Seeking Better, Not Bigger Hard Drives

ard-drive vendors are a lot like sports car manufacturers, pushing the technology envelope with ever-bigger capacities, ever-smaller form factors, new interfaces and new features to speed access to data.

For system builders that are increasingly venturing into servers, storage, high-performance workstations and mobile systems, the ever-widening range of choices is a boon.

Bold Data Technology, a system builder in Fremont, Calif., expects new 2.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) drives will be a big hit with its storage customers, especially those in vertical markets such as video recording where space is at a premium. “With the smaller drives, it will be easier to cram more drives in the box, and it will cut power consumption,” said Andy Kretzer, director of sales and marketing at the company.

In addition to its storage arrays, which can house more than 48 bays, Bold Data also is building mini-PCs and all-in-one systems with integrated displays for financial institutions and schools. And the smaller SATA drives will come in handy there, too. “The 2.5-inch SATA drives will help cut size further because they are easier to keep cool,” he said.

The new generation of SATA drives, which many expect to begin outshipping standard Parallel ATA (PATA) drives by year’s end, may hold an even more important attraction for system builders: Their increased reliability compared to their PATA predecessors are encouraging system builders to use them in place of tried-and-true SCSI drives for some enterprise applications.

As with all components, system builders say their primary concern for most applications is reliability rather than performance—akin to favoring a Toyota Camry over a Porsche Carrera.

“You won’t find a customer out there who asks [about] failure rates,” said Tim Aman, owner of C-RAM, a Bismarck, N.D.-based system builder, but reliability is nevertheless of upmost importance to clients. “The reputation of the vendor is even more important,” he said.

The same goes for customers of GST/E-Systems, said Stephen Monteros, general manager of the Brea, Calif.-based system builder. He said that when it comes to reliability issues, no news is good news. “It’s good that we don’t hear anything about hard-drive reliability,” he said.

And vendors are keeping their customers’ No. 1 concern in mind. Over the past year, Seagate Technologies, Maxtor and Fujitsu have extended warranties to five years from three years on their enterprise drives. Now as they scramble to bring their next-generation 500-Gbyte SATA drives to market, feeding the ever-increasing desire for higher capacity, they also are promising that the new drives will push the envelope on reliability.

Manufacturers are improving the reliability of PATA and SATA drives as they find their way into primary storage applications alongside SCSI drives, the traditional favorites for enterprise server applications, said Hubbert Smith, director of enterprise marketing at Western Digital, Lake Forest, Calif.

Seagate’s new Barracuda 7200.9 drives, slated to ship late summer in capacities of up to 500 Gbytes, feature a 700,000-hour mean time between failure (MTBF) rating, according to James Knight, product marketing manager for high-capacity storage at Seagate, Scotts Valley, Calif. While the high-capacity drives will generate more heat and noise than smaller drives, customers are more concerned about capacity and reliability. “Reduced noise and heat are freebies, but not major considerations,” Knight said.

Features such as staggered spin-up and vibration safeguards are being used by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to improve the reliability of the 400-Gbyte and 500-Gbyte SATA drives that the vendor began shipping in April. Staggered spin-up prevents multiple drives from spinning up at the same time and causing power problems, and rotational vibration safeguards prevent vibration in one drive from affecting the other when multiple drives are located in close proximity, said Debbi D’Amico, worldwide program director for channel sales development at the San Jose, Calif., company.

Western Digital started shipping 320-Gbyte hard drives for the desktop in January and similar drives for the enterprise in June that feature a whopping 1 million hours MTBF. The company’s latest Raptor SATA drives, which spin at 10,000 rpm, feature sensors that detect and compensate for vibration from neighboring drives. They are rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF in heavy-duty cycle applications, Smith said.

Improved reliability isn’t the only reason SATA drives are likely to become increasingly attractive for system builders in the storage and server markets. Western Digital, Hitachi, Seagate and Maxtor also are including a number of optional features that were left out of the first wave of SATA drives.

Principal among these is native command queuing. This feature increases server drive performance by breaking up requests from multiple users for data, which often sits in scattered sectors on the disk, and then reading those chunks of data based on their proximity to each other, rather than by specific user, Smith said.

For such reasons, system builders can anticipate that vendors will begin phasing out PATA drivers at some point, although the time line remains uncertain. Knight said Seagate hasn’t decided whether its next-generation Barracuda drives will be available with the PATA interface, but because of the relationship between PATA and SATA technologies, the company is in no hurry to decide. “We can hold that decision until later,” Knight said. “It lets us assess the market at that time.”

Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) is also on the verge of making its mark in the hard-drive space, said Mike Chenery, vice president of advanced product engineering at Fujitsu Computer Products of America. The San Jose-based company recently began shipping 36-Gbyte and 73-Gbyte SAS hard drives, he said.

SAS allows connection of up to 4,032 SCSI devices per port vs. the 15-device limitation of parallel SCSI. SAS and SATA drives also can be connected into the same host-bus adapters and drive bays to allow mixing and matching according to performance and capacity needs.

While SATA is already common enough that many motherboards have the required RAID connectors on board, system builders looking to move to SAS will need to purchase specific host-bus adapters for the new SAS drives at least for this year, Chenery said. “Next year, Intel will put SAS interfaces on board,” he said.

Seagate also just entered the SAS market in June with initial shipments of 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, said Franco Castaldini, senior product marketing manager of enterprise products at the company. He expects about half of all SCSI drives to be SAS by 2007, with parallel SCSI being phased out by 2009. Hitachi is currently sampling SAS and 4-Gbps Fibre Channel formats in capacities ranging from 36 Gbytes to 147 Gbytes, D’Amico said.

System builders say it is still too early to judge how important SAS will become, but they do anticipate growing use of SATA drives. “Intel supports it, and all the manufacturers are ramping up,” Monteros said.

Aman said C-RAM already is beginning to replace SCSI with SATA drives in the custom servers it builds. “We were doing a lot of SCSI in the low-end servers,” he said. “With the new controllers coming to market, we’re getting better speed with SATA than with SCSI.”