Pillar first past 2TB post
Doubles SATA drive capacity
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Pillar Data is the first manufacturer to incorporate 2TB SATA drives in its arrays, doubling the Axiom product's capacity.
CEO Mike Workman says the firm is using Western Digital's 5400rpm 2TB drive. Pillar was also the first array manufacturer to use 1TB drives, which came from Hitachi GST. Array subsystem manufacturer Xyratex qualified 2TB drives recently, for its OEM customers, but Pillar is the first to ship them to end users.
An all-SATA Axiom 600 could previously scale to 832TB; it can now grow to 1.624PB with the 2TB drives. Customers get twice as much data per drive and lower power consumption per GB. Workman blogs: "If we moved 50,000 PB stored on 1TB disk to half the number of 2TB spindles, we could save the world more than $100M a year in energy costs."
We're in a 2TB transition time and can expect other array manufacturers to fairly quickly follow Pillar's lead. ®
COMMENTS
I am fairly sure they weren't the first with 2TB drives ...
Of course I am biased, but ...
c.f http://scalability.org/?p=1693 and http://scalability.org/?p=1706 . That unit was shipped to a customer more than a month ago. We've shipped a number of 2TB units to customers over the last several months. So far, the drive reliability is pretty good. Far better than the early 750GB units, and 1TB units.
As for some of the other comments on performance ... well ... I prefer real measurements to speculation on performance, as I've found speculation often is at odds with actual results. Bug me at the above site if you want the io-bm.c code to see how things stack up. We've found it very useful, and are extending it. I also recommend fio (http://freshmeat.net/projects/fio/ ).
Joe
not enough diskspace?
i wonder how much porn exists.. would they get even close to containing it with 1.524PB :)
@Frank
No - SATA is not suitable for video capture as the drives are prone to thermal recalibration outages. Given SATA drives use inferior positioning mechanics (when compared to SAS and FC) this is really quite a horrible operation when you're streaming data.
2TB is an extremely bad idea if there's ever a chance you're going to lose part of your RAID set as the reconstruction times will be horrendous.
There's a very good reason most manufacturers have not implemented 2TB SATA-II.
You're absolutely right about SATA in workstation / homeboxes - the performance is woeful compared to equivalent SAS drives.
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