Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part II

This is a series of posts on the Promise SmartStor NS4600 home storage server. Previous posts: Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part I In the first post of this series, we discussed the basic hardware configuration. This post will look at connectivity and RAID configurations...

July 1st, 2010 | Featured, Reviews | Read More

Hardware Review: Promise SmartStor NS4600 – Part I

This is a series of posts on the Promise SmartStor NS4600 home storage server. Background Promise Technology Inc have been manufacturing RAID controllers since 1988 and iSCSI storage systems since 2004. In 2007, the company released the first of the SmartStor devices, the NS4300, a fully-functioned...

June 25th, 2010 | Featured, Reviews | Read More

Review: Western Digital WD20FYPS 2TB SATA-II Hard Drive

This review covers the Western Digital RE4-GP drive, also known as the WD20FYPS 2TB SATA model. Previous reviews: http://www.thestoragearchitect.com/2009/09/08/review-western-digital-wd20eads-2tb-sata-ii-hard-drive/ THw WD20FYPS is a 2TB SATA drive from Western Digital’s Enterprise Drive range. ...

February 12th, 2010 | Reviews | Read More

Personal Computing: The End of The Parallel Interface

This is the time of year I like to do a little early spring cleaning and one group of storage devices due a clean out are my old hard drives. After many faithful years, I’m finally saying goodbye to all of my parallel ATA devices. One the one hand, I hate throwing things out. I like to use...

December 30th, 2009 | Featured, Personal Storage | Read More

Destroying hard drives, what a waste

Many financial and government organisations choose to destroy the hard drives that are declared as failing and removed from their arrays. They use products like this which make the hard drive unusable. What happens to these hard drives? I presume they just end up in landfill and aren’t recycled....

July 16th, 2008 | Uncategorized | Read More

2.5" Enterprise Arrays

I was asked the question today, when will Enterprise arrays support 2.5″ drives as standard? It’s a good question, as at first glance the savings should be obvious; smaller, lower power drives, more drives in an array and so on. However things aren’t that simple. Doing the comparisons...

December 12th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

The Case of Decimal v. Binary

We all know that disk drive manufacturers have been conning us for years with their definition of what constitutes a gigabyte. There are two schools of thought; the binary GB, which is 1024×1024x1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes and the decimal GB which is quoted as 1000×1000x1000 or 1 billion...

November 5th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Disk Sizes Continue to Dazzle

HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) announced yesterday that they have managed to further miniaturise the drive heads they use in the hard disk drives. I hadn’t realised exactly how small these recording heads were; apparently 2000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Called “current...

October 15th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Your Data on a Knife Edge

I read this interesting article on the BBC website today. It talks about how two European scientists (Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg) have won the Nobel prize for physics for GMR (giant magnetoresistance). This technology has enabled hard drives to be made smaller and to hold more data. What I liked...

October 10th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Tower of Tera

Lots of talk today about the 1 terabyte drive from Hitachi. In fact the drive is more likely to be about 931GB based on the dubious practice of using decimal 1000’s rather than binary (whilst we’re on that subject, the concept of decimal versus binary does annoy me – what with that...

January 5th, 2007 | Uncategorized | Read More

Posts Tagged ‘hard drive’