HDD Archives - Unpacked Network

#138 – Storage Predictions for 2020 (Part I)

Chris Evans 10 January 2020Garbage Collection

This week Chris and Martin are joined by Chris Mellor for what is turning into an annual look at storage technology for the year ahead. We should point out that this is only for enterprise storage and not a forecast on the world in general! We start with a discussion on media. At the macro level, capacities continue to grow for SSDs and HDDs year on year. This trend is expected to continue, but what micro-level advancements are being made? QLC increases in layers, while PLC (penta-level cell) flash is being mooted as increasingly more …

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

Chris Evans 15 February 2019Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris and Martin talk to Simon Zola from Avtel Data Destruction. This is a follow-up episode to #85 (Storage for Home and Homelabs) where Martin and Chris questioned the ease of recovering data from pre-owned storage media. As we find out, the process was pretty easy. Martin was able to recover significant amounts of personal data with little effort and using standard tools. Media destruction is one route to safely dispose of drives and guarantees that data is destroyed. But what are the consequences? Simply disabling a drive and throwing it into …

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris Evans 29 June 2018Cloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers. Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China. These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media. The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection. As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …