New Life in Hard-Disk Drives

It was obvious from the beginning that even though solid-state drives (SSDs) were gearing up for a major push into the enterprise, it hardly meant hard disks (HDDs) were going the way of the dinosaurs.

Surprisingly, though, HDDs not only are poised to maintain strength in enterprise deployments, but that area should continue to see robust development. In fact, the enterprise-class HDD market is so strong that it's even pulling new entrants into some of the more specialized applications.

Western Digital is a prime example, having just unveiled a new SAS device after resisting entering that market for a number of years. The S25 relies heavily on the design elements of the company's VelociRaptor SATA drive, although with improved performance and durability. The 10k drive holds 300 GB with a 16 MB cache and read/write seek times of 3.6/4.2 ms. The company is aiming the drive at both servers and workstations.

Western Digital's  decision to head into the SAS market may be due in part to the heating up of the SATA space, where smaller drives are gaining in popularity for the new breeds of mobile devices. Toshiba is looking to meet that demand with a new 1.8-inch SATA drive that spins at only 5,400 RPM but provides up to 320 GB with a 16 MB cache and a transfer rate of 830 Mbps. As for ruggedness, it can handle up to 1,500 Gs of non-operational shock and 500 Gs of operational shock.

Both of these devices come on the heels of a pair of new Ultrastar drives from Hitachi. The C15K147 is a 15k, 2.5-inch 6G SAS drive while the 15K600 is a 3.5-inch model with either 6G SAS or 4G FCAL interfaces. Naturally, both drives are aimed at high I/O environments, and both are outfitted with extras like the Rotational Vibration Safeguard, Workload Detection and advanced power management.

All of this activity is happening against a backdrop of uncertainty in the SSD field. STEC took a major hit in the stock market this week on news that its largest customer, EMC, was going to delay more than half of its expected 2009 order of the Zeus IOPS SSDs into 2010. STEC had already delivered about $55 million of the $120 million order, which represents close to 90 percent of the drive's sales, but demand apparently is not as strong as EMC had anticipated, so it is slowing down the purchase rate to let its inventory thin out a bit.

Still, there's no reason to think either the SSD or HDD market is in any jeopardy of a serious downturn. Quite the contrary: All indications are that enterprises are gearing up for major hardware upgrades across the board, the result of tight spending over the past year or two that has extended the usable lifecycle of many systems to their practical limit.

It just goes to show you that even though the trade media can hype a new technology to unreasonable expectations, rarely does a single advancement render an existing system obsolete overnight.