Seagate sets out to shrink storage
Published: 21 May 2003 08:43 BST
Disk drive maker Seagate is out to shrink the storage industry: it wants to replace all drives used in today's servers with smaller units, the same size as those found in notebooks.
"We'd like to emphasize that this is an industry-wide shift to a new platform strategy which Seagate is driving," said Johan Lim, a spokesman for Seagate in Singapore.
The devices -- which the firm has dubbed "2.5-inch enterprise drives" -- will become available next year. The drive maker is working with Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft to deliver working systems, said a statement.
Smaller drives not only mean space-saving servers, they also give better performance, according to US-based Seagate.
When measured in IOPS (input/outputs per second) -- a method of gauging how much data flows in and out of a drive -- a larger number of smaller drives will give better performance than fewer 3.5-inch drives, the standard used in servers today, said Seagate.
"A 2U rack storage array with 2.5-inch drives will be able to outperform today's common 3U rack storage arrays by nearly 140 percent on an IOPS-per-U basis, while providing equal or greater storage capacity," said the statement.
A "U" is a unit of space on a server rack, with the smallest computers taking up only 1 U.
Seagate is keeping mum about new smaller drives' technical specifications, such as platter rotational speed, data throughput or storage capacity.
Notebooks, very small desktops and some MP3 players today use mobile 2.5-inch drives, but these units resemble the upcoming 2.5-inch enterprise drives only in appearance, said Seagate. Current 2.5-inch drives have platters -- the magnetic media which holds the data -- that spin at a slower 4,200 or 5,400 rpm compared with 7,200 or 10,000 rpm for today's 3.5-inch server drives, and so typically deliver lower performance.
Notebook drives top out at 80GB in storage capacity. Server drives, on the other hand, can exceed 100GB per unit.
In addition, mobile 2.5-inch drives typically feature IDE connection interfaces, while 3.5-inch server drives have SCSI, Fibre Channel or the up-and-coming serial ATA.
"The 2.5-inch enterprise drive is quite different from a common 2.5-inch notebook drive -- it will have true enterprise reliability and the performance to function in a 24x7 enterprise environment," said Lim.
The enterprise 2.5-inch drives will also have interfaces in all flavours, including the new serial-attached SCSI.
HP has plans to use the new drives in servers designed for tight spaces.
"The density-optimised HP ProLiant DL server line and the direct attached storage systems can be optimised with 2.5-inch enterprise-class drives to enable our customers to receive performance enhancements, without adding more racks or datacentre floor space," said Jeff Jenkins, an acting vice president in HP's server group.
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