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Posts Tagged ‘Magnetic Media’

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives
Solid state drives may be the fast-moving wave of the future in PC storage, but the technology for bigger and better magnetic media keeps on trucking. Only recently, that truck hit something of a pothole: the 4096-byte sector size that will allow advanced format drives to have more usable space (and surpass the current 2TB capacity limit) doesn’t play nice with the world’s most popular OS — Windows XP. While manufacturers like Western Digital have already introduced software that successfully combats the problem, the new drives perform poorly in Win XP without it, and rival manufacturer Seagate told the BBC that even with software tricks, XP users should expect the occasional 5ms delay, or 10% speed reduction, during write times. Is this the end of Windows XP? Hardly. Should you make sure to install the software that comes with your next hard drive? Absolutely.

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Latest migrations show SSD is ready for some datacenters

When we asked the IT pros in the Server Room to name the number one barrier to solid state disk (SSD) adoption in the enterprise, “price” was the near unanimous consensus. SSD storage is still significantly more expensive than rotating magnetic media, but with datacenters becoming ever more constrained by power and cooling considerations, the overall price picture for SSD vs. HDD keeps getting better. Sure, at the level of an individual drive, the cost/GB difference between SSD and HDD is still huge, but at the level of the overall datacenter, with floor space, power, and cooling factored in, the delta now looks a lot smaller.

The latest large datacenter to make the leap to SSD is MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive that has recently been shrinking a lot more than just its server footprint—user base, revenues, and staff come to mind. The struggling social networking site has a mandate to boost efficiency, so it turned to FusionIO, makers of PCIe-based SSDs with insanely high sustained read and write bandwidth numbers to match their stratospheric prices (80GB will set you back around $3,500—and it only gets worse from there).

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