The year of the disk drive

According to the Chinese calendar, 2004 is the year of the Monkey. I’ll refrain from making cheap jokes or try to contradict a several millenniums-young culture, but from a storage point of view, we will probably remember 2004 as the year of the disk drive.

Wondering what makes me say that? A couple of things, but before explaining the technicalities let me say that I have rarely seen competing vendors so attuned to the same messages.

Messages that focus essentially around two disk drive concepts — SFF (small form factor) 2.5” sized units, which will find its way into enterprise storage in 2004, and two serial protocols — SATA (serial ATA) and SAS (serial attached SCSI) — will replace their parallel ancestors, and converge under the same disk controllers.

I say 2004 will be the year of the disk drive after repeatedly hearing disk drives giants such as Fujitsu, Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies), Maxtor and Seagate expound on these two emerging themes. The latest proof of that is an announcement from Hitachi, which made public the results of a successful test of SAS data transfers at 3Gbps across controllers.

Further adding credence to the prediction is the echoed sentiments by leaders in the disk controllers market such as Adaptec and LSI Logic, who often joined the drive manufacturers in demos of those SAS prototypes. Obviously, a new disk drive protocol would be useless without compatible controllers.

But there is more. I have witnessed at least one major server and storage vendor, Hewlett-Packard, participate in these demos and show interest for those new technology trends. For instance, recent news from Fujitsu proudly stated HP is currently testing 3Gbps SAS disk drives.

This behavior, however, should not lead you to believe that HP’s competitors are not interested in the new drive technologies. As often happens in the IT industry, many companies prefer to keep the development of new products confidential until just before release time.

Without actual product announcements, we can only make educated guesses as to how SFF drives and SAS will affect your storage budget for 2004. However, I can offer you this — I would refrain, if at all possible, from making large investments in high-end parallel SCSI servers and devices because the forthcoming first generation SAS will quickly make them obsolete.

An easier prediction is that blade servers will benefit the most from SFF drives, offering more disk capacity in the same square footage. But blade servers are likely the only place SFF drives will show up for the time being. None of the vendors I talked to expect 3.5” drives to disappear any time soon from servers and storage devices. More likely, small drives will find their way into those network appliances for which saving on physical space, heat generated and electricity consumption can make a significant difference. 

Otherwise, expect to see the existing 3.5” drives in servers and storage arrays for some time, but bear in mind that the new SAS controllers are able to control both SCSI and ATA drives and therefore will simplify the process of intelligently distributing data across those devices according to criteria such as cost, performance, and recovery time.

Although 2004 will bring novelties in many storage areas, many vendors (and your undersigned) agree that the most interesting developments will come from the humble disk drive. It will indeed be the year of the drive, no monkey jokes about it. Happy budgeting.