Personal storage

The hard drives are getting bigger and faster as are the USB keys. By Dominic K

Personal storage for the enterprise or for that matter home based desktop or notebook user largely means the hard disk drive (HDD) or a USB drive. These drives are not only used in PCs and notebooks, but are also used in servers and consumer electronic equipment such as MP3 players and digital video recorders.

Hard drive capacities continue to go up. Earlier 10 GB drives were the entry-level for PCs. This gradually jumped to 40 GB. Today, the basic configuration for home users is considered to be at least 80 GB for hard disk drives.

IDC India states that the hard drive market grew by 22.1 percent in 2004 as compared to 16.8 percent in 2003. In addition, IDC estimates that the market for hard disk drives will grow at a CAGR of 16.6 percent until 2007. The reason isn’t hard to find, PC sales are exploding, making India one of the fastest growing personal storage markets in the world.

Parameters for USB drive

Any value for money product will be blended with the desired combination of performance, build quality, price and service. To be more specific its high selling points should include parameters such as:

• No driver should be needed except for Windows 98
• A USB drive should be a Plug & play device
• There should be no external power supply requirements
• The product to be bought should be USB 2.0 compliant
• Storage capacity needs to be closely checked and confirmed. These include both stated and actual
• Build quality. This includes the sturdiness of the product along with cap locking
• Performance of the product such as the read and write speed, file transfer rate and CPU utilisation parameters should be analysed
• Warranty of the product. This varies from about one year to five year
• Last but not the least the price

Trends in personal storage

Some of the trends which are making headways into the personal storage market include

• U3: This is a standard which is provided by manufacturers to allow their customers to carry softwares an applications along with them. Currently this feature is limited to those working on Windows XP.
• Password protection embedded within the drive.
• Higher storage capacities: 2 GB is commonplace and soon we’ll see 4 and 8 GB drives enter the mainstream.

Parameters for Hard Disk Drives (HDD)

The various factors that individuals and companies should keep in mind before buying HDDs broadly includes parameters such as:

Interface and transfer rates: Serial ATA is an emerging interface technology that has been developed to replace Parallel ATA for PCs and workstations. It is already the standard for near line storage and entry-level server applications.

The performance increase is an important development for both home users and enterprise customers. For consumers, the higher transfer rates help support the growing number of applications that stream video, music and other digital data. In enterprise environments, where SATA drives are clustered together for near line applications, the effect of the higher transfer rate is even more important.

SATA II will make it easier to deliver speedy, cost-efficient and highly reliable access to data without the expense and complexity of Fibre Channel and SCSI.

Serial ATA currently delivers a maximum data transfer rate of 300 MBps and will soon be followed by 600 MBps. Serial ATA simplifies device configurations and improves interface level data integrity. Serial ATA disk drives use a compact cabling structure and smaller connectors, which are designed to enhance air flow and reduce system complexity.

Capacity and Size: Capacity requirements continue to grow as consumers create and store ever-increasing amounts of digital content, including high-definition video, and therefore the HDD should be of a higher capacity.

Observing such trends Hitachi has recently launched one of the industry’s first one Terabyte (TB) hard drive – Deskstar. In India, the product is expected to be available from the second quarter of the 2007.

Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) and Seek Time: Hard drive RPMs remain fairly constant. In notebook drives, 5400 and 7200 (for performance notebooks) remains the standard; in desktop drives, 7200 RPM provides the best performance while the enterprise hard drives are gradually migrating to 15,000 RPM for large storage subsystems.

Seek time of the HDD is also a matter of consideration while making a purchase. HDDs with a lower seek time are always in demand.

Power consumption and cooling: In applications where power consumption is a major issue, as in notebooks, and small form factor enterprise applications, low power hard drives that are optimised for these applications will be of great help. By providing systems builders with HDDs that sip power, the overall system cooling requirements can be further reduced.

Anti-Crash Technology: A large portion of HDD advancements and innovation are targeted at making hard drives more reliable. Drive reliability is usually defined by the drive’s ability to withstand media corrosion, head instability and head or disk interference. Other technology enhancements such as error recovery, low power operation and high shock tolerance all add to the hard drive’s reliability and, in turn, on performance.

After sales support: This factor also plays a crucial role. After-sales support broadly includes:

• 7 business-day turn around time for selected current and future products
• Customer option for credit or replacement of the product
• Simplified acceptance of returns
• Fully-integrated and automated Return Material Authorisation (RMA) process

Personal Storage

Hard drives