" A dual SSD option was ruled out since Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 don't support more than 10 W over the bus."
Umm... that's more than enough for two SSD's. The wave of SSD reviews here in late 2014 typically had power consumption per SSD below 4.5W. (That does only leave a meager 1 W for the bridge chip.)
Yeah, that's a pretty BS excuse. They could underclock the controllers if they needed more power envelope headroom...it isn't like USB 3.0 and even Thunderbolt is going to saturate TWO 8-channel NAND controllers with a native (non-SATA) interface so the controllers don't have to be super fast.
Anandtech should review Wuala (owned by LaCie/Seagate) and other business grade cloud storage packages for small businesses. Ease of use + security + privacy are most important issues
The Seagate stuff has all been reported before, and is nothing new. Don't they have any of the SMR drives available? THAT is what we all want to see --- just how well does SMR work in practice in terms of performance, heat, even noise. Is the experience smooth and basically fast (just a slight slow down when you have lots of small writes) or is the drive a grinding high temperature monstrosity?
From what has been reported on the technology, sequential reads are on par with perpendicular recording, sequential writes are about half the speed of perpendicular recording, and random reads/writes are just terrible. It isn't something NCQ can fix, either since this is a physical limitation that can't be fixed by head efficiency.
Fittingly, these drives are targeted at cold storage and archiving. They should never be used as a boot\application drive.
Of course ("these drives are targeted at cold storage and archiving"). The question is --- if I want to use this drive as, eg, a Time Machine drive, how does it behave in practice. Obviously this is, in some sense, the target market for this type of device. Just as obviously, this is an application that will involve a fair number of small writes along with the large streaming writes. Hence my questions about things like heat and sound.
We all understand that tradeoffs were made; the question is to try to put some quantifiable flesh on those tradeoffs.
"Amongst the new products introduced at CES 2015, the most interesting seemed to be the 7mm thin external USB 3.0 hard drive."
Really? 500 GB for the same price that you normally get 2 TB for, just to save 5 mm height? (the Dell 784-BBBD is 12 mm high) I call this gimmicky rather than interesting. BTW: at 500 GB it surely uses 1 platter, not 2. This density has been around for a few years by now.
Repeat 1000 times: "I am not the world and the world is not me". You may not be in the market for an ultra-thin drive; that doesn't mean the market doesn't exist. I personally am not in the market for an 18 core Xeon, or a Ferrari, or a pair of Louboutin shoes, but I don't pretend those markets therefore don't exist.
Among other things, the value of these physically small drives lies in the fact that the USB stick market is so broken that it's crazy risky buying a large capacity USB stick. Yeah, in theory, you might get one that writes at a tolerable speed, but the betting man would guess that you'd get one with the same pathetic 6MB/s write speed that flash drives had five years ago. The external thin SSD market is not much better off. I bought one of those OCZ Enyo's a few years ago and this PoS writes at maybe 20MB/s and draws so much power that it can randomly overdraw the USB3 power budget when writing aggressively and so disconnect. But I haven't seen anything taking its place that's much better in terms of performance and reliability.
Until the thumb drive market (one way or another) provides some sort of trustworthy certification of performance, those devices are basically useless for sizes larger than maybe 16GB unless you are REALLY patient. Which means that an alternative which one can be pretty damn sure will NOT run at ridiculously low speeds, and which WILL work (reliably!) even when connected to USB2 (with USB2's power limits) is valuable.
I am rather disappointed by Seagate because they abandoned the USM standard. I have several USM drives and it is wonderful that I can connect them to the fastest interconnect available on any computer.
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Kevin G - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
" A dual SSD option was ruled out since Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 don't support more than 10 W over the bus."Umm... that's more than enough for two SSD's. The wave of SSD reviews here in late 2014 typically had power consumption per SSD below 4.5W. (That does only leave a meager 1 W for the bridge chip.)
Samus - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Yeah, that's a pretty BS excuse. They could underclock the controllers if they needed more power envelope headroom...it isn't like USB 3.0 and even Thunderbolt is going to saturate TWO 8-channel NAND controllers with a native (non-SATA) interface so the controllers don't have to be super fast.diddlydoo - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Anandtech should review Wuala (owned by LaCie/Seagate) and other business grade cloud storage packages for small businesses. Ease of use + security + privacy are most important issuesname99 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
The Seagate stuff has all been reported before, and is nothing new.Don't they have any of the SMR drives available?
THAT is what we all want to see --- just how well does SMR work in practice in terms of performance, heat, even noise. Is the experience smooth and basically fast (just a slight slow down when you have lots of small writes) or is the drive a grinding high temperature monstrosity?
Samus - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
From what has been reported on the technology, sequential reads are on par with perpendicular recording, sequential writes are about half the speed of perpendicular recording, and random reads/writes are just terrible. It isn't something NCQ can fix, either since this is a physical limitation that can't be fixed by head efficiency.Fittingly, these drives are targeted at cold storage and archiving. They should never be used as a boot\application drive.
name99 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Of course ("these drives are targeted at cold storage and archiving").The question is --- if I want to use this drive as, eg, a Time Machine drive, how does it behave in practice. Obviously this is, in some sense, the target market for this type of device. Just as obviously, this is an application that will involve a fair number of small writes along with the large streaming writes.
Hence my questions about things like heat and sound.
We all understand that tradeoffs were made; the question is to try to put some quantifiable flesh on those tradeoffs.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
"Amongst the new products introduced at CES 2015, the most interesting seemed to be the 7mm thin external USB 3.0 hard drive."Really? 500 GB for the same price that you normally get 2 TB for, just to save 5 mm height? (the Dell 784-BBBD is 12 mm high) I call this gimmicky rather than interesting. BTW: at 500 GB it surely uses 1 platter, not 2. This density has been around for a few years by now.
name99 - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Repeat 1000 times: "I am not the world and the world is not me". You may not be in the market for an ultra-thin drive; that doesn't mean the market doesn't exist.I personally am not in the market for an 18 core Xeon, or a Ferrari, or a pair of Louboutin shoes, but I don't pretend those markets therefore don't exist.
Among other things, the value of these physically small drives lies in the fact that the USB stick market is so broken that it's crazy risky buying a large capacity USB stick. Yeah, in theory, you might get one that writes at a tolerable speed, but the betting man would guess that you'd get one with the same pathetic 6MB/s write speed that flash drives had five years ago.
The external thin SSD market is not much better off. I bought one of those OCZ Enyo's a few years ago and this PoS writes at maybe 20MB/s and draws so much power that it can randomly overdraw the USB3 power budget when writing aggressively and so disconnect. But I haven't seen anything taking its place that's much better in terms of performance and reliability.
Until the thumb drive market (one way or another) provides some sort of trustworthy certification of performance, those devices are basically useless for sizes larger than maybe 16GB unless you are REALLY patient. Which means that an alternative which one can be pretty damn sure will NOT run at ridiculously low speeds, and which WILL work (reliably!) even when connected to USB2 (with USB2's power limits) is valuable.
alexvoda - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
I am rather disappointed by Seagate because they abandoned the USM standard.I have several USM drives and it is wonderful that I can connect them to the fastest interconnect available on any computer.