At the request of some users, I am putting together a few bits of storage news from the past week. If the response is positive, I may make this a weekly Friday digest.

OCZ Z-Drive R3 PCIe SSD Solution For Enterprises and OEMs

OCZ Technology, a leader in providing 2.5″, 3.5″, and PCIe SSDs announced the Z-Drive R3 PCI-Express SSD this week both in LP and full height forms. They are PCIe 2.0 x8 cards with capacities of up to 1.2TB and feature a new Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA).

Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology stated, “[c]lients gain both the benefits of increased performance and reduced size with the Z-Drive R3, the half height and half length card can fit in even the slimmest servers and yet is capable of delivering up to 135k IOPS in a half height and 250k 4K Random write IOPS, in a full height configuration, due to OCZ’s unique Virtualized Controller Architecture. This innovative new technology will provide customers with robust enterprise features including TRIM, SMART monitoring and power fail management all within a single streamlined solution.”

Hitachi GST announced the SAS/ SATA Ultrastar 7K3000 Series

Ultrastar 7K3000

The Hitachi Ultrastar drives feature Up to 3TB per drive with a 7,200rpm spindle speed, 2million hour MTBF, and a 5 year warranty. AFR is allegedly rated at 0.40% which is pretty good and this is the first announced 3TB SAS drive I have seen.

Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST stated “[r]aising our MTBF to 2.0 million hours on our new Ultrastar 7K3000 family reinforces this quality commitment. Our new Ultrastar drives will continue to play a growing role in data centers that require 24×7 availability for cloud storage, massive scale out (MSO) data farms, data warehousing, disk-to-disk backup, RAID arrays and more.”

Of course with a new generation of drive we have lower power consumption per GB and higher storage densities.

For more info, see the Hitachi GST Ultrastar 7K3000 series home page.

Mozy Updates its Restore Manager Software

MozyPro and MozyHom users will have the ability to have an instant download of indivirual files and see a restore progress manager with the new Mozy Restore Manager software.

Russ Stockdale, Vice President of Product Management for Mozy said that, “[a] typical growing business or consumer would prefer to set up Mozy once and never have to think about it again. But life happens, and if and when one of our customers needs to restore their backed-up data, we want that restore process to be painless.”

Full disclosure, signing up for a Mozy account using the banner to the right nets ServeTheHome.com $1. Net earnings to date: $1

Kingston makes an investment in JMicron

This was reported by quite a few resources, but apparently Kingston is looking to purchase a stake in JMicron. Kingston currently uses various JMicron controllers in its SSD lines and I have heard reports that Kingston already commands up to 30% of JMicrons volumes. Kingston also has stakes in other controller companies like Phison which makes the controller for the now dated Patriot PS-100 series SSDs (I suggest not buying one of these at this point).

Feel free to suggest news items for next week or provide feedback on the ServeTheHome.com Forums.

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