The Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 drive has higher performance and lower power consumption
There’s been lots of talk in the blogs about how SSDs are the future for performance storage in the enterprise. Absolutely! But that future is years away for broad adoption.
15K drives now, SSDs later
Today, 15K disk drives are powering the performance servers out there. Glad to see Seagate is upping the ante on what these drives can do.
Seagate’s new Cheetah 15K.6 has 28% faster data transfers and uses 61% less power at idle. This is incremental, Moore’s Law-ish progress, just what is needed for transaction-strained servers and storage systems.
Hard to believe that performance15K drives now go up to 450GB!
Has anyone tested this drive yet?
I’m watching for reviews of this product…anyone had a chance to test it yet?
I have not tested this drive yet but I’d love to see you blog about how the storage vendors have essentially abandoned performance. Examples:
— EMC and NetApp have not upgraded their architectures since the early 90s. Yeah, more cachee, bigger CPUs, etc. but big deal; it’s still “two controllers” do it all”. Redesign storage already. You’ve got the billions to do it.
— Thin Provisioning — store more on less! Yeah, but I need X drives for Y performance. If I have X-1 then I can’t meet my performance needs. But I did save a few dollars
— WAFL. Seriously, who in their right mind would use a WAFL-based system for Block data?? Two things cause performance issues in storage: contention and fragmentation. WAFL fragments data by design.
— emc disables write cache if you lose one of the 1st 5 drives… huh? still? fix that already!
— and my 2nd favorite (behind WAFL) is Compellent’s “data progression”. It should be called “data fragmenter”. Not only does it fragment your block data, it moves that data to SATA. Your performance drops because you’re fragmented and because some is on 15KRPM drives and other (related data) is on 7200RPM drives. Real easy to predict your performance with that architecture
You could get a dozen good blogs entries out of this topic…
Great blog fodder! I’ll do it.
In the meantime, my simple answer is that disk is becoming the new tape. SSD will become the new disk.
Here’s my post on this:
http://storageeffect.com/2008/03/25/the-circle-of-media-life/
Thanks for the great ideas!