Articles about Storage

When it comes to microSD cards, they are plenty small enough. We are at a point where making storage cards any smaller would be downright ridiculous -- they are too easily lost as-is. With that said, how can companies continue to push the envelope? Speed.

SanDisk is one of the leaders for storage like cards and flash drives; its cards are reliable and fast. Quite frankly, I only trust my photos to its cards, but I digress. The company is making its microSD lineup even better, with the all new Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-II, which it claims is the world's fastest such card.

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How much of your company's data do you actually use? According to search technology specialist Lucidworks, businesses typically only analyze around 10 percent of the data they collect.

The rest becomes what the company calls 'dark data' -- information that lurks unused. Much of this data is unstructured and doesn't fit into any convenient database format. This means that companies don't have the tools to make sense of it or simply find they have too much to handle.

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Almond Joy and Mounds are two fairly popular candy bars -- I see them often in most convenience stores. Both feature coconut and chocolate, but only the former features nuts. There was quite the popular marketing campaign years ago, with the jingle of "sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't". The same can be said of technology. Sometimes you feel like a solid state drive, sometimes you don't. But why would you ever prefer a mechanical hard drive?

Capacity. True, SSDs are faster, but HDDs typically offer higher capacities at lower prices. If cost and capacity are your focus -- speed be damned -- a hard disk drive could be what you need. Today, Seagate releases what it claims is the "world's slimmest and fastest" 2TB mobile hard drive. Oh my.

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Storing data is extremely important for many situations. Businesses often need to retain information for legal purposes, while home users cherish things like family photos and heirloom recipes. For many people, utilizing flash drives, optical media, or the cloud is sufficient. I prefer redundancy -- cloud and local data.

What if you need to store a lot of data? I'm talking, like, a lot of friggin' data. Well, your needs may be met by a new invention from the University of Southampton. Not only can its newly announced Eternal 5D nanostructured glass discs hold 360TB of data, but they can last billions of years too. Hell, these discs could possibly outlive the Earth and its sun!

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Intel’s SSDs may soon see a significant increase in their capacity and speed as a result of Micron’s latest chips, which could also be used to create competitive SSDs that are as small as flash drives.

Micron is responsible for producing the flash which is used in Intel’s SSDs and now it has begun manufacturing and distributing its 3D NAND flash in large quantities. The company’s 3D flash chips would allow tiny SSDs to reach a capacity of 3.5TB, and 2.5 inch SSDs could possibly hold even more than 10TB of storage.

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In any discussion about cloud computing, it is becoming harder and harder to ignore Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), the massively scalable, cost-effective cloud storage solution developed specifically to house the huge influx of data created by organizations worldwide.

Amazon S3 commands twice the market share of all its closest competitors combined and is likely to be the storage platform of choice for on-premise hybrid or private cloud deployments for some time to come.

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Your company computer is probably clogged with unnecessary data, and your company’s cloud is probably filled with things no one really uses any more.

Those are the results of a Crown Records Management/Censuswide survey, released on Clean out Your Computer Day.

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Hard drive failure is inevitable, but manufacturers will generally provide an estimate of how long their products will last, giving businesses and consumers plenty of time to backup their drives. When a hard drive fails unexpectedly and long before it should, it can cripple a business.

A class-action lawsuit has been brought against the hard drive manufacturer Seagate after many users reported that the company’s 3TB drives were failing at an alarming rate. The law firm Hagens Berman and Sheller has filed a case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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It seems as 2016 will be the year of the SSD (solid-state drive), with more and more IT decision makers saying they’re looking to use the advanced storage technology within their organizations.

This is according to a Spiceworks Voice of IT survey, done by Crucial, which asked 306 IT decision-makers in Europe and North America about their storage plans.

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When it comes to storage, saving money is no longer the number one priority for businesses, a new survey by Western Digital Corporation says.

According to the storage maker’s second annual global survey of CIOs and IT decision-makers, businesses have recognized the positive impact data can have on their bottom line.

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Seagate is looking to increase its presence in the data center market as it unveils a new hard disk drive.

The Seagate Enterprise 3.5 Capacity HDD offers 10 TB of storage and, according to the company’s press release following the announcement, the disk is quiet and energy-efficient.

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Large hard drives are surprisingly controversial. In the world of computers, it is often assumed that larger capacity drives are a positive. For a long time, that was indisputably true. With that said, as drives grew to gargantuan proportions, critics were quick to point out that the larger the drive, the more you can potentially lose at failure. Those people will often suggest utilizing multiple smaller drives, combined with regular backups -- good advice.

Unfortunately, many businesses are limited in space physically -- there are only so many bays and connections for drives. It is for this reason that a larger HDD is preferable. Today, Seagate is launching a massive 8TB NAS HDD. While not the first HDD of this capacity, Seagate claims it is the largest-ever NAS optimized drive. Who is the drive for? The company says "small- and Medium-sized Businesses (SMB), Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and creative professional segments". Of course, there is no reason why it can't also be utilized by home users who value a high quality -- and high capacity -- NAS optimized drive.

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Storage has undergone some major changes in recent years. The growth of cloud usage, the Internet of Things and the exploitation of big data have all meant increased demand and a shift towards different solutions. But how has this affected the storage industry and and what further changes can we expect to see?

We spoke to Mark Lewis, Chairman and CEO of storage specialist Formation Data Systems to get his view on how the industry is evolving.

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S.M.A.R.T. which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology is a fantastic tool for anticipating hardware errors on hard disk drives. The utility can test for bad sectors and some software can even test for temperature, core speed and system fan speed anomalies. When S.M.A.R.T. software indicates an imminent hard drive failure, the user is notified so that data can be backed up and data loss avoided. Diagnostic programs are widely used on mechanical hard disk drives and RAID, but how reliable are they on solid state drives SSDs?

Checks include electrical and mechanical performance and read/write error rates. Electrical tests include RAM and read/write circuitry. Mechanical tests seek servo information on data tracks, scanning for bad sectors across the entire disk surface. However solid state drives are constructed very differently, although flash media does develop errors over time -- normally bad flash blocks in the NAND memory chips. Just like traditional hard disk drives, the controller manages these bad blocks and re-maps them to ‘extra’ blocks. Eventually the drive will run out of ‘extra’ blocks and S.M.A.R.T. is quick to identify this.

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Flash is undoubtedly considered a superhero within the world of storage. However, it is unlikely to save the day all on its own. Whilst playing an important role, flash is just one of multiple solutions required to address the most common storage pain points in the data center.

Just like any superhero, it needs to work as part of a team in order to save the world or at least save you time. And in that respect, there is an underlying problem (or villain) that needs to be fought off. After all, without villains, there would be no need for superheroes in the first place.

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