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Memristors and HAMR Lasers

Dan Bennett — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:07:57 +0000

TDK reckons it can use lasers to double hard drive density by heating platters and HP / Hynix want to take on flash memory with it’s Memristor technology.

It makes a change to see two storage technology articles on general tech blogs in one day.

TDK Laser Beam Story on El Reg

HP Memristors Story on Slashdot

Apple & Lacie Thunderbolt Technology

John Wilson — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:31:55 +0000

Apple officially unveiled the newly updated MacBook Pro range featuring new high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology and improved processor and graphics offerings back in February 2011. LACIE have just announced the Little Big Disk with Thunderbolt Technology to support this range of Macs. Running on PCI Express and DisplayPort protocols, data transfer speeds between peripherals on Thunderbolt technology can reportedly be done 20 times faster than USB 2.0. LACIE also mention the use of SSD technology in the little big disk to complement this technology, using two 250GB Intel 510® Series Solid-State Drives (SSD). The two solid-state drives are preconfigured as a Striped RAID Set for enhanced performance.

Our only concern with SSD technology is it’s reliability and endurance.

As with any non-volatile floating gate memory device, the more you cycle the device the more failures you tend to observe, and the less data retention you get. So although the I/O technology is the way forward, the type of device used for critical data storage, is still a question to be answered.

Dataquest part of Novatech’s New Managed Services

John Wilson — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:03:33 +0000

Dataquest’s specialist data recovery services incorporated in Novatech’s bespoke IT & Telecomms hardware solutions. Novatech can now offer their customers the complete worry free IT Solution. In partnership with Novatech, Dataquest will provide their customers with 24/7 Data Recovery support.

Novatech Blog

SSDs Not Secure

Dan Bennett — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:06:43 +0000

Some tests carried out by the “Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory” have revealed some serious flaws with SSDs ability to be securely erased. When using standard tools designed for spinning disks, the results were understandably bad. They also tried the built-in “Security Erase Unit” command and the results of this were generally not good. After being securely erased, most of the SSDs still contained some large fragments of the test files.

Some secure erasure software would be similarly inefficient for hard disks anyway, as things like remapped or bad sectors can still contain readable data which may not be erased during the process.

The simplest solution for securely erasing any data is to completely destroy the storage media. For hard drives this means making a real mess of the platters, for SSDs it means wrecking the whole PCB, data chips and controller chips.

MEMRISTORS

admin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:09:00 +0000

To put it in a nutshell, this could be the future for storage technology. The memristor has been the missing link from back when resistors, inductors and capacitors were originally created. What has now changed is the use of nano technology which has allowed the creation of the fourth electronic component; the memristor.

This technology can “remember” how much current has passed through it and can save its electronic state even when turned off. This means that in theory it will be much faster and cheaper than flash memory (And SSDs), and eventually also replace the hard drive for data storage.

Seagate May Sue Rival SSD Makers

Dan Bennett — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:32:00 +0000

The next battle in the war on SSDs may have just begun. Apparently Seagate are convinced that SSD makers such as Samsung and Intel are violating some of Seagate’s (and Western Digital’s) patents. The wizardry which relates to the way a storage device communicates with a computer is at stake, even though Seagate themselves don’t appear too taken with an SSD based future. CEO Bill Watkins is quoted as saying, “realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell.” I would have to agree with that at the moment. Cost per GB, reliability and speed are among the many drawbacks currently facing solid state drives when compared to traditional hard disk drives. Once these issues are resolved then the need for regular backups will become all the more important in my eyes at least. There are currently many ways in which we can resurrect a failing hard drive but next to no ways to recover a failed SSD.

Read More On Engadget

Hard Drives Vs Solid State Round 1

Dan Bennett — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:39:00 +0000

It seems the backlash may have already begun. As we expected the current batch of SSDs are no match for the long perfected hard drives. Reports of customers returning solid state laptops are apparently hitting the 10-20% mark. I would like to think that a new revolutionary data storage medium gets into the market place before SSDs really take hold. I have an SSD in my EEE pc which is fine but I can’t help thinking a 30GB 1.8″ drive would have been far more versatile. Let’s see what developments appear in round 2. Will the SSDs fight back? (I think not…)

Read More On Engadget

1.6TB Ultra320 SCSI SSD

Dan Bennett — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:04:00 +0000

According to Engadget, BiTMICRO have announced a new solid state drive which packs in 1.6TB of storage into a 3.5″ form factor drive. The E-Disk Altima E3S320 promises sustained data transfer rates of up to 230MB per second and are also expected to be available in more modest 16GB varieties. Engadget suggest remortgaging your house which may not be too far wrong if current SSD costs are anything to go by.

Samsung Start Manufacture of 64GB 1.8" SSDs

Dan Bennett — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:00:00 +0000

Samsung has today started production of it’s 64GB solid state drive. (How long until we see that in an iPod hack?…) These 1.8″ flash hard drives would be a welcome addition to any portable device, provided you keep regular backups. At least if the drives do fail you won’t have to put up with the heart wrenching click of death. (but good luck trying to desolder and then resolder all those chips in an ill-fated and expensive data recovery attempt.)

Read More On Engadget

PNY unveils SSDs for laptops, iPods and more

Dan Bennett — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:01:00 +0000

Engadget today posted news of the new solid state disks from PNY. In 1.8″ and 2.5″ flavours they feature 66MBps read and 55MBps write speeds with standard ZIF, Micro SATA, 44-pin IDE and SATA interfaces. These drives will be simple replacements for the likes of laptops and will eventually (by the end of the year) be shipping 1.8″ and 2.5″ drives up to 128GB capacity. Finally my whole music collection can follow me to the gym without fear of trashing the 1.8″ drive and it’s glass platters! It is now more important than ever that people start to put a decent backup routine in place because with solid state storage there is not much a data recovery company can do to resurrect them when they fail.

Read More On Engadget