Storage company HGST demonstrated this weekend at the Flash Memory Summit 2014 in San Jose, California what it calls the “world’s fastest” SSD.

HGST’s new SSD uses a PCIe interface and delivers three million random read IOPS of 512 bytes and random read access times of 1.5ms. Latency was reportedly close to 1us. HGST says this performance is orders of magnitude faster than existing Flash based SSDs.

“The PCM SSD demonstration is a great example for how HGST sets the pace of the rapidly evolving storage industry,” said Steve Campbell, HGST’s Chief Technology Officer, in a release. “This technology is the result of several years of research and advanced development aimed at delivering new levels of acceleration for enterprise applications.”

According to HGST, the memory used in this SSD consists of proprietary Phase Change Memory (PCM) components built on a 45nm process with a capacity of 1 Gb. PCM memory exhibits faster read access times when compared to NAND Flash memory. In order to get such low latency speeds, HGST engineers worked with researchers from the University of California, San Diego to develop a new interface protocol and architecture

“Three million IOPs is exceptional, but that is not the most exciting part of the demonstration,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, HGST’s manager of Storage Architecture is quoted as saying in the press release.. “What is really exciting is to be able to deliver latencies close to 1us for small block random reads. This is something that just cannot be done with NAND Flash and current controller and interface technologies.”

Of course this technology is years, if not a decade away from trickling down to the consumer space. What is exciting though is that this kind of research will spur research and development competition in a market, as the storage market notoriously is, that teeters on a oligopoly.

The post HGST Showcases 'Fastest Ever' SSD appeared first on VR World.

Today I’m taking another look at Western Digital’s WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ enterprise drives. I reviewed a single WD4000FYYZ in our Western Digital 4 TB roundup, and Western Digital was kind enough to provide us with some more drives to put through their paces.

The WD RE 4 TB FYYZ was the highest performing drive in our earlier roundup, and as an enterprise drive, it’s rated for double the load/unload cycles of the consumer drives. As such, these drives are optimized for RAID arrays.

The specifications of the drive are below:

• Interface – SATA 6.0Gb/s
• Capacity – 4TB
• RPM – 7200 RPM
• Cache – 64MB
• Load/Unload Cycles – 600,000

I’ll start off with the basic configuration, a single FYYZ drive.

In AIDA64, the single drive has a top linear read of 171.0 MB/s, a random read of 148.8 MB/s, and a buffered read of 345.2 MB/s. It has an average read access of 12.19 ms.

In CrystalDiskMark, the single drive provided a sequential read of 176.6 MB/s and a sequential write of 171.8 MB/s.

We had an issue with AIDA64 and the average read access times. For some reason they were coming out as 0.00 ms for the RAID 0 and 1 arrays, which is incorrect. The AIDA64 screenshots below still include the average read access, but any 0.00 ms times should be ignored

Moving on to two of the 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 1, a mirrored array, however, an NTFS RAID 1 array won’t provide any speed benefits.

In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 1 array has a top linear read of 173.6 MB/s, a random read of 130.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7278.0 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive WD RE 4 TB RAID 1 array provided a sequential read of 176.5 MB/s and a sequential write of 166.8 MB/s.

Next up are the two WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 0, a striped array, meaning performance should almost double.

In AIDA64, the two drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 339.3 MB/s, a random read of 289.1 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7359.2 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the two drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 338.3 MB/s and a sequential write of 334.1 MB/s.

Now we get to the behemoth four 4 TB FYYZ drives in RAID 0, for an array 16 TB in size. The performance should be impressive.

In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 0 array has a top linear read of 713.5 MB/s, a random read of 559.7 MB/s, and a buffered read of 7440.5 MB/s.

In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 0 array provided a sequential read of 657.1 MB/s and a sequential write of 642.6 MB/s.

These figures are better than any consumer-grade SSD currently on the market, and certainly this array provides a much larger capacity.

We also tested four WD RE 4 TB drives in RAID 10. RAID 10 is the same as RAID 1 + 0, meaning that two pairs of drives are striped, and those pairs are mirrored. This array should yield similar performance to the two drive RAID 0 array, however, note the disclaimer below.

Disclaimer: It should be noted that the RAID 10 benchmarks were done via SATA 2.0 (3 Gbps) on an Intel X79 chipset, whereas the rest of the benchmarks in this review were done via SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) on an AMD 990FX chipset. This will likely have some effect on the performance of the drives.

In AIDA64, the four drive RAID 10 array has a top linear read of 327.9 MB/s, a random read of 265.4 MB/s, and a buffered read of 6902.5 MB/s. It has an average read access of 11.92 ms.

In CrystalDiskMark, the four drive RAID 10 array provided a sequential read of 336.0 MB/s and a sequential write of 322.5 MB/s.

The drives themselves are very impressive, and scale well in RAID configurations. The WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ currently retails for $300. While this might be a bit too pricey for the average consumer, prosumers and businesses interested in drive performance and guaranteed durability should definitely consider the WD RE 4 TB WD4000FYYZ.

The post Review: Western Digital Enterprise WD RE 4 TB Drive appeared first on VR World.

Western Digital today announced two new products in their WD Red line of hard drives. They also introduced an entirely new line of drives known as WD Red Pro. The two new products are the WD Red 6TB and the WD Red Pro 4TB. The major difference between WD Red and WD Red Pro (and why there are different names) primarily has to do with performance, price and warranty. WD’s Red still remains Western Digital’s primary NAS-based hard drive for consumers and small businesses, but it also has expanded its capabilities by supporting 5-8 hard drives in a NAS configuration as opposed to the original 4-5 recommended drive configuration. Since 2012, WD has made some pretty significant improvements in the drive’s capabilities and as such they are able to support more drives confidently and with more capacity, like the WD Red 6TB.

WD Red 6TB

Following the 6TB (and 5 TB)  introduction into the WD Red family, there is also the introduction of a new WD Red line in the WD Red Pro line with the largest capacity 4TB drive. The Red Pro drives add 7200 RPM drive spin speed, which naturally adds to performance and power consumption over the entire WD Red line of drives, but not without reason. The primary reason why the WD Red Pro drives consume more power has to do with the fact that a 7200 RPM spinning disk consumes more power than a regular Intellipower drive. The Red Pro drives are designed to deliver good NAS/RAID experience while still being more affordable than Western Digital’s enterprise Se and Re lines of drives which force consumers and small businesses into larger drives without them needing all of those features. Similarly, like the rest of the WD Red line of hard drives, Western Digital is trying to give consumers a good value drive that is purposely built for NAS and RAID so that they don’t try to use their Green drives for RAID and ultimately run into a lot of issues. Hopefully the 6TB version of the WD Red drives will bring enough value to those looking to RAID that they will stop buying green drives to build RAID arrays and then have them fail spectacularly.

As you can see, the WD Pro line of drives come in smaller capacities, but still have similar features as the rest of the WD Red line of drives with only a few differences (other than capacities). The Pro line also features a longer 5 year warranty as opposed to the Red line’s standard 3 year warranty. Both lines will still have their own dedicated 24/7 support line which already passes the standard tech support and immediately brings you to a higher level of technical support. There is also a different target for the Red Pro line of drives versus something like the WD Red 6TB in that WD Red Pro is designed to work in more small to medium business environments with some rackmount/server features like active vibration reduction. The Red Pro line of drives is mostly focused on higher performance small business systems while Red is still more focused on home NAS ans very low power small business applications.

In addition to drive capacities, target market, and warranty there are also a few more differences between WD Red and WD Red Pro. WD Red has both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drive form factors while WD Red PRo is only for 3.5″. Additionally, WD Red is mostly recommended in configurations up to 8 drives, while WD Red Pro is usually recommended for 8 to 16 drive configurations.

For the drives themselves, The WD Red 5 TB MSRP is $249.00 USD, and $299.00 USD for 6 TB. Pricing for WD Red Pro 2 TB  is $159.00 USD, $199.00 USD for 3 TB and $259.00 USD for 4 TB. They should already be available at most retailers today if not, shortly.

The post Western Digital Goes Big with WD Red 6TB and Red Pro 4TB appeared first on VR World.

So, its starting to get a bit confusing how many times SandForce has changed hands by this point, but the short of it is that they were bought by LSI in 2011 to beef up the company’s flash business, and then LSI as a whole was purchased by Avago last year which included the SandForce division. And now, Avago, a company mostly known for their components (not necessarily entire products) has sold the solid state flash business of LSI to Seagate to the tune of $450 million. This includes both LSI’s own line of PCIe based SSDs as well as their SSD controller business which produces SandForce SSD controllers.

The Cupertino based company, Seagate, is buying this division from the Singaporean based company, Avago, in order to beef up their solid state offerings which have admittedly taken some time to develop when compared to their competitors like Toshiba, Intel, Samsung and SanDisk. This continues to industry’s consolidation of solid state storage companies as now LSI no longer does solid state storage which means Avago no longer does either. And by selling it to a company that already technically has their own SSD technology they’ve effectively consolidated the industry into one fewer company. Even though, for consumers, this is probably not the best thing because when there are more companies there is more competition. However, some of these companies struggled to develop their own controllers that would really enable them to capture some market share.

What will be interesting to see if how the different titans of solid state will perform now that we’ve got 5 major competitors all with their own technology. Additionally, it will be interesting to see how some of Seagate’s competitors, who use SandForce controllers will react to today’s news. And even more importantly, what Western Digital will do as a response. After all, Seagate and Western Digital are both in a virtually never ending race to prove who is the biggest hard drive manufacturer in the world with their essential duopoly.

The post Seagate Buys LSI Flash Business for $450 Million from Avago appeared first on VR World.

Since the beginning of this blog in mid-October of last year, I received numerous positive and negative comments about the blog and about myself (interesting to hear negative comments from people that probably even don’t know how I look like, yet alone who I am).

Sadly, you’re not reading stories from Bright Side of News, that originally was planned to debut today. As usually happens when Major Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr. gets involved, we suffered a major setback last week, with two of five drives in RAID5 array went poof, loosing roughly five hours of processed video material. Tales of backup won’t go well this time, since working with RED One camera and 4096×2403 resolution footage really stresses our storage subsystems beyond the current archiving possibilities (REDCODE RAW Compression cuts 325MB/s to 28 MB/s aka 224 Mbps bit-rate – compare that to Blu-ray’s 2.4 MB/s aka 25 Mbps) , so we’ll look into how to solve that issue in the future. My thoughts are currently focused on evaluating rack storage, such as Thecus N8800 and pairing that with 2TB WD Green drives.

Video-wise, we decided to be very aggressive in deploying GPU transcoding (where we can deploy it) and the results of multi-pass renderings were such that our video streaming requirements will be quite interesting and ISP-friendly. We saw some interesting results and the change will be visible next week

This puts a lot of stress on our originally planned launch date, and we already slipped by more than a week… but we’re looking to launch the site very soon. A lot of articles are already in the process of editing, and whole team hopes that you’ll like our effort. For the end of this piece, I would like to invite you to contact me at theo.valich@gmail.com and provide personal insight in what you would like to see from a modern website that covers IT technology. Thanks for your patience.

The post Passing 100K, glimpse into the background appeared first on VR World.

Couple of years ago, I believed in WD’s Marketing moto “Put Your Life On It!” and purchased WD’s external hard drive box, containing “A grade” hard drive. That drive contained all of my pictures in period between 2002-2005 and needless to say, it wasn’t going anywhere but stayed on my desk. One day, this drive simply stopped working. I took it to a data recovery company and was told that the drive has manufacturers fault and that the head scratched the drive to that level that the data could not be recovered. Needless to say, I started to back up things on DVDs and even on Blu-ray media.

Today’s announcement of Western Digital’s 2TB Green drive brings sheer joy at the amount of data you can put in a five drive RAID5 array. Bear in mind that almost every motherboard sold in the past couple of years can fit at least four of these monsters, so you can have 8TB of data on your personal computer.

Then again, backing up 8TB of data is nothing short of logistical nightmare, since Blu-ray offers only 25 or 50GB of data and will charge you an arm and a leg for a single writable medium. It pays more to buy another hard drive for backup than buying a deck of five or ten writable BD-R media. Our video production studio is producing enormous amount of content with every filming, and while we keep the edited stuff, keeping unedited footage is almost impossible due to large foot print. In that way, while we are ready for investing in 2TB drives, bear in mind that every owner should be careful if the unthinkable happens and the hard drive goes poof.

My personal advice to every owner of hard drive goes as follow: backup your most important stuff on three locations. Prioritize the importance of data. Given the size of sensitive data, sometimes, a 1GB USB stick can be more useful than a BD or tape drive.

• First tier should be your most important data – backup this online as well
• Second tier should be data such as private pictures, videos etc- for that, you can use optical media or another hard drive.
• Third tier should be something you can live without.

All in all, Google’s Gdrive cannot come soon enough. 2TB hard drive is available for 300 bucks. Excellent for your movie collection, but for anything sensitive, go with RAID5 and five drives.

The post 2TB hard disk drive is good and bad at the same time appeared first on VR World.

I won’t go into fashion decisions, as I am not a big fan of acrylic cases, but I wish my friend all the best when it comes to cleaning up.

When it comes to the CPU itself, Intel Core i7 965 (codename: Bloomfield) works at 1.6 GHz in SpeedStep mode, and works at 3.4 GHz by default. E.g. it works in ASUS motherboard at 3.4 GHz by default, since the board came with Turbo mode on.

Intel Core i7 965 works at 1.2 Volts, the board was feeding the CPU with 1.208V, bus speed was supposed to be 133 MHz, the board was giving out 135.9 MHz (which means QPI is clocked at 3.23 GHz instead of 3.2 GHz), but if you want, you can turn the Turbo mode off. Since Core i7 Extreme is made for overclocking anyways, expect that this system will undergo a nice air cooling upgrade and then target 4 GHz on air.

One thing is certain: somebody is really, really lucky

You are free to use images from the gallery, just please link to this post. If there are interested, resolution is 2048×1536, since all pics were taken with a Sony Ericsson phone. And yes, my Nokia N93i would make way better ones

P.S. If you wonder why Intel chose the name 965 for its Core i7 series, reason is very simple: company wanted to revisit its failed NetBust marchitecture and relive the glory days. Pentium EE 965 was a 150W consuming (that was advertised, reality was a bit different… for the worse) monster that failed to beat AMD processors that worked at much less clocks… now, Intel is challenging AMD with the new 965.

The post Intel Core i7 965 Gallery – from Silicon to Benchmarks! appeared first on VR World.