Storage vets push new hybrid technologies, 1TB disk drives

Storage vendors have had a busy week, banding together to promote new flash-embedded drive technology while independently devising plans to cram more capacity into smaller disk drives.

Five big guns -- Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Seagate Technology, Fujitsu, Samsung and Toshiba -- formed the Hybrid Storage Alliance, an industry group that will show how hybrid disks that include flash memory can enhance notebook computers.

Hybrid drives have several advantages over traditional hard drives, the group says. They boot up faster, using the flash memory chip, and can resume operations faster after periods of inactivity. They also have lower power consumption than traditional disk drives – because they curtail the platter spin time, there is less power draw and an extended battery life. Reduced platter spin time also extends the life of the drive. Because data is pulled from flash memory and the drive platter isn’t required to spin, the system has greater durability and a longer life.

Installation, too, is easier with hybrid drives. The incorporation of flash memory doesn’t require any more space on the host system and, according to the Hybrid Storage Alliance, installing hybrid drives in environments running Windows Vista is as easy as installing traditional drives.

IDC predicts a great deal of success for hybrid drives. The research firm says the disks will comprise 35% of all laptop drives by 2010.

Meanwhile, Hitachi and Seagate this week also detailed plans for 1TB disk drives.

Hitachi’s is a 1TB drive for PCs. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, which is due to start shipping this quarter, will have a retail price of $399. It’s intended for storing digital content – lots of it, Hitachi says. The company is also announcing the CinemaStar 1TB hard drive for digital video recording applications. The drives use 7,200-rpm Parallel ATA and Serial ATA disks.

For its part, Seagate previewed plans to ship a 1TB hard drive in the first half of 2007. The 3.5-inch drive will use perpendicular recording technology and feature fewer read/write heads and disks than drives from Seagate’s competitors.

In unrelated storage news, Incipient on Tuesday announced that its virtualization software for director-class Fibre Channel switches is now available. The Incipient Network Storage Platform runs on the Cisco 32-port Storage Services Module of its MDS 9000 Series Fibre Channel switches. It lets users migrate data within a storage-area network without disrupting applications. The software starts at $137,500 per Storage Services Module.