GLG News by Hard Disk Drive Experts

* 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...

* JEDEC is a memory standards body that is very active and respected in the electronics industry  * JEDEC has formed a committee to develop standards for NAND flash solid state drives  * The JEDEC committee will be co-chaired by Micron and Seagate  * Seagate expects to announce their...

* Seagate announced their Barracuda 1.5 TB disk drive, the first announced disk drive with more than 1TB capacity  * Seagate also announced their first 500 GB 2.5-inch drive products with 5200 and 7200 RPM  * The 3.5-inch 1.5 TB product will begin shipping in August 2008 while the 2.5-inch...

* USB 2.0 provides external data rates of 480 Mbps sustained.  eSATA, an external version of the SATA interface currently provides data rates of 3 Gbps sustained  * Next generation USB will have 5 Gbps and next generation eSATA will have 6 Gbps data rates * Recently several laptop and external...

* Oerlikon sold its disk drive sputtering assets to Intevac and exits the hard disk drive business  * Oerlikon, in a former incarnation as Balzers used to be one of the major players in the disk sputtering equipment market but had lost most of its business over the last 10 years  * Despite...

 Seagate has stated that they will introduce a SSD device by the end of 2008 This is expected to be an enterprise level SSD to help protect the company’s position in the enterprise storage market There are several rumors that Seagate is looking at acquisitions to enable its SSD effort Intel...