Tag: flash drives

Hyper scale data centres give storage boost

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

emcboxIDC said that the storage market ended well. In the last quarter, worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue grew 7.2 percent year on year to amount to close to $10.6 billion.

And capacity shipments rose by 43.7 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year to represent 99.2 exabytes.

Eric Sheppard, a research director at IDC, said spending on enterprise storage grew in most markets worldwide with factors including demand for midrange systems using flash memory and systems designed for hyper scale data centres.

EMC was the top dog in fourth quarter, with a 22.2 percent market share. That company was followed by HP (13.8%), Dell (9%), IBM (9%) and Netapp (7.2%).

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Flash drives still have problems

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

flash_gordon (1)Kroll Ontrack, a company which specialises in data recovery, claimed that while nearly 90 percent of the people they surveyed used solid state drives (SSD), a third claimed they had some malfunctions.

Obviously Kroll has something of an axe to grind here, but it has surveyed over 2,000 people in the survey.

Of the SSDs which showed a malfunction, over 60 percent lost data and less than 20 percent managed to recover their data.

The reason it’s difficult to recover data is because it’s scattered on the drive, compared to hard disk drives, where the information is stored linearly, according to Paul Le Messier, operations manager at Kroll.

SSDs, however, are steadily become more popular both for enterprises and individuals. Of those surveyed, three quarters use flash drives in laptops and mobiles, 60 percent in desktop PCs, and 20 percent in servers.

The main attractions are performance and speed.

With the increasing usage of SDDs however, Kroll has averaged a 100 percent increase in recovery requests year on year from 2011 to 2014.

 

SSDs make the notebook grade

Posted on December 17, 2014 by - News

seagate-hddBusiness users of notebooks can expect a plethora of notebooks in 2015 that use solid state drives (SSDs) rather than the traditional electromechanical storage.

SSDs are far faster at accessing operating systems and data than HDDs and Digitimes has talked to a number of suppliers that think their use will increase next year.

The main reason is that as SSDs proliferate, their prices will continue to drop and the report suggests that as many as a fifth of business notebooks will use them next year

SSDs are still expensive compared to HDDs however. Digitimes said that a 128GB flash drive will cost $60 in the next few months, but you can buy a one terabyte drive for that amount.

So the notebook vendors will probably use a combination of SSDs and HDDs in hybrid devices.

But it will be a while before notebooks intended for home use and using SSDs will be cheap enough for home use, although most analysts believe that time is not far away.

Sandisk releases enterprise flash drive

Posted on September 30, 2014 by - News

Sandisk X300 SSDMemory company Sandisk said it has introduced the X300 solid state disk (SSD), suitable for corporate environments.

The drive uses its X3 flash technology and also builds in nCache 2.0.  This is next generation tiered caching technology that uses SLC and X3 flash blocks to improve life, increase efficience and give faster performance for large organisations.

Those corporate workloads include office productivity apps, media creation, or financial transactions.

The drive becomes available in October and comes in capacities of 128GB, 256GB, 5GB and 1TB.

The drive comes with a dashboard application giving management tools include measuring drive performance, checking the health of the drive, firmware update alerts and embedded applications such as the ability to create exact replicas of old hard drives onto the X300 SSD without the need to re-install operating systems.

No pricing details are available.