Seagate Announces World's First 1.5TB Hard Drive

Seagate unveiled the industry’s first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives to meet explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments.

The debut of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive, the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs, marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives – a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB, thanks to the capacity-boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines proven PMR technology, components and expert manufacturing to provide 1.5TB of reliable storage for mainstream desktop computers, workstations, desktop RAID, gaming and high-end PCs, and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage.

Seagate’s new 2.5-inch half-terabyte 5400- and 7200-rpm drives – Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 – deliver the best combination of capacity, mobility and durability for mainstream and high-performance notebook computers, external storage solutions, PCs and industrial applications requiring small form factor.

Highlighting the global growth of digital content, Seagate expects to ship its two billionth hard drive within the next five years. Earlier this year Seagate shipped its one billionth hard drive since the company’s inception nearly 30 years ago.

Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 hard drives are the fourth generation of Seagate’s laptop family to use PMR. The Momentus 5400.6, a 5400-rpm drive, combines a powerful Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB with an 8MB cache.

The Momentus 7200.4 hard drive, with its 7200-rpm spin speed and a Serial ATA 3GB/second interface, delivers true desktop performance. The power-efficient 7200-rpm drive maximizes battery life and comes in capacities ranging from 250GB to 500GB with a 16MB cache.

Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Seagate’s new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate’s innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology.

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines the capacity and speed required for today’s most demanding desktop PC applications. The drive packs 1.5TB on just four platters and its fast Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface delivers an industry-leading sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second for fast boot, application startup and file access. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

RAIN architecture scales storage

Most corporations use relatively isolated and expensive disk subsystems for primary storage, and they protect this data with tape back-up systems that are stored offsite for disaster-recovery purposes.

A new storage system architecture called Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN) surpasses this traditional storage architecture by offering data-storage and protection systems that are more distributed, shareable and scalable. RAIN systems also are less expensive than traditional systems.

RAIN is an open architecture approach that combines standard, off-the-shelf computing and networking hardware with highly intelligent management software. This combination lets a host of storage and data-protection applications be cost-effectively deployed across a grid of devices that are highly available and self-healing.

RAIN-based storage and protection systems consist of:

• RAIN nodes: These hardware components are 1U servers that provide about 1 terabyte of serial ATA (SATA) disk storage capacity, standard Ethernet networking and CPU processing power to run RAIN and data management software. Data is stored and protected reliably among multiple RAIN nodes instead of within a single storage subsystem with its own redundant power, cooling and hot-swap disk-drive hardware.


• IP-based internetworking: RAIN nodes are physically interconnected using standard IP-based LANs, metropolitan-area networks (MAN) and/or WANs. This lets administrators create an integrated storage and protection grid of RAIN nodes across multiple data centers. With MAN and WAN connectivity, RAIN nodes can protect local data while offering off-site protection for data created at other data centers.


• RAIN management software: This software lets RAIN nodes continuously communicate their assets, capacity, performance and health among themselves. RAIN management software automatically can detect the presence of new RAIN nodes on a new network, and these nodes are self-configuring.
  
  The management software creates virtual pools of storage and protection capacity without administrative intervention. It also manages all recovery operations related to one or more RAIN nodes becoming unavailable because of RAIN node or network failures. RAIN nodes do not require immediate replacement upon component failure because lost data is automatically replicated among the surviving RAIN nodes in the grid.



• Information life-cycle management software: This software replaces traditional snapshot, back-up and mirroring data-management tools with innovative virtualization, compression, versioning, encryption, self-healing integrity checking and correcting, retention and replication algorithms. Information life-cycle management software increases the overall reliability of lower-cost SATA disk drives by replicating data among multiple RAIN nodes.
  
  A grid of RAIN nodes also can adapt to changing application workloads by load-balancing data across nodes based on utilization or storage capacity.
  
  In a RAIN-based storage system, each RAIN node regularly checks all its own files. The combination of hundreds of RAIN nodes forms a powerful parallel data-management grid - one that is much more powerful than today's independent protection architectures. When file corruption is detected, the associated RAIN node initiates a replication request to all other RAIN nodes, which verify their own replicas and work collectively to replace the defective file.
  
  Grids of RAIN nodes will replace existing isolated data-storage systems. Low-cost, high-performance disk drives, CPUs and IP networking make this evolution possible. In addition, businesses are demanding simplified, lower-cost, site disaster-recovery systems and faster and more reliable back-up and restore processes.
  
  By executing information life-cycle management applications across hundreds of powerful, internetworked storage and compute RAIN nodes, RAIN systems will deliver unprecedented long-term data availability, cost-effective and rapid site disaster recovery, and automated onsite and offsite data back-up protection.

Learn more about RAIN: http://www.springerlink.com/content/y5288u60h4108516/

Google is the largest RAIN implementer...

BiTMICRO updates World’s largest SSD to 1.6TB

You can tell that BiTMICRO is one company who does not rest on its laurels - shortly after releasing an 832GB SSD at the recently concluded CES '08, the same folk have just announced their 3.5” E-Disk Altima Ultra320 SCSI series to a whopping 1.6TB of solid sate storage that prides itself in being the first of its kind in the world.

The enterprise grade E-Disk Altima will carry the typical ruggedness of SSD drive, with sustained data transfer rates of up to 230 MB/sec and peak rate at 320 MB/SEC in burst mode. It’s also packed with data security features like DataSentinel, Patented PowerGuard, Patented securErase and Proprietary Write Protect to make your money worth.

For folks with smaller budgets, they can always pick up the 16GB version when it is launched in Q3 later this year.

Yes, SSDs are dropping in price, but that doesn't mean you can in any way afford BiTMICRO's new 1.6TB SSD. There is no word on pricing, but rest assured you're probably be able to buy a car with the amount of cash needed to bring one of these 1.6TB monsters home.

BiTMICRO >>> News Release

SSD Prices Dropping, 32GB iPhone Not Too Far Off

While getting a laptop with an SSD inside is still ridiculously expensive, it won't be that way for long. That's because the price of flash memory is plummeting, with it dropping 75% in the last 5 months alone. In fact, 1GB chipsets are selling for as low as $2.23, with 4GB chipsets going for as low as $12.30.

What's that mean for you and me? Well, it means that a, say, 32GB iPhone isn't too far off, and that the days of platter hard drives in computers are numbered. If the trend of dropping prices continues, within a couple more years they'll be nearing the low prices of HDDs we're seeing now, and we'll all enjoy faster, more reliable, more energy efficient storage in all of our devices. Until then, you're still gonna have to do what you've been doing: wait.

Google's storage strategy

Not a SAN in sight

With 6 billion web pages to index and millions of Google searches run daily you would think, wouldn't you, that Google has an almighty impressive storage setup. It does, but not the way you think. The world's largest search company does use networked storage but in the form of networked clusters of Linux servers, cheap rack'em high, buy'em cheap x86 servers with one or two internal drives.

A cluster will consist of several hundred, even thousands of machines, each with their internal disk. At the last public count, in April 2003, there were 15,000 plus such machines with 80GB drives. As an exercise let's assume 16,000 machines with 1.5 disk drives, 120MB, per machine. That totals up to 1.84TB. In fact Google probably has between two and five petabytes altogether, if we add in duplicated systems, test systems and news systems and Froogle systems and so forth. Why does Google use such a massively distributed system?

It's the application

Crudely speaking, Google's storage has to do two production jobs. First it has to assimilate the results of the web crawlers which discover and index new pages. In file system terms the bulk of this activity is appending data to existing files rather than overwriting them.

The second task is to respond to the millions of online search requests, query the stored data, and come up with results. These searches can be extensively parallelised.

Google has its own GFS - Google File System - and it is described here. It has implemented this on several very large clusters of Linux machines spread across the globe in data centres.

Google's application is unique and not comparable to a general enterprise application which typically involves file data being overwritten and a much lower degree of parallelism. Google also requires that its services be up and running 7 x 24, every day of the year, no matter what. Single or even double points of failure, or network bottlenecks are simply not acceptable - ever.

Overall system configuration

Google has devised its own cluster architecture, which has evolved from the first Google system set up at Stanford by the founders in 1998 (so recent!) Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The nature of a Google query, such as search for 'EMC', requires the scanning of hundreds of magabytes of data and billions of cpu cycles. But each web page that might contain the term 'EMC' can be read independently of the others. Thus it is inherently parallel. Brin and Page reasoned it was better to have many cheap Linux machines do the search in parallel rather than running an SMP Unix server. The Unix server would cost 5-10 times as much and represent a point of failure.

Run the search in clustered Linux PC servers (cheap, very cheap), each with their own internal disk rather than a networked storage device (expensive; network link is a bottleneck) and combine the results. Even better, store the index data for the web pages separately from the web pages themselves. Run the search across the web page index, then aggregate the positive hits and search the web pages to extract the little snippets of text surrounding the search term. Aggregate these and serve them to the user.

Linux was chosen because it was inexpensive and more reliable than either Windows NT or any proprietary Unix version.

There is no concept of state as there would be with a commercial web transaction. Each search request is atomic, can be dealt with and forgotten.

In scaling terms this is a classic scale out or horizontal scaling scenario and not a scale up, as in adding CPUs to a server, requirement.

The index is separated into what Google calls shards and these are stored on separate index servers.

The hard drives

Given this why not have a large disk server used by the clustered Linux machines? It's cost and reliability that drives this. A disk server is expensive and, as a single box, is vulnerable. Getting the hard drives with the PC servers means that the data is stored across hundreds if not thousands of drives. Google replicates data three times for redundancy. It can afford to be cavalier about hardware failures. So a drive fails. Log it, switch queries on that data to a replica and move on. It's all pretty instant.

There isn't even RAID protection. In a way the Google cluster architecture is similar to the RAIN storage idea, a redundant array of inexpensive nodes. (Techworld mentioned RAIN here. Exagrid is a supplier with RAIN storage product ideas which Techworld discussed recently here.)

The drives are IDE drives and not SCSI, which would be more expensive. Google spends more time reading files than waiting for them to be read. Latency is not that great an issue so having lightning fast 15,000pm SCSI drives is not a requirement. In 2001, 5400rpm 80GB maxtor IDE drives were mentioned as being used by Google.

Google's architecture is home-grown. Its PC servers are supplied by two specialist server builders. There is no great case study material here for Sun or IBM or HP, none whatsoever. The only well-known supplier is Red Hat for Linux, and much of its distribution is discarded as not needed.

Google gets its system reliability from software and hardware duplication. It uses commodity PCs to build a high-end computing cluster.

File System

The Google file system basics are that each GFS cluster has a single GFS master node and many chunk servers. These are accessed by many, many clients. Files are divided into fixed-size chunks of 64MB. The master maintains all file system metadata. The chunk servers store chunks on their local disks as Linux files. They need not cache file data because the local systems' Linux buffer cache keeps frequently accessed data in RAM.

To understand more about this read the GFS paper referenced above. The assumptions behind the file system includes one that component failures are normal. So system component health is watched rigorously and constantly and automatic recovery is integral to Google's operations.

Growth

Google has been growing at a phenomenal rate. In June 2000 it had three data centres and 4,000 Linux servers. Six months earlier it had 2,000. By April 2001 it had 8,000 servers and was moving to four datacentres from its then total of five. At that point it had 1 petabyte of storage. The number of servers had passed 15,000 in April,2003, probably well past.

By the end of this year Google could have around 18,000 servers and more than 5PB of storage. It is a fascinating exercise in commodity computing economics, performance and reliability but, unless your applications are inherently parallel, not a general role model, alas.

Source: http://www.techworld.com/features/index.cfm?featureID=467&printerfriendly=1

The truth...

Gmail's Storage Increases, 6 GB in January 2008

Gmail will increase the free storage gradually in the next days. On October 23, you'll get 4321 MB of storage, then the growth will slow down until January 4, when you'll have 6283 MB of storage. From January 4, you'll receive 3.3 MB every day, that's 10 times bigger than the current rate of growth.

Another good news is that Google Apps mail accounts will have the same quota as standard Gmail accounts, while Google Apps Premier Edition will have 25 GB mail accounts. Previously, Google Apps accounts had 2 GB of storage, while the business edition offered 10 GB per account.

Gmail didn't abandon the paid storage option, but you'll get around 50% more storage for the same price: 10 GB for $20/year, 40 GB for $75/year, 150 GB for $250/year and 400 GB for $500/year. The paid storage will probably become more attractive when Google adds more services, like Google Docs, JotSpot or GDrive.

"In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our "Infinity+1" storage plan. At that time, we realized we'd never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able," explains the Gmail Blog. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft also increased the storage (Yahoo even claims to offer "infinite" storage) and Gmail became the top webmail service with the least amount of free storage.

Gmail adjusted to have extra 300MB?

This morning I noticed that the reminder message has gone...

With the missing message, I quickly noticed an extra 300MB storage space added to the account.

Wow... that's "WOW"!!!

You are almost out of space for your Gmail account.

Google has begun promoting its paid storage space to users of its webmail service, Gmail, starting at $20/year for six gigabytes.

Gmail was introduced with the premise that you will never have to delete mail, but now Google has started peddling its "extended storage" plans to heavy users like this scribbler, in other words "e-mail hoarders". But I don't blame Google as, for some of us, our Gmail inboxes are big giant "archives in the sky". OK, "cloud" as Voles put it.

Well, discard no more. Just as my Gmail Inbox was at 99 percent with the dreaded, "your account is almost full" message - later reduced to 96 percent after a purge- Google surprised me. And I guess everyone else with a banner on top reading: "You are almost out of space for your Gmail account. You can view our tips on reducing your email storage or purchase additional storage". And there is also a link at the page footer: "Need more space? Upgrade your storage", clearly hinting at the firm's eagerness for users to contract the service. Back in January 2006 I said, "Now that I think about it, I'd sleep better at night if I could pay a small yearly fee to Google", well they took their time, but now I can pay them for the privilege of not deleting stuff.

Google is initially offering four storage plans, starting with six gigabytes for $20/year, and culminating with a whopping 250GB - this is similar to a lot of people's hard drives - at $500 per year. On the middle ground, there's 25GB for $75 and 100GB for $250. The space is shared by your Gmail account and "Picasa Web". As more and more people put their high-res digital photos online, and as megapixels go up and people become used to leaving everything in "the cloud", I'm sure this will be a healthy source of Google revenue.

In that sense, Google is competing now with hosting companies. But if you intend to use Google's space only for Picasaweb pictures, I humbly suggest you do the maths, as I think hosting companies still have an edge. The hosting provider I use for one of my domains has, for instance, a 110 GB plan - yes that's gigabytes of storage, and 5TB of data transfer per month - for $5 per month (that translates to $60/year for 110GB vs Google's 100GB for $250, in other words $0.54/GB vs Google's $2.50/GB).

Your own hosting account also lets you upload and put online thousands of pictures if you want, plus having other uses and flexibility that Google cannot match, like associating domain names, hosting your own forums -all a bit more work, of course, but the only option for control freaks. A regular hosting account is attractive specially with easy to use tools like jAlbum which make creating online photo galleries a point-and-click endeavor, just as easy as Picasa Web.

Related:
Google rolls out paid storage services

Hotmail 2000MB (2GB)

This is a surprise when my old hotmail account showing 2000MB.

I'm a GMAIL user because of its clean and simple interface. I don't like hotmail and yahoo because their ads are bigger than the email and loading very slowly.

I guess Microsoft is trying to gain back the market share. For me, forget about it. I won't switch back to hotmail, just like I won't use IE.

Google's Infinity+1

G is for growth
Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate Gmail one-year birthday, they're giving everyone one more gigabyte. Their plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving everyone more space as they are able.



Google said: "...And we've always loved a good joke. We know we won't reach infinity, but check out what we will do ..."