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This week saw OCZ accused of fraud, a big storage merger announced and divergent earnings reports from EMC and Western Digital. Read the full story

Here is a quick roundup of interesting news this week:

Iron Mountain Shutters Public Cloud Storage and Nirvanix Reaches Out to Stranded Customers

Perhaps one of the scariest things for anyone storing data in the cloud is what happens if that cloud provider ceases operations. Unlike an internal IT department shutting down a system, there is less control over third parties. This week, in response to Iron Mountain’s decision to shutter their public cloud storage, Nirvanix offered stranded Iron Mountain customers 30 days of free, unlimited storage. As storage moves increasingly to the cloud, these types of occurrences will be all the more common.

Viking Modular Solutions Introduces new DDR3 Compatible Flash Modules

Viking Modular Solutions, a well-known memory module manufacturer has been creating SSDs that fit in memory slots for a while now. This week Viking Modular Solutions introduced new DDR3 “SATADIMM” SSDs. The SSDs physically fit into DDR3 slots and get their power from the motherboard through the DIMM slot. The new SATADIMMs come in eMLC and SLC varieties and can sustain over 500MB/s transfers and deliver up to 60K IOPS. These are very cool bits of technology for high density servers. Two compelling reasons are that they are smaller than standard 2.5″ SSDs and they do not require a backplane or SATA power cabling.

A Viking Modular Solutions SATADIMM

ATTO Technologies FastFrame 10GbE NICs

ATTO Technologies announced this week new FastFrame 10GbE Network Interface Cards. 10GbE interfaces are becoming all the more necessary as storage speeds are increasing dramatically with the rapid introduction of flash-based caching. One can read more about caching technologies at the ServeTheHome storage caching primer. ATTO has long had a reputation for producing quality products, so this is an overall welcome development.

OCZ Shipping Vertex 3′s Through the Channel

OCZ Announced this week that it is shipping Vertex 3 drives through resellers after taking extra time to work on firmware tweaks. This has followed much followed announcements and delays. The Sandforce SF-2200 series controllers are highly anticipated sequels to the SF-1200 series controllers in the “Generation 2″ SSD era. If OCZ and Sandforce got the formula right, and OCZ focuses on customer care, the Vertex 3 could be the killer product of 2011. It is also an interesting release insofar as OCZ is now a direct competitor of Sandforce as OCZ recently acquired Indilinx and its associated controller technology.

Feel free to discuss these topics and more on the ServeTheHome.com Forums!

Major news this week including the Intel Xeon E3-1200 series and Bromolow platform launch, Microsoft releasing a free iSCSI target for Windows Server 2008 R2  and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, and Windows Home Server 2011 moving to RTM status and being released to OEMs, TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Read the full story

Some big news came out this week from Amazon.com, Santa Clara Consulting Group, Intel, and OCZ. Overall solid state drives and the transition from physical media to the cloud for some applications are hot themes this year. Read the full story

This week did not have any ultra exciting announcements like Windows Home Server 2011, a Cougar Point bug or anything of that nature, so I picked a few top tidbits that I saw this week.

TrendFocus releases Q4’2010 Hard Drive Market Analysis Report

TrendFocus published its Q4 2010 report on the worldwide hard drive market titled Storage Demand Analysis System CQ4 ’10 Quarterly Update, Executive Summary.

Some interesting stats from the Executive Summary:

Approximately 167 Million HDDs shipped for 88 Exabytes of capacity and the market share numbers put Western Digital in front with Seagate close behind. Hitachi comes in third from a market share perspective. This includes not just desktop drives but also enterprise, notebook, and consumer electronics.

HDD Supplier CQ4 2010
Market Share Percentage  in Units

Trendfocus has subscriptions to regular, detailed reports if you are really into these statistics.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 hit RTM and Release Dates Announced

Windows Server 2008 R2

Word on the street from Microsoft is that Service Pack 1′s for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit RTM and will be released shortly. For MSDN and TechNet subscribers Service Pack 1′s will be available on 16 February 2011 and for everyone else on 22 February 2011.

The Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is basically a roll-up of updates and patches without Windows XP SP2-like upgrades. Perhaps the biggest for home server users is the new Remote Desktop client that can take advantage of RemoteFX.

On the other hand, the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 gets some really cool new features like RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory. RemoteFX will basically allows Windows 7 virtual machines hosted in Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 to boost graphics performance if the server’s hardware allows it. Dynamic Memory is a technology that allocates memory based on a virtual machine’s need, which helps increase density because of more efficient memory allocation.

OCZ is Switching to 25nm NAND

OCZ Vertex 2

This news has been less well received. Apparently OCZ is now using newer, lower-cost 25nm NAND in their Vertex 2 line. The newer NAND is good for only 3,000 P/E cycles compared to 5,000 on older 34nm NAND. As a result, OCZ has increased overprovisioning so users will get less usable space on newer Vertex 2 drives than older ones. Initial user reports seem to also indicate that the newer 25nm NAND based Vertex 2 drives are slower than the older versions.

This really begs the question, can (or should) a company decrease usable storage space, and offer a lower performance product under the same name? Undoubtedly 25nm NAND is making OCZ’s drives less expensive to produce, but retail prices have not followed suit during the transition. Frankly, OCZ should label the 25nm parts “Vertex 2 SE” drives or something to designate the difference. Without a new designation, users researching based upon online reviews will be severely disappointed when they release the newly updated drives.

Microsoft-Nokia Partnership

This one is everywhere in the news. The quick story is that Nokia finally realized that Symbian was not going to let it challenge Apple’s iOS (not Cisco’s IOS btw) or Google’s Android in the future. The choice was either, 1. develop something new, 2. use Android, or 3. Team with Microsoft/ HP for either Windows 7 Mobile or WebOS. Nokia decided to go with Microsoft greatly expanding Windows 7 Mobile’s potential reach since Nokia has more than ten times Microsoft’s smartphone sales.

It will be interesting to see how Nokia fares in all of this. If this decision was a miss, then Nokia, one of the most dominating mobile phone companies over the last two or three decades will basically have to abandon a second platform in a short time frame. My only hope is that Microsoft puts some kind of awesome RemoteFX RDC client on a Nokia Windows 7 Mobile phone!

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. Read the full story

Today I am taking a look at the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB Sandforce SFF-1222 based SSD. Two things that should be clarified at the outset are that the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB and the ADATA S599 64GB both have the same formatted capacity (55.8GBs) and that there is no perceivable real-world difference between the drives. The difference between the 60GB and 64GB drives is due to marketing semantics rather than physical differences. Second, I have used both drives quite a bit over the past few weeks, and I use Indilinx and Intel X25-M G2 drives regularly as well both in servers and on all notebooks and desktops. Frankly, each controller exhibits different characteristics that one can see easily using a suite of benchmarking software. Those benchmark differences are not translating to real-world performance advantages for one controller over another at this point. Read the full story

One of the most annoying things in SSDs these days is the fact that virtually every manufacturer uses mail-in rebates to make their SSDs appear more affordable. The ADATA S599 64GB is based on the Sandforce SF-1222 controller like many other popular Sandforce consumer drives such as the OCZ Agility 2 and OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair Force, Patriot Inferno, and G.Skill Phoenix Pro. With the internals being largely the same between manufacturers the two main differentiators are warranty and price. Since I needed an additional drive for a ZFS L2ARC SSD for my NexentaCore + napp-it build, I decided to go with another Sandforce based drive. The ADATA’s low price and lack of a mail-in rebate attracted me immediately. The big question I had was whether the ADATA S599 would perform as well as my OCZ Agility 2 which I reviewed earlier.

A few things should be mentioned off the bat. First, the ADATA S599 retail package comes with a blue 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter. For those that need one, this is a great bonus for a SSD that costs just over $100.

Second, the SSD may advertise being 64GB, but after the 1,000 to 1,024 base conversion, and formatting are taken into account, the usable drive size is actually 55.8GB usable. That is not bad, it is just a lot lower than some users may expect. Read the full story

Shortly after posting my last benchmarks on the dual OCZ Vertex 120GB in Raid 0 setup, I received an e-mail to try the new Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) 9.6.0.1014 drivers, which were supposed to enable TRIM in raid. These new drivers were released, taken down, then re-released in March 2010. The big improvement was supposed to be TRIM is enabled for Raid 0, 1, 10, but not enabled for Raid 5. Unfortuneately, this seems not to be working so the best that can be done is the background garbage collection in firmware v1.5 for OCZ’s Indilinx based SSDs. Since I am only working with two 120GB drives at the moment, I decided to give them a shot. Just for reference, the original benchmarks were done with the standard, off the shelf, Windows 7 64-bit RTM drivers.

Read the full story

A few weeks ago, I had my main system’s OCZ Vertex 120GB drive die after a Firmware version 1.5 update. After applying the allegedly successful v1.5 firmware update, I started seeing data corruption issues. A few days later, the drive failed to be recognized by any system I own regardless of which onboard SATA controller I tried or even with raid card was used. Just to give an idea of the timeline:

1. Day 0- the SSD drive died, RMA request sent to OCZ (past working hours)
2. Day 1- SSD information such as serial numbers was given to OCZ and a RMA number was issued
3. Day 2 (Friday)- SSD was shipped to OCZ’s San Jose, CA facility (which is <20 miles away)
4. Day 5 (Monday)- SSD was delivered to OCZ
5. Day 9 (Friday)- Another SSD arrived via FedEx from OCZ in shrinkwraped retail packaging

Somewhere in there I ordered another 120GB Vertex from Amazon.com which arrived on Day 8 of the timeline above since I was running out of space anyway.

Read the full story