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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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Blu-ray and digital downloads: Best frenemies
3 weeks, 4 days ago
Rather than waging a war to make consumers choose sides between digital downloads and physical media, some content makers are calling a truce. -
Intel announces high-speed SSDs
1 month, 3 weeks ago
At today's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, the chipmaker announced new SSDs (solid-state drives). The 1.8-inch X-18M and 2.5-inch X-25M target laptops and desktops, while the 2.5-inch X25E, which boasts faster write speeds, targets servers. -
32GB flash chips target mobile devices
2 months ago
Toshiba has announced new NAND flash memory devices said to offer the highest densities ever. The 32GB devices use chips built on 43 nanometer process technology, integrate controllers for standard interfaces, and target mobile phones, handhelds, and PNDs (personal navigation devices). -
32GB flash chips target mobile devices
2 months ago
Toshiba has announced new NAND flash memory devices said to offer the highest densities ever. The 32GB devices use chips built on 43 nanometer process technology, integrate controllers for standard interfaces, and target mobile phones, handhelds, and PNDs (personal navigation devices). -
Micron preps 256GB solid-state drive
2 months, 1 week ago
Micron Technology announced Tuesday that it will ship a series of solid-state drives next quarter ranging up to 256 gigabytes in capacity, but at one-third the price per gigabyte of existing drives. -
The Mess That is Linux Volume Management
2 months, 2 weeks ago
The GNU/Linux operating system is blessed to have sound partition management tools like GParted which are very easy to use. However, when it comes to the management of 'virtual partitions' known as volumes, things are quite different. There is Linx Volume Management, or LVM for short, however it can only really be used from the command line. Also, it doesn't integrate software RAID - except for striping. I was quite optimistic when I started using volume management some four years ago, but not anymore. Let me explain why I'm disappointed. -
Setting up DRBD in an open source SAN
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Open source storage area networks need to be configured for replicated storage. This tip explains how to do so with the Distributed Replicated Block Device, or DRBD. -
Hitachi announces second-generation terabyte drive
3 months ago
Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks--down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi's 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption. -
Fujitsu Announces 5 TB Hard Disk Drives
4 months ago
Fujitsu announced in the media that its researchers have developed the key technology necessary to fivefold the highest storage densities existent in today's commercial hard disk drives. The next step is to find a solution to transfer this technology into commercial products. The company is confident that the near future will allow it to bring to the market 5 TB desktop drives and 1.5 TB notebook drives. -
Linux file systems: ready for the future?
4 months, 2 weeks ago
"My article three weeks ago on Linux file systems set off a firestorm unlike any other I've written in the decade I've been writing on storage and technology issues .... " -
HP Goes to Extremes in Petabyte Storage
5 months, 1 week ago
Hewlett-Packard is poised to push out a high-capacity storage box aimed at enterprises in need of massive, scalable data storage -- potentially even beating EMC to the punch. -
Will Seagate go to War Over Flash Drives?
6 months, 3 weeks ago
It could be dismissed as mere saber rattling by the old guard protecting its turf. Still, when the CEO of a major vendor starts talking litigation, the threat has to be taken seriously. -
2008: The Future of Solid State Storage
9 months ago
In addition to HDTV's, solid state storage drives made their way to CES as well, albeit in limited quantity. There was a lot of speculation on the show floor regarding SSD and companies were loaded with far-fetched answers. However, we can't blame them for our insistence on them predicting the future of SSD going forward. -
Victory For Flash as Hitachi Cans Tiny Hard Disks
9 months, 1 week ago
Hitachi is kissing production of its smallest hard drive disks goodbye, citing poor sales and the increasing shift to flash technology when it comes to demand for mobile device storage. -
Automatically mounting and unmounting Samba/Windows shares with CIFS
1 year, 2 months ago
At my work the employees are in the fortunate position that they are free to choose whatever OS they want to work with. The only thing that's banned (unofficially) so far is Windows Vista. In such a heterogeneous environment it makes sense to share our files through Samba. It's one of the few protocols that any OS can speak. If you're running Windows Server 2003 then you can't use the smbfs driver that most Linux distributions ship by default. You'll need to use the CIFS filesystem driver and you'll need to edit /etc/fstab. Adding the required fstab entries is actually quite easy as I will show, but on Debian and it's derivative distributions you get a nasty "CIFS VFS: No response" error when you subsequently try to reboot or shutdown your machine. I will show you how to get rid of that too. - More News
Linux.com : Storage
Turn your machine into enterprise storage with Openfiler
In my job as a systems engineer, I have handled various storage implementations for our enterprise clients. These may be in the form of direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), or Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) systems. In these implementations, clients generally use proprietary storage products from vendors such as EMC, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and EqualLogic. Many of these devices work just like ordinary servers with multiple hard disks and an operating system. Some use Unix and Linux as base operating systems, so I began to explore the possibility of using that kind of operating system on ordinary servers to turn them into storage boxes. I found Openfiler, which supports most storage protocols and can save you $5,000 or more by providing enterprise-level storage absolutely free for any box that meets the minimum requirements.
SSD vs. SATA benchmarks, round 2: Server applications
Yesterday I presented Bonnie++ and IOzone benchmarks for a solid state drive in a client machine and discussed the relative merits of purchasing an SSD over a set of hard disks costing the same money. Today I'll look at deploying and taking advantage of the extremely fast seek time of the SSD on a server.
SSD vs. SATA RAID: A performance benchmark
Solid state drives (SSD) have many advantages over traditional spinning-platter hard drives including no noise, low power and heat generation, good resistance to shock, and most importantly, extremely low seek times. To see just how much an SSD might improve performance, I used Bonnie++ to benchmark a contemporary SSD as it might be used in a laptop computer.
Get to know Ubuntu's Logical Volume Manager
Hard drives are slow and fail often, and though abolished for working memory ages ago, fixed-size partitions are still the predominant mode of storage space allocation. As if worrying about speed and data loss weren't enough, you also have to worry about whether your partition size calculations were just right when you were installing a server or whether you'll wind up in the unenviable position of having a partition run out of space, even though another partition is maybe mostly unused. And if you might have to move a partition across physical volume boundaries on a running system, well, woe is you.
Benchmarking hardware RAID vs. Linux kernel software RAID
Want to get an idea of what speed advantage adding an expensive hardware RAID card to your new server is likely to give you? You can benchmark the performance difference between running a RAID using the Linux kernel software RAID and a hardware RAID card. My own tests of the two alternatives yielded some interesting results.
Using spindown to prolong the life of old hard disks
Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning. There is a delicate balance between having a hard disk spinning down and up too frequently and leaving it spinning around the clock. If you have a filesystem that you want to have near instant access to but do so on an infrequent basis, you might like to use spindown to automatically spin down the disk containing that filesystem after you have finished accessing the drive.
eCos real-time OS makes short work of building a SAN appliance
Compellent has been shipping its SAN appliances to small to medium-sized companies for three years, growing from $4 million in annual sales to more than $23 million last year. Part of the reason for that growth, says cofounder John Guider, is that Compellent executives have recognized the value of making an open source operating system one of the building blocks of the company's SAN offerings.
