Making Sense of the Latest Hard Drive Technology

Processors appear to have been the main focus of computer progress in recent years, according to the tech press. A good fight usually attracts the media. Intel versus AMD generates a lot of fascinating headlines and articles (or NVIDIA against AMD). While big-name chips receive a lot of attention, they aren’t the only components witnessing increased research and creation in recent years.

Consider the use of hard disc storage as an illustration. Because of this, storage and drive performance have become more important in the workflow than ever. A business, for example, may want to make a backup of each virtual machine instance. High-performance drives are required, as is the ability to scale up and down.

Here are a few storage innovations that are pushing the envelope in terms of performance and capacity, but they are also creating new markets for the products. Things have changed from the days when you could just slap some mechanical drives in there and get away with it. RAID is still in use, although it’s cumbersome and unreliable. It’s also pricey to keep up with. Zero-configuration storage solutions sometimes replace RAID systems because they are more cost-effective. What is the future of storage technology?

Mechanical Drives

Companies like Western Digital will probably keep making mechanical drives as long as motherboard manufacturers continue to make boards with SATA connectors. For less than $600, we’ve recently seen drives with up to 256 MB of cache and 10 TB of storage. Mechanical drives are the best option when storage capacity is more important than speed. They remain popular among those who are adamant about using RAID on their server. For mechanical drives, Intel has recently released Optane; I’ll get to that in a minute, though.

Mechanical drives offer excellent value for money, but at the expense of some serious drawbacks. They produce more heat, consume more energy, and occupy more space than solid-state drives, not to mention being less reliable (SSD). Furthermore, performance is unaffected. In terms of read/write performance, even entry-level SSDs can outperform the greatest mechanical drives.

Solid State Drives (SSD)

A solid-state drive (SSD) is still one of the best computer improvements you can make. While they are no longer the quickest drives on the market, solid-state drives are still far faster than mechanical ones. An operating system and all your apps and files couldn’t even run on first-generation SSDs. No longer is this the case with storage capacities of 2 TB and more. SSDs also improve system performance without upgrading the motherboard or RAM because they utilise regular SATA connectors.

SSD-compatible storage appliances were hard to come by just a few years ago, but now they’re commonplace. The OneBlox 5210, for example, can accommodate up to 10 SSDs. A 1U chassis can now hold 38 TB of raw storage. In the event that your company’s storage requirements increase, you can expand the OneBlox by adding more hard drives or OneBlox.

M.2 Drives

This is the point at which many people feel perplexed by drive technology. M.2 drives are similar to memory sticks rather than hard drives. M.2 is the second generation of solid-state drives. They are more compact and utilise PCI-Express connectors rather than SATA III. Thus, what? Thus, an M.2 drive may function at speeds of up to five to seven times those of the fastest first-generation SSDs.

M.2 SSDs are a relatively new technology that is predominantly found on workstations and server motherboards. Additionally, an M.2 motherboard connection is required. Due to the fact that the connection is only available on recent boards, you cannot simply replace a mechanical drive with an M.2.

M.2 drives, like SSDs a few years ago, are still relatively new. These drives become heated and slow down when their casings are not adequately cooled. Apart from their expense, they can be finicky with system drivers and the BIOS.

Once heat concerns are resolved and prices reduce, storage units such as the OneBlox might be stacked with M.2 drives. They thrive in circumstances that involve a significant amount of reading/writing in a short period of time. M.2 would be a suitable fit for a big database server that executes 10,000+ read/write operations per day.

My advice to anyone contemplating an M.2 drive is to pause for a moment longer, even if your fingers are itching to snap. Make the leap once the initial hiccups have been ironed out and no more bottlenecks have been identified. As with an exotic sports vehicles, they give incredible performance but also have a few drawbacks.

Intel Optane

Optane is Intel’s vision for future memory and storage. This is possible. Contrarily, Optane is a memory technology that nowadays accelerates mechanical drives. Yes, old mechanical drives!

Optane is a chip that monitors your computer’s use. Then it transfers the frequently used files into Optane. Anything from the operating system to games and programmes. This is RAM that does not disappear when the system is restarted.

We’ve seen Intel introduce Optane-compatible SSDs and enterprise data centre solutions with fast caching and storage for latency-sensitive apps. Intel continues to conflate storage with memory. It’s not hard to imagine servers with a single low-latency storage pool replacing separate memory and disc controllers.

A motherboard compatible with 7th generation Intel Core CPUs is required to use Optane. It’s been called a “poor man’s SSD” since it makes a mechanical disc work like an SSD. For now, we’ll have to wait and see whether other companies embrace Optane.

Conclusion

A perfect storm is developing. More material is being created than ever. That puts a lot of pressure on IT to back up data. Then cloud services come along and offer to simplify our lives by storing our data. Cloud services may be beneficial to firms that don’t generate a lot of data, so you should consider using them for part of your storage requirements. Last week, I chatted with the owner of a real estate firm who said he had migrated all 20 workers to Google’s G Suite. His only Windows server served as the company’s file sharing. Deploying that one function makes sense.

For those of us who need regular system backups or deal with big data volumes, relying on cloud services for storage is unrealistic. For most of us, on-premises storage equipment is preferable. Some may intelligently exchange data with the cloud. However, the storage technology they support determines their performance. SSDs are currently standard, but M.2 drives could be available shortly.