Seagate Technology is throwing its hat into the 1 terabyte (Tbyte)
disc drive ring with a new addition to its Barracuda product
line that will ship to OEMs in the third quarter.
Seagate joins Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, which first
shipped a 1 Tbyte consumer drive in April and has since added an
enterprise-class drive. Samsung Electronics USA also announced a 1
Tbyte disc drive last week, and Seagate is also adding a 1 Tbyte
desktop model to its portfolio as part of its announcement this
week.
The Seagate enterprise drive has features to address
enterprise-specific concerns about large drives, the company said.
The Barracuda ES.2 1 Tbyte disc drive has a feature called
PowerTrim, which cuts off power to either the read or write parts
of the drive's electronics in order to make the drive more
"
green;" according to Henry Fabian, executive director of
marketing for Seagate. The company expects PowerTrim to save around
2W per drive. PowerTrim is being newly introduced with the 1 Tbyte
model but will be applicable to the 250 Gbyte, 500 Gbyte and 750
Gbyte models of the ES.2 product line.
Higher capacity, higher stakesReliability will become a more critical factor for users with
large disc drives -- 1 Tbyte is a lot of data to lose in a single
drive failure. Systems vendors currently qualifying drives are
recommending caution when it comes to
RAID groups. Most vendors recommend RAID 6 or RAID DP, which
can tolerate two disc drive failures, as opposed to RAID 5, which
uses one parity disc drive and can only tolerate a single
failure.
Seagate claims the new drive is more reliable than previous
versions of its
SATA products, 1.2 million hours before failing, which matches
Hitachi's specifications on its enterprise drives. Tolerance for
rotational vibration has also been raised from 1.3 KHz in the
previous generation to 1.5 KHz with the new drive.
However, not every storage vendor is in lock step with the RAID
6 trend. Pillar Data Systems Inc., for example, stripes the data
across multiple RAID 5 sets in its Axiom arrays. "This single
striping of data across multiple RAID 5 sets is commonly called
RAID 50 and provides parity protection for the data in the event of
a drive failure," wrote Chip Woerner, vice president of corporate
communications at Pillar, in an email to SearchStorage.com.
"Not every one of our [OEM] customers supports RAID 6 yet, and
for certain applications RAID 5 is still preferable because it
involves less parity overhead," said Mike Jensen, chief storage
architect for Dot Hill Corp. "In those instances it makes more
sense to have smaller parity groups in a RAID 5 configuration to
boost reliability."
Meanwhile, Seagate said the PowerTrim feature actually prolongs
the life of its drives, and that its design takes into account the
allowable number of on/off cycles for the electronic components of
each drives, but the feature is worrisome to some users when it
comes to disc drive life.
"I would stay away from that in the first generation," said Joe
Meyer, senior storage architect for Level 3 Communications Inc. The
terabyte disc drives look most interesting to him for backup and
applications with large sequential reads and writes. "I would also
look to the array vendors to make sure to do their due diligence,
though I would also not want to be the first adopter of that
technology, regardless."
"The failure of a drive is often like a light bulb -- it usually
fails when you try to power it back up," according to David
Reinsel, vice president of storage and semiconductor research
groups for IDC. Of particular concern is the possibility that a
disc drive, where electronics are partly shut down, might not send
a response quickly enough to disc-scrubbing applications. "A lot of
tweaking goes on with firmware in the enterprise world, and these
drives have got to be tested thoroughly to make sure there aren't
problems with 'false dead' drives."
Performance: The next frontier
While 7,200 rpm is typical for high-capacity SATA disc drives,
some users said they'd like to see a 1 Tbyte capacity disc drive
move quicker before they'd want to see even more bits packed onto a
disc.
"If I could talk to Seagate's engineers right now, I'd say,
'thank you for the added capacity, but I would rather you work on
making a 10,000 rpm or 15,000 rpm version of a 1 terabyte drive
next, rather than another 7,200 rpm drive that can hold two
terabytes,' " said Tom Dugan, chief technology officer of backup
services provider Recovery Networks Inc.
"It's tough to say" whether that will happen, according to John
Rydning, research manager for IDC's Storage Mechanisms: disc
program. "Typically storage systems OEMs are focused on either
capacity or performance, but not both at the same time."
One OEM, however, is banking on faster 1 Tbyte disc drives and
in different formats. "It's like when 300 Gbyte drives were first
introduced years ago," said Val Bercovici, director of technical
strategy for Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp). "Today there are
15,000 rpm Fibre Channel drives at 300 Gbytes. I expect in about
two years' time to see a Fibre Channel or SAS drive at 15,000 rpm
and 1 Tbyte capacity."
Where the drives will surface
With three manufacturers now set to ship 1 Tbyte disc drives
into two different markets, "the race is on," according to Reinsel.
Competition among drive vendors means systems vendors can now test
and qualify multiple drives and get better pricing.
NetApp, EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), Overland Storage
Inc., Pillar, BlueArc Corp., Isilon Systems Inc., Dot Hill, Xyratex
and Xiotech Corp. all indicated to SearchStorage that they plan to
incorporate the drives when they become available. 3PARdata Inc.,
EqualLogic Corp. and LSI Logic Corp. declined comment. Hitachi Data
Systems (HDS), IBM and Quantum Corp. did not respond to requests
for comment as of press time. Those companies that gave specific
timeframes for the addition of 1 Tbyte disc drives to their systems
(namely Pillar, HP and NetApp) projected ship dates in the first
quarter of next year.
Most of the large OEMs said the products will have the most
appeal in nearline and backup storage offerings sometime in the
next year. NetApp said it expects to see some large customers using
its 6000 series enterprise arrays with 1 Tbyte disc drives for
archival storage.
Clustered-network attached storage (Nas) makers, including
BlueArc, NetApp and Isilon, also said they foresee a future for 1
Tbyte discs outside the obvious archival and secondary storage
role. In particular, NetApp said it expects to see the drives have
some adoption in its OnTap GX systems.
"Clustered systems have the advantage of a large globally
coherent memory cache and parallel processing that allows for
quicker rebuild times on high-capacity drives," said Brett Goodwin,
vice president of marketing and business development for Isilon.
"For us, it will be a slow and steady [qualification] process to
get [these drives shipping], but once they're out, you can expect
to see a wide range of high-performance, reliable enterprise
applications for them with our software."
"We're excited about it," said John Affeld, director of product
marketing for BlueArc. "It fits right into our target vertical
markets, particularly in multimedia and online businesses that are
just eating up storage like crazy."