Pennies for storage
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Storage on
The average office document is about five pages long. Don’t be mean; assume that you’re storing it as an image rather than skinny text files; the JPEGs take up about 200K, so five of them to the megabyte. At retail prices for something like the twin 500GB Maxtor OneTouch drive that comes out to one cent. The time it takes for you to hit delete costs your company more than the space to keep that file for ever.
RAID is a great idea but matching drives exactly is a pain in the neck, especially if you’re trying to match a new drive to the three working drives still in your two-year old system when the fourth disk turns up its toes. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get a seamless volume incorporating all the storage on your external drives as well as the ones in your NAS box? That kind of storage fabric used to mean a huge investment in hardware and software but it was only a matter of time before somebody did the work to bring it to a wider audience. The first real candidates come from Microsoft; the Home Storage Server cherry picks features from Windows Longhorn Server including unified storage: all the internal and external drives show up as a single storage space that you can make available to users. Machines around the home (or in the office with Longhorn Server) are automatically backed up into the space too. For the larger business, the high availability features you get in Exchange 2007 with an enterprise exchange work with direct attached storage - Microsoft has thrown away its own SAN for this.
Businesses are going to be the first customers for several of the storage devices announced at CES this year, like Hitachi’s 1TB drive (imagine four of those in a Buffalo Terastation Pro if you have plenty of space or two in the new SATA NAS enclosure from D-LINK if you have space for a six-pack). SanDisk has a 1.8″ drive that looks to the system like a hard drive but is all flash - 32GB first, 64GB by the middle of the year; frequent travellers will put up with a little less space to get faster startup, faster file read and write and more battery life. We put two versions of the Sony UX micro PC side by side at CES; one with a standard hard drive and one with a flash drive. We tried to time shutting them both down and starting them both up, but I got so fed up waiting for the hard drive system to finish shutting down when it was still churning long after the flash system was done that I just pressed the power button on the flash system again. It had practically finished loading Windows by the time the hard drive system finished shutting down. Hybrid hard drives won’t give you quite the same speedup but they’ll be a lot cheaper - and they’ll be ready for anyone to buy when Vista ships at the end of the month; SanDisk will only have enough units for OEMs to build into new PCs.
My dream machine, the Portégé R400, doesn’t have an SD card socket. I don’t mind much because both SanDisk and Kingston Micro have USB thumb drives that incorporate an SD socket so I can still get files off my camera. They’re both doing several ReadyBoost thumb drives, including an 8GB stick; ReadyBoost only uses 4GB so that will leave me 4GB for files. I don’t think I’ll run out of storage this year…
- Mary Branscombe
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