Now There’s a Good reason to buy the WD Elite

Let’s face it, who needs extra connections? Blah. The electronic display on new WD external elite models are reason enough to spend the extra money on these drives. Other than the flashy “elite” name there are some useful options with it. The label helps distinguish which drive contain what data, plus gives you a rough estimate of how space is available. Things that are the same: shape, automatic backup software, hardware based encryption, warranty, and Western Digital’s green technology.

USB 2.0? Come on already. Hello? USB 3.0? Heck even eSATA would be appreciated. If I’m paying a premium for the brand name it should have firewire. FYI Mac users will need to reformat the drive to work optimally with their hardware. FAT32 just doesn’t cut it. A nice aluminum or metal casing would look fantastic, albeit more expensive, would probably do wonders for the failure rate. Plastic is not great when it comes to heat dissipation.

Hmm, I wonder how much a label machine costs? I’m always mixing up my music and porn drives…

Price is Right

Get ready for a price adjustment. Affordable SSD’s will soon be on the way. JMicron’s new NAND flash controller could cut prices of solid state drives in half. The JMF612 chip design suits the current generation of flash chips utilizing smaller process geometries. The new chips are smaller, faster, and most importantly cheaper to manufacture. Intel and Micron are working on building 34nm NAND flash chips while Samsung and Toshiba are following closely behind. The cheap controller board combined with newer higher density flash memory add up to a widely affordable storage unit by late Fall. Look for many data centers to convert to solid state technology later this year. (link)

Longterm SSD performance in question

Solid state drives in test runs have vastly outperformed traditional hard drives. However new information now shows that SSD performance drops off in the long run. Out of the box, shiny new SSDs blow SATA drives away in read/write speed tests. Previous logic seemed to imply that SSDs did not suffer from the same problems older hard drives do but some of the same problems still exists. Data fragmentation is one of them. Drive performance as more capacity is used. As well as write cycle wear slowing drive performance. Through extended tests SSDs still perform faster than mechanical hard drives and the added power efficiency is a nice bonus if you have a large data center, however the cost vs performance is still debatable. A whole hearted switch to solid state technology is probably not advised at this point as the cost factor still is unattainable for most companies. On a small scale solid state drives are still worth a test drive for the ultra mobile employees. Bottom line: it’s still a wait and see game.

WTF is RAID?

Often terms get thrown around the office that aren’t always apparently clear. When it comes to technology it’s hard to always be on top of the ball. However the term “RAID” is definitely one you should get to know. Gizmodo has done a great writeup on the what a RAID is and the various types of set ups. For the most part you only need to be concerned with RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 as these are the most common forms you will run into in the wild. Mirror, span, striped, parity, redundancy, just do a Google search and read up on your tech already.

Feeling a bit more adventurous? How about setting up your own RAID at home? Go to Lifehacker and just do it. Your spouse just might thank you when that crusty old hard drive decides to crap out and the RAID you set up saves the day. OR you can be really lazy and go to the local electronics store and pick up a little NAS box to do the job for you. Man, you really are lazy!

Now that’s fast

This is a technology that really peaks my interest. Well at least 2 technologies that combine to make something even more interesting. Solid state drives and PCI express architecture combined to produce super high performance enterprise hardware. Is it fast? Try 1.5 Gbytes/s sustained data transfer. Now, that’s damn fast. Slapping SSD technology on to other PC components opens up a whole new area of application for storage. How about a motherboard with built in SSD chips for either backup purposes or OS installations? How about video cards pre-packed with video games installed on the card? Can’t beat that, plus you’ve got the video card optimized for running the game. Sound cards with a built in iTunes library? Or how about smaller capacity SSDs stored right on the PCB of hard drives for data recovery purposes? Sure, it will lead to more expensive drives but you’d always have a copy of your data stored on the SSD. Just remove it from the PCB and put into a reader.