - Solid-state disks (SSDs) are fastÂ becoming popularÂ as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives but they are not all alike, said South Korea's Mtron. SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption, and zero noise. They've been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers. Major PC makers are starting to offer them as options in some laptop models, but consumers looking to SSDs for a performance boost should pay close attention to the specifications, said Sean Roh, assistant manager of the marketing department at Mtron . The company, which is based near Seoul, makes its own SSD that it claims is faster than any other on the market. It offers a sustained read speed of 100MBps and a sustained write speed of 80MBps, he said. By comparison, SandiskÂ reports a read speed of 67MBps and a write speed of 47MBps for its recently announced 64GB SSD and Samsung ElectronicsÂ said its SSD reads at 56MBps and writes at 32MBps. The faster speeds are possible thanks to the use of a custom-designed drive control chip. In a demonstration at the SEK show, which opened in Seoul on Wednesday, the company had five competing 2.5-inch drives and its own 2.5-inch drive hooked up to a personal computer running benchmarking software. The test appeared to confirm that the Mtron drive performed at around the speeds claimed and also beat out the competition. Among the competing drives, all of which had labels to cover the manufacturer's name, the slowest read data at about 28MBps and the fastest at about 96MBps, while write speeds ranged from 17.6MBps to 68MBps (the fastest read and write speeds were not on the same drive). The Mtron drive hit a read speed of 97MBps and a write speed of 72Mbps in the test, the benchmark software reported. Mtron, which is about three years old, has already signed up distributors in some markets and is looking to sell its 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives to PC makers for use in their machines. It isn't planning to offer the drives direct to consumers. Â
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Virtual tape, remote replication and de-dupe, all in one Quantum has announced a high-end de-duplication appliance, called DXi7500. The new box is aimed at large enterprises, and as well as de-dupe, it can also be used as a virtual tape library (VTL) with a path to real tape, as disk-based backup and even as straight replicated disk storage.â¦
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A new technology capable of storing the equivalent of 100 DVDs on a single DVD-sized disc has been unveiled by researchers from London&#39;s Imperial College.
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Using advanced "nanopatterning" techniques, IBM researchers plan to build 100TB tape storage devices.
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Prototype products include the first such drive for use in a PC.
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A new DVD-based storage appliance is aimed at making archiving data faster and retrieving it easier.
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South Korea's Mtron says its SSD is faster than drives from competing companies thanks to a custom drive controller chip.
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(InfoWorld) - It's an interesting contrast: consumers are fast ditching videotape for DVDs and hard disks, but the people who make TV shows are sticking to tape for some cutting edge applications. When it comes to recording broadcast-quality HDTV, today's optical disc systems just can't spin fast enough to keep up with the video -- but that may be about to change. Current optical disc systems are speed-capped at about 10,000 rpm (revolutions per minute.) Spin them any faster and there's a danger the discs will physically disintegrate in the drive leaving nothing but a pile of sharp plastic splinters and data that is gone forever. And even if they don't break apart the disc can begin to wobble making reliable recording a problem. Engineers at the Science and Technical Research Laboratories (STRL) of Japan's public broadcaster, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), are working on an optical disc recording system based on consumer Blu-ray Disc technology that can spin as fast as 15,000 rpm without these problems and demonstrated it last week. It's needed because broadcast quality HDTV signals of the type NHK records stream at 250MbpsÂ making a fast-spinning optical disc a necessity. A 1X Blu-ray Disc records at 36Mbps so the new system is equivalent to 7X speed. NHK has gotten around the stress problem by making a flexible disc that is just 0.1 millimeters thick. The disc, which was co-developed with Ricoh, is essentially the recording layer from a Blu-ray Disc without the 1.1 millimeter plastic substrate that is used to give the disc rigidity. It won't break apart at higher speeds but is not rigid enough to be useful in a drive at any speed. To solve this second problem a thick stabilizing plate has been added into the drive. When spun, the disc is kept steady by the stabilizer and can be used up to 15,000 rpm, said Daiichi Koide, an engineer at NHK STRL. The set-up is similar to Hitachi Maxell's Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) that wasÂ introduced in prototype formÂ at last year's Ceatec exhibition in Japan and shown again at Cebit in Germany this year. SVOD packs several 0.1 millimeter thick optical discs into a cartridge and holds them against a stabilizer in the drive to keep them steady while in use. However there is a key difference between the two, said Koide. In the NHK drive the stabilizer doesn't rotate. If it did it would be susceptible to the same stresses that as the discs. The result is that NHK can spin the disc up to 15,000 rpm without any mechanical problems. The system is still under development and there's no word on when it will literally be ready for prime time. NHK envisages cartridges stuffed with a number of the thin discs that can replace videotapes. Â
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EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB, said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.Pricing for the solid-state drives&#160;was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 percent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.Single-cell flash memory stores one bit of information in each memory cell, while multicell flash memory stores two. The greater density of multicell flash makes it perfect for music players and digital cameras. But multicell flash is significantly slower, making single-cell flash more suitable for high-performance applications such as solid-state drives. Single-cell flash memory is also more durable that multicell flash. Each cell on a multicell flash chip is generally good for 10,000 write/erase cycles, while the cells on single-cell chips can last for 100,000 write/erase cycles. The durability of a flash memory chip can be increased with the use of wear leveling, a technique that writes data equally to all of the memory cells on a chip instead of using the same cells repeatedly.Drives based on magnetic platters are capable of enduring unlimited write/erase cycles, but they have moving parts which can break down. Solid-state drives do not have moving parts.STEC -- the maker of the solid-state drives that EMC plans to offer -- said its solid-state drives, which use wear leveling, last more than 2 million write/erase cycles. There was no indication of how many write/erase cycles the EMC solid-state drives will be capable of sustaining.
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(Source: SEPATON) ESG Lab reviews SEPATON's enterprise-class virtual tape library systems to validate backup/restore performance of over 17TB per hour, dramatically accelerating data protection.  In addition, SEPATON's DeltaStor de-duplication software exceeded company claims of 50:1 de-dupe ratios to help companies mitigate growing disk storage costs. Uncover more "outstanding" results in the full report.