Update: Toshiba's small enterprise disk
Toshiba has announced its enterprise 2.5-inch disk drive credentials with a trumpet blast; it's sampling a 3-platter, 600GB drive now, with a 6Gbit/s SAS interface, and shipping it in April. Toshiba's new MBF drive comes in 300, 450 and 600GB capacity points. It spins at 10,025rpm and has a 16MB cache. The thing will spin slower …
SAS is SATA compatible, that means awesomeness for my PS3 :D
If it spins down when not used, does that not mean it'll have additional spin-up times? As I see it, it may spin faster when active, and it will transfer stuff faster, but if it'll have even worse response times than average HDs then it may not be worth it.
I'd like a durable 600GB SSD instead, please!
@Squirrel:
"""SAS is SATA compatible, that means awesomeness for my PS3 :D"""
No, SATA is SAS compatible, not the other way around - Regular SATA connectors don't even fit on a SAS drive, which has a little piece of plastic with some extra electrical contacts connecting the typical SATA power and data plug sockets. Plus, while enterprise drives are 2.5" wide like regular laptop drives, they're something like 3 times as thick, so they won't be going anywhere near your ps3.
@criscros:
"""If it spins down when not used, does that not mean it'll have additional spin-up times?"""
It probably does a partial spin-down, so access times in low speed mode will be slightly higher, but there shouldn't be a full spin-up delay, which would be intolerable in the average enterprise 2.5" application.
So, they're aiming to be the market leader in internal server hard disks. And that's a big market, I agree. But how big do 2.5" internal disks really need to be? If you want really big, surely you've got a DAS or SAN. And soon enough we'll probably be booting our servers from flash drives because the server probably doesn't need more than 60-120 GB internal, flash drives are way faster, and failing a lot less often sounds pretty good to all the server monkeys out there.
About the 'enterprise' bit--
I have seen exactly zero storage arrays that use 2.5" SFF drives. They all use 3.5" drives because the IOPS from a 15k drive are far superior and 1-2TB from a 7.2k SATA drive can't be beaten. There are a few DAS enclosures that use 2.5" drives but they're a sideshow mostly-- by far the biggest sellers for DAS are also 3.5" drives.
The areal density of the Toshiba drive is 384Gb/in^2. Now if it takes > 500Gb/in^2 to make a 320GB/p notebook drive with higher format efficiency, why do you think 384 can give you a 300GB/p enterprise drive? Care to guess the number of platters again?
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