GLG News by Hard Disk Drive Experts

* HP hailed Intel’s entry into SSDs announced at the IDF in August  * HP announced that they have selected Samsung SSDs for their virtualization blade server system  * The Samsung SSDs in this application replace 2.5-inch hard disk drives  * HP says that use of SSDs in this application...

* TDK is the last independent HDD head supplier. * In order to remain competitive to vertically integrated HDD companies TDK must push magnetic recording technology.  * At the CEATEC conference in Taiwan TDK announced technology with a magnetic recording areal density of 803 Gbpsi.  *...

* Hoya is a major manufacturer of glass and supplies many of the glass substrates used in mobile hard disk drives.  * In addition to substrates Hoya manufactures some hard disk media as well.  * Showa Denko has been a customer of Hoya for media substrates and is the largest...

* Fujitsu is the sixth in unit shipping volume of HDD companies making 2.5-inch drives for notebook, consumer and enterprise applications.  * Fujitsu is one of the oldest companies in the HDD business and has been responsible for much technology innovation in the industry.  * Reports abound...

* Metadata is information that describes the contents of a piece of data or content  * Standards that make metadata created in one device readable in another device are in their infancy  * Most metadata today must be entered manually but this takes more time than most people can afford ...

* Oracle announced that it is selling an Exadata Storage Server under its own brand  * HP makes the storage hardware which uses 64 Intel processors, hard disk drives with storage capacity up to 12 terabytes and runs Oracle database software  * The base HP platform is the HP ProLiant DL180...

§ By some estimates there are over 50 companies currently offering products that they call solid state drives (SDDs)  §  Many of these products have been designed hastily and some of them show no improvement in benchmarking tests vs. hard disk drive metrics  §  There...

* There are rumors that Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor drive  * Other HDD companies such as Seagate, Fujitsu and others are also working on improving rotational as well as track change drive latencies  * SSDs are starting to compete against HDDs for performance oriented...

* Nintendo and InPhase are apparently doing some joint work on holographic storage  * InPhase has been pursuing a holographic storage system (primarily for write once archive applications) for several years  * Any holographic storage product likely will not be in a Nintendo game system for...

* SanDisk recently revealed a proposal for creating a single metric representing the expected lifetime of a solid state drive  * The SanDisk metric is called “Longterm Data Endurance” or LDE  * The SanDisk proposal comes at a time that several organizations such as IDEMA and JEDEC are discussing...