The searing heat of the Nevada desert sun during Pure Accelerate 2023 came with a pinch of irony. It offered a fleeting glimpse into what it might be like being a storage drive in a data center rack unit; roasting hot and gasping for the cool embrace of a power-hungry air conditioning unit. 

Heat has long been an unavoidable reality in the data center. A myriad of spinning disks guzzle power and generate heat for every second they’re active – and they need to remain active. It’s the operator’s job to ensure the temperature is moderated efficiently to avoid dreaded failures. 

But “disks are done”, as Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo said, and the company predicts by 2028 no new hard disks will be sold, with enterprises shifting to more modern, efficient drives. 

This shift forms part of a natural evolution in the industry, attendees heard, with Giancarlo comparing it to the transition from vinyl records to CDs or VHS and DVDs to streaming services in the last two decades. 

“It only took five or six years for DVDs to completely take over the market from VHS,” he said. “And if we look at 2006, within five years, Netflix, which was sending out DVDs – versus Blockbuster that started out on VHS – completely changed in terms of share. Five years later in around 2011, Blockbuster went bankrupt.”

Making the case for sustainable data storage

The sustainability benefits of flash storage versus legacy disk-based storage make the format highly compelling. It was a recurring theme throughout Pure Accelerate 2023, with several sessions highlighting the growing need for the storage industry to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices. Globally, data centers account for between 1-2% of all global electricity consumption, exacting a significant hit on the environment and power grids.

Traditionally, a big reason for this has been the use of those pesky inefficient disk drives spinning endlessly. The heat generated by these drives demands intensive cooling, which in itself results in added costs and energy consumption. 

In fact, anywhere between 30 to 55% of data center energy usage is dedicated to powering cooling systems, research shows, equating to a significant chunk of overall power consumption. 

Pure is highly vocal on the fact that its own products can unlock up to an 80% reduction in power consumption. Flash drives also provide up to a ten-fold boost to power and space efficiency compared to disk drives. 

That’s not exclusive to Pure products, either. NetApp, a competitor in the space and another industry stakeholder bullish on the potential of flash, reports similar performance metrics.

With that in mind, it seems evident that flash should be the natural go-to for organizations conscious of their environmental impact. But if flash can deliver marked energy efficiency improvements, then why isn’t there widespread adoption as of yet?

IDC research shows more than 90% of exabytes in cloud data centers are still stored on HDDs, with the remaining 10% stored on SSDs or flash. 

Cost, Pure conceded, has been a traditional hurdle for organizations. As various speakers noted, however, enterprise data storage and hyperscaler data centers are also among the “last bastions'' of hard disk usage – and both segments account for a significant portion of global data storage. 

If that is the case, then it’s clear there is still a long way to go until flash storage adoption is ubiquitous and global businesses can begin mounting a serious offensive to reduce energy consumption. 

Data center e-waste is a growing concern

Components used to create the disk drives present at many sites also contribute to the seemingly endless amount of e-waste that scars the earth. 

Shawn Rosemarin, VP for customer engineering at Pure Storage, noted the e-waste aspect of current hard disk use in the data center industry should be a huge cause for concern.

Research from the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) shows around 90% of hard disks are destroyed when they reach end-of-life, with the majority of drives having just a five-year lifespan. This endemic practice of destroying hard disks adds to the global stream of nearly 54 million tons of e-waste annually.

Flash, however, boasts greater longevity than hard disk and, from a mechanical standpoint, is a far more simplistic design than its predecessors. 

Rosemarin noted that flash storage produces 85% less e-waste compared to disk, which if taken at face value could represent a step change in tackling this global issue. But again, this is dependent on how rapidly adoption continues to grow. 

Data centers and energy crises

Flash storage doesn’t represent a total silver bullet for energy efficiency and carbon reduction for the data center industry, however.

Despite notable benefits highlighted at Pure Accelerate, it is clear that there are significant future challenges ahead - especially when one considers the current state of the global energy market. 

Research from the European Commission projects that data centers will account for 3.2% of all electricity by 2030, marking an increase on current levels and a significant surge since 2018. 

The power demands of data centers have reached such a point that, according to a report from the Financial Times last year, London housing developments were put on hold because there simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet commercial and residential demands. 

These straining demands placed on electricity grids were among one the key challenges Rosemarin highlighted at the conference - and it’s clear this is an issue he expects to continue. 

“We have for the first time in our existence an electricity crisis with no end in sight,” he said. “We’ve already got countries telling public cloud providers ‘we don’t want your tax dollars, we have no more electricity’.”

“And so if we’re only going to turn more GPUs and TPUs and CPUs on, where are we going to find the power to do this? 

IDC research also shows that data volumes are expected to continue growing over the next three years - to around 221ZB of data generated globally. 

With this in mind, it’s clear that flash storage adoption will require a serious acceleration in adoption rates to deliver the power-related benefits it’s being hailed for. 

The performance and capacity advantages are clear, but without widespread adoption, the environmental impact of data centers running largely on hard disks will remain a lingering problem.

An optimistic outlook for flash adoption

Despite obvious challenges, Pure Storage appeared highly confident flash represents “the future” of data storage. 

CMO Matt Burr described the days of hard disks as a “dark age” and believes the “future is flash”. It's a bold claim, but one supported by current statistics. 

Research shows the all-flash array market will grow at a CAGR of around 26.3% over the next five years, representing a serious shift toward broader adoption of flash storage. 

This mood of optimism was prevailing through Pure Accelerate 2023, but while the data storage industry may be leaving the "dark ages" and entering its enlightenment period, key hurdles still lie ahead. 

Mitre has revealed its top-ten list of security vulnerabilities in hardware in a bid to help companies design more secure products.

The weaknesses highlighted in the list can be found in hardware design, architecture, or programming. Mitre compiled the list in conjunction with the Hardware CWE Special Interest Group (SIG).

Mitre publishes the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) for software bugs in conjunction with the US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). This marks the first time the organization has done the same thing for hardware.

The list aims to drive awareness of common hardware weaknesses through CWE and “prevent hardware security issues at the source by educating designers and programmers on how to eliminate important mistakes early in the product development lifecycle”.

"Security analysts and test engineers can use the list in preparing plans for security testing and evaluation. Hardware consumers could use the list to help them to ask for more secure hardware products from their suppliers. Finally, managers and CIOs can use the list as a measuring stick of progress in their efforts to secure their hardware and ascertain where to direct resources to develop security tools or automation processes that mitigate a wide class of vulnerabilities by eliminating the underlying root cause," Mitre said.

The list, which is in no order, includes vulnerabilities found in many types of hardware. For example, CWE-1189 is a flaw on a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that does not properly isolate shared resources between trusted and untrusted agents.

“Several resources on the chip may be shared to multiplex and support different features or functions. When such resources are shared between trusted and untrusted agents, untrusted agents may be able to access the assets intended to be accessed only by the trusted agents,” Mitre noted.

Another hardware bug mentioned on the list is where a chip does not implement or does not correctly perform access control to check whether users are authorized to access internal registers and test modes through the physical debug/test interface.

“If authorization, authentication, or some other form of access control is not implemented or not implemented correctly, a user may be able to bypass on-chip protection mechanisms through the debug interface,” said Mitre.

It added that the methodology used to generate the inaugural CWE Most Important Hardware Weaknesses List is “limited somewhat in terms of scientific and statistical rigor.”

"In the absence of more relevant data from which to conduct systematic inquiry, the list was compiled using a modified Delphi method leveraging subjective opinions, albeit from informed content knowledge experts,” it added.

If you’ve recently bought a brand-new computer, there’s a good chance it has a solid-state drive (SSD) to boot its operating system.

SSD prices have fallen, making them more mainstream as of late. Today only the most basic budget models come with only a hard disc drive (HDD) installed.

What are the differences between the two and which is best suited for your needs? We explore that and more below.

What is an HDD?

The humble HDD has been around for decades, as IBM introduced it in 1956. This early drive used 50 24-inch-wide platters to hold 3.75MB of data — that was a lot back in those days.

An HDD holds all the data you need to start the operating system. Unlike RAM, this information isn’t lost when powered down – it is “non-volatile.”

Inside a hard drive are several metal platters with magnetic coatings that store the data. A read/write head on an actuator arm moves over these platters to retrieve information.

An HDD is reminiscent of an old-fashioned record player with a needle that rides along grooves to play music. In an HDD, though, you do not want the read/write head to touch the platter. This will likely damage the disc and corrupt any information on it.

As hard drives have increased in capacity over the years, they have added more platters and more actuator arms to read and write the data.

Data is stored on concentric circles called tracks, which are divided into logical units called sectors. The track and sector numbers formulate a unique address to organize and find data.

An HDD’s speed is closely related to how fast its platters rotate. Most laptop drives spin at either 5,400 revolutions per minute (RPM) or 7,200 RPM. In servers, some hard drives spin at 15,000 RPM, but these can be very costly. Suffice to say, all this spinning uses a lot of energy and creates a lot of heat.

HDDs come in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch sizes — the 3.5-inch format allows for more platters, giving it more storage capacity.

Most modern drives use the serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) interface to connect to a computer. The most recent version is SATA III, which allows faster data transfer. Despite the faster speeds, it’s often the HDD itself that is the bottleneck in data transfers.

The advantages of HDD

The major advantage of an HDD is that it’s a proven technology and can easily and cheaply hold terabytes of data. For example, an inexpensive 4TB HDD works to about 3 cents per GB.

This also means higher-capacity hard drives are cheaper than SSDs. This is particularly useful when you need to store terabytes of data and do not need blazingly fast access to them — this is known as “cold” data.

For example, you may want to store photos from years gone by, but you do not need to access them every day — or even every year.

Another advantage is an HDD’s capacity. Today’s enterprise HDDs can store up to 12 TB of data, though these are usually in servers and NAS devices.

The disadvantages of HDD

An HDD’s mechanical parts that read and write data make the process of finding and retrieving data longer. Also, these mechanical parts can skip or fail if mishandled or dropped. HDDs are also heavier and use more power.

What is an SSD?

An SSD does the same thing as an HDD but faster, much faster. Think of it as a larger, smarter USB thumb drive.

There are no moving parts, and everything is stored in non-volatile flash memory chips. These chips are like the chips on RAM modules, but the memory retains the information when the system is powered down. In fact, the data on an SSD can last up to 200 years.

The flash chips are also known as NAND. This flash memory contains an integrated circuit that uses NAND gates to store data in memory cells. There is also NOR flash memory that reads data faster but writes slower — this is not nearly as popular as NAND storage.

Instead of using a mechanical arm to move across a platter to retrieve data, an SSD uses a processor-based controller to read and write data. The controller also performs error correction, read and write caching, encryption, and garbage collection. Better controllers make for faster SSDs.

An SSD writes data differently than hard drives. When a computer retrieves or updates data, all data on a particular block is refreshed. The old block data is erased, and data is rewritten to it with any changes incorporated. When idle, the drive carries out garbage collection to ensure that information in old blocks is erased and free to be written to.

SSDs come in many formats. Many SSD that directly replace hard drives have a SATA interface and the same dimensions of a laptop HDD. SSDs can also plug into a PCIe expansion slot or even be mounted directly on the motherboard. These motherboard-mounted SSD use an M.2 form factor.

The advantages of SSD

The big advantage SSD has over HDD is speed. HDDs can copy files at 30-150 megabytes per second (Mbps), a SATA-based SSD can copy files at 500Mbps — the SATA connection is the bottleneck in an SSD.

When it comes to PCIe and M.2 SSDs, speeds can start from 1.2Gbps up to around 1.4Gbps. For a premium, some can reach 2.2Gbps.

This means systems boot up faster and applications load quicker. For gamers, games not only load quicker, but high-resolution images used in games are rendered quickly and deliver a more realistic tone.

SSDs also use less power than their HDD siblings, so laptops with SSDs tend to have better battery life.

Another advantage of SSDs is the lack of moving parts. If you drop a laptop with a traditional HDD, the heads inside can hit the platter, potentially damaging them, leading to data loss or hard drive failure. SSDs do not have this type of problem.

The disadvantages of SSD

As a newer technology, SSDs are more expensive than HDDs, but prices have fallen as the tech has developed. Finding high-capacity SSDs can be difficult and will also cost a lot more than their HDD counterparts.

Which should you choose?

SSDs are faster, consume less energy, and are less prone to data-damaging drops and knocks, but HDDs are cheaper.

Some find pairing a small, cheap SSD to boot for operating systems and applications with a cheap HDD for file and document storage is a good compromise. Hybrid drives, known as SSHDs, can do a similar job in a single drive if physical space is a concern.

As the famous quote says, three things in life are certain: death, taxes and lost data. It's happened to us all at least once: we fire up a laptop or plug in a hard drive and learn it’s corrupted and the data within is inaccessible. There's that immediate sinking feeling as you recall all the important files you forgot to back up that may be lost forever.

Fortunately, you have a number of data-recovery remedies at your disposal without having to pay for costly forensic retrieval services or simply write it off forever. There are various software offerings that can restore data your operating system can’t find. We’ve tested a few of the top data-recovery programs and found the best option for retrieving missing files.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard

EaseUS offers a free version of its software, but it's extremely limited. There's a trial version of its paid-for tier that lets you to run a scan and preview the files found, but you can't restore them. There is a freeware version with a claimed 2GB cap, which sounds great. However, this is too good to be true, as the actual base limit is 500MB. You can unlock the remaining 1.5GB by promoting the product on your social media accounts.

Despite this, if you don't mind the price, this is a robust data recovery solution. Similar to many of EaseUS' products, this Data Recovery Wizard benefits from a well-designed and modern user interface, combing a decent blend of simplicity and functionality. It is quick and painless to start a scan and, even though the console is clean and uncluttered, you can find advanced filtering options a few clicks away if you need them.

Price: £84.95 a year

Lazesoft Data Recovery

Lazesoft immediately impresses as it is one of the few data recovery tools on this list that offers a genuinely useful free tier. Most free data recovery tools limit the user to a certain (usually fairly small) maximum quantity of data that can be restored, Lazesoft Data Recovery Free provides almost all of its features right off the bat. It only gates the support for Windows Server and bootable recovery media.

Although the interface is a little dated, with what some may call a Windows Vista-esque appearance, the functionality is definitely solid. It can get a little frustrating when using the filtration options to identify and recover specific types of data, and unfortunately, the full drive scans aren't as quick as some others you'll find on this list, but it's definitely a well-rounded system that delivers on its promise.

Price: Free

Minitool Power Data Recovery

Minitool's user interface pitches the right balance between an uncluttered, clear layout, and one that still impresses with a solid amount of flexibility and technical depth. We were great fans of the detailed file-explorer window for previewing recovered data, complete with indicators for whether specific files are lost or deleted.

Scans take a little longer with Minitool than with some other software, but that’s paid off by the depth of information that they return, including dates when files were last modified. Unlike other entries in this list, Minitool offers a lifetime plan for personal users, in addition to monthly and annual subscriptions, which may offer better value if you’re looking for a long-term solution.

Price:£90/year

Stellar Data Recovery Wizard

Stellar Data Recovery Wizard is among the better-looking tools in this category, with a clean, modern interface, but it suffers a little from being over-simplified. The default options are all large and clearly labeled, but you’ll have to dig a little deeper for more granular options; as an example, the scan process doesn’t allow you to preview recovered files until you toggle an optional slider, while systems like Minitool display that info automatically.

Like the other paid-for options on this list, Stellar offers a free version of its software allowing users to recover 1GB of data without paying, but be warned – you can only recover files that are under 25MB in size. Bumping up to a paid subscription will remove these restrictions, although only the ‘Professional’ tier and above are able to recover files from lost partitions.

Price: $89.99/year

UnDeleteMyFiles Pro

Like Lazesoft Data Recovery, UnDeleteMyFiles Pro is a genuinely free app with no strings attached, and despite its mid-2000s aesthetic, it’s a perfectly capable file recovery tool. All the functionality you’ll need is here, although the layout – with individual names and icons for different tasks – can be slightly confusing compared to more menu-driven rivals.

Get your head around the UI, though, and you’ll find a tool that offers fast and reliable recovery operations. Advanced filtration isn’t as intuitive a process as with some other tools on this list, but it does the job, and it even includes some more niche tools including email recovery and a forensic file deletion tool.

Price: Free

Please note while this round-up was accurate at the time of publication, prices have since been updated to reflect the standard pricing for these tools as of December 2022. We will update our listing for 2023 in due course.

SSDs are becoming the default choice for PCs, thanks to incredible performance, decent capacities and falling prices, yet the mechanical hard disk is far from dead and still has its place. This applies in particular if you're building a NAS, where the total amount of storage you have is likely to be the most important factor. Plus, performance isn't quite the same issue in a NAS as it is in a PC, as network speed is the limiting factor.

While any old hard disk can be used in a NAS, for the best reliability it makes sense to choose a drive specifically designed to run in such an enclosed space, such as the WD Red drive. This series has been around for a few years, but the drives have recently been updated, adding a whopping 10TB drive at the top end. As a result, we decided that now was a good time to visit the WD Red line to see how well the drives perform and if this range is now the best choice for a NAS. It's a particularly interesting question, given that we recently saw Toshiba's rival N300 High-Reliability Hard Drive, which is also designed to be used in NAS devices.

WD Red 6TB review: Reliability

As a result of being specifically crafted for the confined chassis of a NAS drive, WD Red drives are built to withstand the additional shock and vibration that a multi-bay NAS has to undergo. Unlike the rival N300 drives, WD Red models do not have an RV sensor, which helps a disk deal with very high levels of vibration. As a result, WD recommends that its Red drives are used in one-to-eight-bay enclosures, and its higher end WD Red Pro used in larger enclosures. For typical SMB users, then, the WD Red drives will more than do the job.

Heat and run cycles are other problems that NAS drives have to deal with, as they're typically left to run 24 hours a day. WD has certified its drives for this type of environment, and they're guaranteed for a yearly workload rate of 180TB per year - the same as the Toshiba N300 range. Built into the WD Red's firmware is the NASware software, which optimises performance and power consumption, helping reduce hard disk temperature automatically and thus increasing reliability.

Most desktop-class hard drives have a 7,200rpm spin speed for better performance, but the WD Red range used a 5,400rpm spin speed. Theoretically, slower spin speeds mean reduced performance, but there's also a reduction in heat and power consumption.

A hard disk's cache can help iron out performance differences, with the amount you get depending on the drive's capacity. With the 10TB drive, you get a whopping 256MB of cache; 8TB drives have 128MB of cache; and 6TB and below have 64MB of cache. In comparison, the Toshiba N300 range has a spin speed of 7,200rpm and a 128MB of cache across the line.

WD Red 6TB review: Speed and performance

Specifications can only indicate a drive's speeds, so we put a WD Red 6TB drive through our usual range of tests to see how fast it was. Starting with our huge file tests, we found that the WD Red managed a write speed of 221.9MB/s and a read speed of 234.6/s. This put the drive at 14% slower than the 4TB Toshiba N300, most likely due to the WD Red's slower spindle speed.

However, things started to change in our other tests. Using large files, we found the WD Red 6TB managed a read speed of 217.87MB/s and write speed of 235.16MB/s. With small files, we got 217.59MB/s read speeds and 200.06 write speeds. These proved the WD Red to be faster than the Toshiba N300.

Using the CrystalDiskMark synthetic benchmarks solidified the WD's overall performance lead. Using the sequential test, we saw read speeds of 228.9MB/s and write speeds of 244.3MB/s. On average, the WD Red was 13.5% faster than the Toshiba N300. Switching to the tricky random test, which reads and writes 4KB files from all over the disk, the WD Red did comparatively well. We measured it as capable of read speeds of 2.64MB/s and write speeds of 2.34MB/s, putting it 31% faster on average than the Toshiba N300. Indeed, specs certainly don't tell the full story.

WD Red 6TB review: Verdict

We've been impressed with the latest incarnation of the WD Red range of drives. Certainly, WD has the best capacity range, with 10TB (370), 8TB (270), 6TB (217), 4TB (127), 3TB (99), 2TB (84) and 1TB (57) available. In comparison, the N300 range is slightly cheaper for the same capacity, but has fewer options in its range: 8TB (228), 6TB (180) and 4TB (110).

That all adds up to make choosing the right drive rather tricky. If you're building a NAS from scratch and can use drives between 4TB and 8TB, then the N300 makes the most sense, as its drives are cheaper. If you need smaller or larger capacities or want the best performance, the WD Red line-up is an excellent choice.

Verdict

We've been impressed with the latest incarnation of the WD Red range of drives. If you need smaller or larger capacities than rival Toshiba offers or want the best performance, the WD Red line-up is an excellent choice.

CAPACITY 1/2/3/4/6/8/10TB

COST PER GIGABYTE £0.06 (1TB), £0.04 (2/6/8/10TB), £0.03 (4TB)

INTERFACE SATA3

WARRANTY Three years RTB

DETAILS www.wdc.com

PART CODE WD60EFRX

If you're buying more storage for your PC, the odds are that you're looking to upgrade with an SSD. However, the humble mechanical hard disk isn't dead yet. If you want a lot of storage at the best price, even the most keenly-priced SSD can't compete with a hard disk.

In particular, a hard disk makes a lot of sense for anyone looking to upgrade their NAS, most of which are designed with mechanical storage in mind. Enter the Toshiba N300 High-Reliability Hard Drive, which is designed specifically for NAS usage - putting it in competition with the similarly-focused WD Red series.

Toshiba N300 High-Reliability Hard Drive review: Storage capacity and reliability

With any NAS, hard disk performance is important, but it's not everything. Typically speaking, the speed of your network has more of an impact in access times than the speed of the hard disk. Rather, it's disk size and reliability that are the most important aspects. Toshiba certainly has disk size well covered, with the entry-level drive weighing in at 4TB, and 6TB and 8TB models sitting above it. Clearly, this range of hard disks is designed for people who need a lot of storage.

Although you can use any hard disk in a NAS, the tight constraints of the devices typically mean that there's more heat and, thus, more chance of problems developing.

Toshiba has built in rotational vibration (RV) sensors to the drive, which is a feature more commonly found in enterprise-class hard disks. Inside an enclosure, particularly one with multiple drives, vibration can be a real problem - given the sensitive nature of hard disks and their small mechanical parts, vibration can cause damage. With an RV sensor, a drive can disperse vibration across its chassis, reducing the risk.

Heat sensors inside the drive can alter its seek time, helping to cool the drive. There can be a slight knock-on effect on performance, but increased reliability seems like a fair trade-off to us.

Given that NAS devices are typically left on 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, it's important that any drive can withstand this kind of usage. Each N300 drive is rated for delivering a workload of 180TB a year, which is around three times higher than on many consumer drives.

Toshiba N300 High-Reliability Hard Drive review: Speed and performance

Spin speed is an important metric when determining a drive's performance. In simple terms, the faster a drive spins, the quicker data can be found and the faster it can be read. The WD Red series operates at around 5,400rpm, which is similar to a lot of laptop hard disks, whereas most desktop drives operate at 7,200rpm. It's good to see that Toshiba has managed to engineer better reliability without affecting spin speed, and the N300 runs at 7,200rpm.

The128MB cache is also double what you'd find on the WD Red drives. Increased cache helps improve performance, with data stored in fast memory before it's read or written to the physical platters.

To see how quick the N300 is, we put the 4TB version through our usual benchmarks. Using our file copy test, which uses Windows' file system, we found that the drive could read huge files at 205.15MB/s and write them at 326.77MB/s, with the latter score benefiting from the large buffer and Windows' own caching.

Switching to large files, we saw performance drop to 196.52MB/s for reading and 159.46MB/s for writing. Small file performance is usually the worst, as lots of small file operations require a lot of physical head movement. However, the N300 surprised us here, managing a read speed of 155.54MB/s and write speed of 145.48MB/s.

That's impressive performance, and the drive's large cache is clearly helping out. Performance-wise, the N300 comes out ahead of the WD Red, and while it proved to be slower than the WD Black (the performance desktop drive) for large files, the N300 was faster than the Black in our small files test.

For a real challenge, we used the CrystalDiskMark synthetic benchmark, which really pushes a drive to its limits. First, using the sequential test, which reads and writes data contiguously, the N300 managed a read speed of 208.4MB/s and write speed of 208.5MB/s. Switching to the 4K random test highlights how slow a mechanical hard disk can really be.

This test reads and writes data at random over the entire disk, requiring a lot of seeks, which mean physically moving heads. In this test, we saw read speeds of just 1.96MB/s and write speeds of 1.84MB/s. In reality, this test pushes a drive to its absolute limits, but software caching and normal workloads will rarely see a hard disk slow to these speeds in normal use.

Toshiba N300 High-Reliability Hard Drive review: Verdict

If you want smaller capacity drives for a NAS (1TB or 2TB), then the WD Red range is the only option. However, if you want a lot of storage for your NAS, then the N300 is the quicker drive, and to top it off, a 4TB, 6TB or 8TB N300 is cheaper than the equivalent WD Red.

Seagate has unveiled a new high-capacity enterprise hard disk drive (HDD) aimed specifically at addressing the needs of cloud service providers.

The 10TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD, to give it its full name, incorporates seven platters and 14 heads and seals in helium, which, Seagate claimed, creates a turbulence-free, quiet environment. The company said this design reduces both friction and resitance on the platters, which, it claimed, allows it to deliver the lowest power-to-terabyte ratio in the industry, as well as offering the lowest weight specifications.

The drive also offers easy system integration by using the standard 3.5in CMR design, while still providing 25 per cent higher density than competitors, said Seagate.

The device is already in use by the likes of Huawei and Alibaba.

"Cloud-based data centre storage needs are expanding faster than many current infrastructures can sustain, rendering the capacity demands of users a herculean task for cloud managers," said Mark Re, SVP and CTO at Seagate. "Our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organisations worldwide solve the needs of their growing stprage business."

Fan Ruiqi, president of storage products at Huawei added: "With the amount of data today growing at an increasingly rapid rate, we are always on the lookout for storage solutions that offer better performance with lower overhead. The new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD from Seagate helps us meet these demands by offering capacity with improvements in power and weight allowing us to drastically reduce our costs."

The Seagate 10TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD is available in both 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS interfaces and is shipping to customers worldwide immediately.

A hacking group responsible for a cyber rampage thought to have lasted up to 20 years has been uncovered by Russian security researchers.

According to Kaspersky researchers, The Equation Group has been infecting users with malware in a range of verticals, including the public sector, telecoms, energy, transportation and financial industries, since at least 2001,

This is when the command and control server The Equation Group uses was first registered, but others employed by the troop date back to 1996, suggesting the perpetrators may have been going a lot longer.

During its reign, the anti-virus firm's researchers fear up to tens of thousands of computers may have been infected by the group using a number of codenamed tools, including Equationlaser, Equationdrug, Doublefantasy, Triplefantasy, Fanny and Grayfish.

They've also described the group as one of the world's most sophisticated perpetrators of cyber attacks.

"Perhaps the most powerful tool in the Equation Group's arsenal is a mysterious module... [that] allows them to reprogram the hard drive firmware of over a dozen different hard drive brands, including Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Maxtor and IBM," the researchers stated in a blog post.

"This is an astonishing technical accomplishment and is testament to the group's abilities."

This allows an invisible pool of storage to be created within the infected hard drive, that would persist in the wake of a drive being reformatted and the operating system reinstalled.

"The Equation group's HDD firmware reprogramming module is extremely rare. During our research we've only identified a few victims who were targeted by this module," the researchers said in an FAQ document about The Equation Group.

"This indicates that it is probably only kept for the most valuable victims or for some very unusual circumstances."

The Kaspersky blog post goes on to share details of one of the group's most notable attacks, dubbed Fanny Worm, which was used to map out air-gapped networks in the Middle East and Asia in 2008, and was spread via USB sticks.

It featured two zero-day exploits which were latest observed during the Stuxnet wave of attacks during 2009-10.

"It's important to point out that these two exploits were used in Fanny before they were integrated into Stuxnet, indicating that the equation group had access to these zero-days before the Stuxnet group," the blog post continued.

Disk utility? Or P2V migration suite? Or backup program? Or illicit machine copier? The spray of product categories, all of which do the same basic job with little tweaks in input and output, in the field of disk to disk copying used to be a pretty simple but rather underground marketplace. Regular users with laptops at imminent risk of meltdown, for whom a disk copier should be a desperate last-minute lifeline, still have that curious voodoo suspicion of this entire sector, and people like me who make regular use of all these products.

There's good reasons for the suspicion of course: Making an image backup of a PC hard disk drives a coach and horses through the licence agreements which are supposed to govern the use of all kinds of software installs. Provided the copy takes place within the same PC, this should not present a hardened techie with any challenges but those challenges look deeply strange to an everyday user. One that I find always furrows the brow of the anxious audience is the party trick when using a Virtualisiation tool on an ancient Windows XP machine. Almost always, these will start up in virtual mode thinking that they have to re-activate themselves with Microsoft, over a network interface that hasn't yet been installed and which therefore is bound to fail. The fix is to type into the activation box almost any XP key, so long as it's not the original key that came with the machine.

Spectators see me leap up, find a case with a dead PC inside it and copy down it's COA sticker something that lixes life, death, activation and virtualisation in a way that raises many echoes of zombies and voodoo and confirms all their suspicions about how nerds really work. For them, this is no different from biting the head off a chicken.

Before we dive into the morass of anecdotal hacks that enliven this entire activity for the well-informed insider, let's be clear about how these programs actually work. From the point of view of the simplest possible scenario the "dying laptop" situation there is no difference between a drive copier, a virtualiser, a corporate grade backup utility and a partition manager. All these pieces of software install some sort of small agent which can read everything from the hard disk, then make use of some nearby bit of disk to store what it has read in a semi-portable format. What you do once that initial copy has been secured may vary a bit; some of the variation comes because there are actual practical reasons for choosing one utility over another. Other variations come about simply because the utility-makers feel they would like to draw a line in the sand, which you are free to step over by handing them a chunk of cash.

Perhaps the most important of these variations is whether your utility can be booted up from its own CD, or not. It may seem horribly old-school to include "boot from CD" in a feature checklist that also includes "write image to iSCSI target" at the farthest opposite extreme of the list but it is still surprisingly and painfully relevant. Those who have long included a USB to SATA drive adapter in their little bag of tricks may know that not all of those little mysterious boxes are created equal. Especially when it comes to modern, larger replacement drives for laptops, the low-level drive support chipset inside the laptop can see a disk utterly differently from a third-party bargain-basement adapter box from a nameless manufacturer.

This is when CD-based booting for drive imagers starts to really bite, because ideally the workflow when you are given a misbehaving laptop like that relly needs to run "image old disk to temporary offboard store; swap out old disk for new; drag image back down from store to disk" and you can't really do that with a truly blank disk unless there's a quite complicated and fully-featured CD based bootup solution that understands both the PC and the range of storage methods open to the merry imaging wizard.

Here the market takes an early split into three: Those who give you a bootable CD as an ISO file (principally, Acronis), those who don't do anything at all like that (VMware) and those who leave you to make your own using arcane parts of the Windows PE environment (see http://firesage.com/winpe.phpfor a well-summarised overview of WinPE).

I know what's happening at this very instant: Sage long-standing VMware gurus are wagging their beards, because it's really not relevant to talk about standalone boot CDs in looking at VMware's Converter utility. It has a seat at the table on the general topic of copying partitions around and the whole physical-to-virtual (P2V) activity: But you'd not boot from something that way. I beg to differ with this assessment, mainly because the decision to go with one hypervisor (or backup system) or another can start right back with an evaluation of the workflow which will arise when a particular candidate dying machine meets another, particular candidate living new host platform.

The contrast to draw here is that while you can't boot a physical machine from a VMWare VM image file, you can do that with a .VHD, which is Microsoft's equivalent container in the world of Hyper-V.

So you might well start out thinking the (free) VMware Converter would push you down a road of rapid, pain-driven virtualisation to the (free) VMWare ESXi hypervisor space because you can't find any equivalent to Converter in the Microsoft download site: However, I would point out that it's often worth careful evaluation for only a few minutes (because time is always tight when things have got bad enough that you are having to make this decision) to look at what's just over the border between free and paid for.

I am here mostly thinking of Paragon's Virtualisation Manager, which has just hit v14. This addresses the lack of an official machine-to-VHD conversion program from Microsoft, and comes pitched carefully so that each conversion probably costs you not much more than about 30 per laptop. My run of logic is that if I were paid as much as a plumber per hour (which I'm not, incidentally such is the parlous state of Information Technology these days) then it would save me money to spend a bit of cash, to get a Hyper-V ready virtual machine straight out of a dying candidate on to my new and usefully unrestricted Hyper-V host Windows 8.1 PC.

There are other candidates in this field: Acronis are keeping up the pressure, and Symantec still have something that resembles the original Ghost utility: But the great problem here then becomes one of demarcation. I went to look at the Acronis site as I wrote these words to try to point the curious reader in the right direction, to find myself confronted by a series of adverts for a megascale cloud/virtualisation hybrid backup and snapshot system. This is not applicable to the simple laptop user scenario, and is symptomatic of a lot of blurring of "home" versus "professional" versions and areas of interest in the whole sector. Mastering the basic mechanics of developing an agent that sits inside a machine for copying purposes, and then bloating it so that it perpetually updates a warm-spare virtual image version of the whole PC on a second by second basis is over-engineering a solution on such a grand scale that it beggars both belief, and likely utility out there in the real world.

The kind of extended feature set that most hardened techies want is not about that sort of instantaneous megascale backup: Rather, they miss some abilities which are only left out as a way of distinguishing free or trial versions from paid-for ones a gap which to my mind is the fault of the something-for-nothing types, than it is a sin by the software architects and marketing men. For instance, lots of people take my recommendation of Paragon and pay money there because they get the idea that VMWare can only read a running PC (by being installed on it) whereas Paragon can read a disk rescued from a plane-crash laptop (once it's presented via a USB to SATA Adapter like the Freecom Drive Doock). The fact is that the range of options for input to conversion is a lot wider in Converter than it is in Paragon's offering but those formats are much more commonly found in the enterprise data centre than they are out in the comsumer computing backwoods.

One last and final tip: Do not imagine that a successful run of a utility is the end of a copying or virualisation process. It's only the start. Almost every type of VM or disk image format requires some later tweaking and post-convert tidying up, and sometimes these can look and feel rather drastic. Very few of these programs have the smarts to completely remove bits of the PC rendered redundant by their new format and host, like hardware monitoring utilities, LAN card drivers, graphics card utilites, and the rest. You will need to put time aside to tidying up as much as possible on the new clone of the old boat-anchor, as you did to choosing and then running your utility of choice in the first place.

EMC has reaffirmed its commitment to Flash storage and talked up converged infrastructure and big data as its big bets for the future at its annual EMC Forum event in London.

"We think Flash storage is going to...and already is having a profound impact [on] the storage industry," said Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations, solutions and marketing, during his keynote yesterday.

"Why is that? ... You get dramatic reductions in latencies. If you look at your average performance hard drive, you've got a couple of milliseconds in terms of latency. With a PCIe card in the server, you are down to 100 microseconds," he added.

However, while Burton lauded the much lower latencies associated with Flash storage, he also acknowledged the capital outlay for the technology is much higher.

But, he argued, Flash offered much better value for money up to 50 times more dollar per IOPs than with a standard hard drive, justifying the initial expense.

Burton revealed the company will be releasing XtremIO, an all-Flash array that initially began shipping to selected customers in March 2013, to general availability before the end of 2013.

"This really is a specialised weapon," he said. "Because of its architecture, whether this array is empty or full, whether it's idle or busy, you're going to get sustained half-millisecond response times."

EMC acquired Flash storage specialist XtremIO in May 2012 for $430 million (266 million at the time), before it had started shipping any technology to customers. It appears the acquisition caused something of a lag in the technology's release as it had been expected to start shipping before the end of last year.

A further market trend identified by Burton is converged infrastructure.

"[If] the market for converged infrastructure...is not on your radar right now, my prediction [is that] in the next few years it will be," he told delegates.

"It is expected to grow 40 per cent...over the next four years in contrast to the two per cent growth for the individual components. So again, it is a trend that is on the up and we see these cloud building blocks' - server, storage and network - becoming increasingly deployed not just in IT departments but in service providers as well," Burton said.

Big Data was another of the event's key themes, with much of the discussion focusing on its use within companies, as well as practical questions around storage and analysis.

According to a survey carried out by EMC for the conference, 75 per cent of 455 IT decision makers said their organisation could be improved with better use of data and 37 per cent agreed their senior teams trust Big Data insights to make transformative business decisions.

A further 21 per cent claimed to have achieved a competitive advantage through the use of Big Data analytics, while 44 per cent said they thought the industries using these tools will be successful in the future.

However, 48 per cent said a lack of a clear business case or proven ROI was stopping them from adopting a Big Data strategy.

At a media roundtable at the Forum, Burton said this was likely because the business teams within their organisations do not understand what Big Data is.

"Until a business really internalises [what Big Data is] and understands the impact it can have and puts some people looking at what it can do, then this thing is like a hammer looking for a nail," said Burton.

"They've heard about it and they think it sounds good, but they don't know what they can do with it."

Burton added the 21 per cent who had already claimed to have gained a competitive advantage were the early adopters but the rest would follow in the coming years or be left behind.

We're not used to seeing much innovation when it comes to mobile hard disks, but Seagate's Wireless Plus tries to stay ahead of the competition by cramming 802.11n wireless into its 20mm frame.

Wireless connectivity

Cable free connectivity is becoming increasingly useful and Seagate has worked hard to make the Wireless Plus live up to its name. Connectivity is versatile: the drive can be used wireless with PCs and Macs, as well as Android devices using at version 2.3+ and iOS hardware using version 4.3 of Apple's software.

It's easy to get started. Turn on the Seagate's wireless button and it'll appear in your PC's wireless networks menu. Once connected, access to the drive is handled through www.seagatewireless.com - it'll detect the Wireless Plus and load its browser-based interface.

From here, the Seagate's folders can be browsed and movies, documents, songs and pictures can be viewed, moved and opened. Content can be streamed from the disk to any DLNA-equipped device, and desktop formats also allow content to be uploaded from a computer to the Wireless Plus - a feature that isn't supported on the two smartphone systems.

Access on iOS and Android devices is through a free app, and the structure is broadly similar, with navigation handled through a near-identical UI. It's easy to use, intuitive, and we didn't experience any performance issues when using the Wireless Plus across any platform.

USB 3

Remove a blanker from one end of the Wireless Plus and you'll find SATA/300 and SATA power connections. Seagate includes an adapter in the box, and it turns this drive into a traditional, USB 3-powered external hard disk.

It's here where the Wireless Plus falters. The Seagate ran through CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write benchmarks at 103MB/sec - half the speed we'd expect to see from top desktop hard disks.

The situation became worse as files became smaller. The Seagate read and wrote 512KB files at 38MB/sec and 45MB/sec, and it laboured to 4K file read and write speeds of 0.4MB/sec and 0.9MB/sec.

It's clearly not a drive built for speed, and it's easy to see why when you look under the hood. The Wireless Plus is built around a 1TB Seagate Momentus, which is a mobile drive that spins at 5,400rpm - slower than the 7,200rpm pace of desktop hard disks. It's only got 8MB of cache, too, which doesn't help matters - top desktop disks have 64MB.

Conclusion

The Wireless Plus is a well-built, good-looking drive, and its wireless connectivity and software work extremely well: it's easy to use on PC, and the free app allows for media access and streaming on a wide variety of mobile devices.

The Seagate's wired performance leaves a lot to be desired and the price is high. The hard drive costs 191, which is three times the amount you'll pay for a decent, non-wireless 1TB external disk.

That price and poor USB 3 performance means we can't give the Wireless Plus a whole-hearted recommendation. It's only worth such a high outlay if you regular consume media on your smartphone or tablet.

Verdict

Seagate's Wireless Plus includes effective, easy-to-use wireless access from PCs and Macs as well as a huge variety of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, and it's easy to both access and stream media when you're on the move. However, the high price and poor USB 3 performance mean that this is only ideal for mobile media fans and frequent travelers.

Connectivity: 1 x USB 3, 802.11n wireless

Capacity: 1TB, 931GB usable

Dimensions: 89 x 127 x 20mm (WxDxH)

Weight: 256g

Warranty: 1yr RTB

Toshiba has launched a four terabyte hard disk drive (HDD) for enterprise.

The new MG03xxx400 series HDD has a range of 8.9cm (3.5in) serial attached SCSI (SAS) and serial ATA (SATA) models, which Toshiba claims are ideal for business-critical server and storage platforms, as well as private cloud storage.

There are four models in the range, each available in capacity increments up to 4TB, including the SATA MG03ACA400 and SAS MG03SCA400 drives, as well as two self-encrypting models, the SAS MG03SCP400 and SATA MG03ACA400Y.

The range has been developed with the storage challenges presented by big data and cloud services in mind, Toshiba said.

The 4TB hard drives are touted as providing a 50 per cent increase in storage capacity compared to the previous generation. The range also features the company's first SATA 6GB HDD for enterprise, which has transfer rates claimed to be 18 per cent faster than the previous generation.

The new range has also been developed to be environmentally friendly. The HDDs are all compatible with the European Union Directive on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and are free of both halogens and antimony, both of which are toxic.

"Our new range of hard disk drives has been developed to meet [the challenges of increasing data and the need to cut costs], providing [IT departments and cloud service providers] the high capacity and performance required to keep up with this rapid and unpredictable data growth, whilst still getting the best value for money," said Martin Larsson, vice president of Toshiba Electronics Europe's storage products division.

Toshiba will begin sample shipments of the MG03xxx400(Y) series in December 2012, with volume shipments scheduled to begin early in the new year.

Apple has extended its hard drive replacement programme to include iMac all-in-one computers dating back to October 2009.

Originally, the firm was set to replace disks in iMacs bought between May 2011 and July 2011.

The programme has now been expanded to cover machines purchased between October 2009 and July 2011. Owners of 21.5-inch or 27-inch iMacs from that period may qualify for a free hard drive replacement.

The launch of the initiative follows on from the discovery of a problem with Seagate drives that caused them to fail "under certain conditions".

Replacing hard drives in all-in-one machines is no mean feat. It involves taking the display off, so will require the machine to be fixed up by Apple or one of its Authorised Service Providers for free.

Users have three years from the purchase date or until 12 April 2013 to get their machines seen to.

Apple has provided a webpage where iMac users can enter the device's serial number to see if it qualifies for a hard drive replacement.

The consumer electronics giant has urged customers to take up the offer "as soon as possible".

It is not known how many drives are affected by the problem. Users that replaced drives before learning of the replacement programme should contact Apple for a refund here>.

The news of the programme extension comes just days before an Apple event where it is thought the firm will unveil a refresh of the entire iMac line-up and an iPad mini that will compete with the Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

Storage vendor HGST is planning to launch a helium-filled hard disk drive (HDD) in 2013, which it claims will help datacentre operators reduce their cooling costs.

The product has been in development for more than six years, and is being hailed as the company's first radical major new product design since it was acquired by HDD vendor Western Digital in March 2012.

The vendor has not released exact details about the expected storage capacity of the new devices, but HGST has confirmed that each 3.5inch unit will contain seven platter drives, which is two more than the industry standard.

We have a significant technology leadership position with this product.

The inclusion of these two extra platter drives would not have been possible without the inclusion of helium, the company claims, as the low density of the gas means the drives can be placed closer together.

A helium-filled environment also imposes less drag on the spinning disks, which means the drives emit less heat and noise, claims HGST.

Speaking to IT Pro, Nigel Edwards, senior director for EMEA sales at HGST, said datacentre providers that swap out their existing HDDs for helium-filled ones should save on space and cooling costs.

"You can swap out a three-to-four terabyte drive, which features five disks, for a seven disk one and get a better cost per terabyte...in the same 3.5-inch [form factor]," said Edwards.

At the moment, Edward said HGST "is not aware" of anyone else with a similar product in the pipeline, but he shied away from declaring that his firm will be the first to market with such a device.

"From what I've been told, we have a significant technology leadership position with this product," he added.

iStorage has a reputation for providing secure, rugged portable hard drives, and the diskAshur 3.0 aims to add high-speed to this combination as it provides USB 3 connectivity.

As with other iStorage drives, the main feature is the alphanumeric keypad which is the primary method of data protection.

The first thing you have to do is enter a PIN number between six and 16 digits long. Once this is done, you simply need to connect the device to a USB port, enter the PIN and press the unlock button. When the green LED is on, you're good to go. There's no need for an external power supply, the device is plug-and-play like a Flash drive.

The iStorage diskAshur 3.0 comes with an inbuilt cable, allowing you to connect to devices quickly

For businesses who have a dedicated IT department, the Administrator Feature will come in handy. This lets the admin set up an account and allows five additional user PINs to be created. This means the device can be shared between small teams for collaboration.

Admins have control to reset the device at any time, allowing it to be redeployed when necessary.

With data security the main focus, iStorage offers 128-bit and 256-bit hardware encryption.

For enterprises and public sector organisations, such as hospitals or police forces, who need to secure highly classified data, the 256-bit algorithm is the way to go. This sends text and data through 14 transformation rounds, compared to 10 rounds for the 128-bit.

The high-level of protection means that if a device is ever lost or stolen, the data is unlikely to be compromised. Lock down mode will be triggered after six failed PIN attempts. This destroys the encryption key, renders data inaccessible and leaves users with no choice but to reset the device.

Performance

Despite the USB 3 connectivity, speed is an area where the iStorage 2.5in hard drive struggles to match the security. In our large file read and write tests, the device clocked a speed of 67.3MB/s and 66.8MB/s, respectively. Although consistent, it's nowhere near as quick as its bigger brother, the iStorage diskAshur DT. This read files at a snappy 320MB/s and wrote large files at 140.9MB/s.

The drive was also slower in the small file test. It read files at maximum of 35.3MB/s and wrote them at a pedestrian 21.2MB/s. We expected more from the USB 3 connectivity, but this wasn't too far off the test scores for the diskAshur DT. This wrote 38.6MB/s, and read them at a marginally worse 36.7MB/s.

Design

The portable HDD is able to fit into the palm of your hand, but don't be fooled by the small dimensions (19mm x 84.5mm x 120mm) or the 175g weight. It's the same size in length as a biro pen, and the drive is small enough to be carried around in a pocket.

Storage spaces ranges from 250GB to 1TB. Our review offered 500GB of storage, which means it will easy cater to the needs of small businesses and also provide enough space for use within larger enterprises.

The small size enables the device to be carried around easily

iStorage keeps the design simple. The tough plastic exterior has been coated in rubberised paint and a simple LED indicator light is at the bottom of the device. It's not quite as rugged as the metallic chassis DT, but it can be handled roughly. There is a small pouch supplied with the device as well, to help protect it when carrying it around.

When not in use the USB cable tucks neatly into the side of the device

A particular feature we like is the in-built USB cable, which clips nicely into the side of the chassis when it is not being used.

This is handy as you don't have worry about carrying a cable when traveling. The one small criticism is the 10cm length of it, which means it must be kept close to the PC or laptop it is being attached too. This isn't a problem when you are connecting to devices on a desk, but hooking it up to the back of a mini tower on the floor could be a problem.

Overall

With the capacities ranging from 250GB to 1TB, and the portability and hardware protection it offers, the iStorage DatAshur has to be one of the safest 2.5in hard drives on the market.

The device isn't the cheapest, and it is typically double the price of competing devices. Prices start at 139 for 250GB 128-bit encrypted drive. Whereas the same 250GB drive with 256-bit encryption will cost 159.

Prices rise to 159 for the 500GB 256-bit unit and 219 for the 1TB hard drive.

Verdict

Despite the high price tag, the iStorage diskAshur 3.0 is portable, rugged and easy to use. The inbuilt USB cable is a neat little touch, so you don't have to worry about carrying any cables on the move. The 256-bit hardware encryption is practically impossible to break into and makes up for the slow read/write speeds. If you've got large volume of data which needs to be protected, this is a worthwhile investment.

Power Supply: USB powered Interface: Super Speed USB 3.0 (Backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1) Buffer Size: 8MB RPM: 5400 Average seek time: 12 ms Dimensions: 19mm X 84.5mm X 120mm Weight: 175g Warranty: 3 year limited System Requirements: Windows, Mac and Linux

A local council and a NHS Trust have come out fighting after being hit with data breach fines totalling 415,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

As reported by IT Pro last week, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust received a record 325,000 fine after personal details belonging to thousands of staff and patients were found on hard drives sold via an internet auction site.

It is a matter of frank surprise that we still do not know why they have imposed such an extraordinary fine, despite repeated attempts to find out.

In a statement, the ICO said the size of the fine was in direct proportion to the "scale and gravity" of the breach.

The trust has since confirmed to IT Pro that it plans to appeal against the judgement because it cannot afford to pay.

"We arranged for an experienced NHS IT service provider to safely dispose of our redundant hard drives and acted swiftly to recover those that their sub-contractor placed on eBay. No sensitive data has entered the public domain," said Duncan Selbie, chief executive of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust, in a statement.

"We reported all of this voluntarily to the ICO who told me last summer that this was not a case worthy of a fine, [so] it is a matter of frank surprise that we still do not know why they have imposed such an extraordinary fine, despite repeated attempts to find out."

Earlier today, the ICO announced that Telford and Wrekin Council had been fined 90,000 after confidential details about four vulnerable children were disclosed during two similar data breaches.

The first took place in March 2011, when a member of the council's staff accidentally sent findings from a social care assessment to a child's sibling instead of their mother.

It also included details of another child who had made a serious, unspecified allegation against another youngster.

The second breach involved the disclosure of foster care details for two young children to their mother. As a result, both children had to be moved to alternative accommodation.

Following an investigation by the ICO, the breaches were attributed to the settings used on a council child information system called Protocol.

While we accept the breaches occurred, we do not agree with the rationale behind the financial penalty that has been imposed.

Its findings showed that, in the first breach, Protocol contained insufficient information about the children involved and did not allow people to check documents before they were posted out.

The default settings of Protocol were blamed for the second breach, which automatically included foster carer's details in the children's placement information records. It is also claimed there was no process in place to check these records once they have been printed.

David Smith, the ICO's deputy commissioner and director of data protection, said: "These were two very similar data breaches which occurred within a short space of time, and both involved highly confidential and sensitive personal data.

"It is the responsibility of all organisations especially where children or other vulnerable people are involved to keep sensitive personal data secure," said Smith.

In statement to IT Pro, Telford and Wrekin Council said the fine should be reduced by 18,000 in recognition of how promptly it will be paid.

"While we accept the breaches occurred, we do not agree with the rationale behind the financial penalty that has been imposed," said the statement.

"We believe the fine goes against the ICO's own guidance, which states an organisation should not be fined when it has taken reasonable steps to prevent a breach, which we believe we have."

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued its largest ever fine against a NHS trust that disclosed personal details about thousands of staff and patients.

The Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust has been hit with a 325,000 penalty, the largest the ICO has ever issued, after the details were discovered on hard drives sold via an internet auction site in 2010.

NHS patients rely on the service to keep their sensitive personal details secure.

The ICO said the hard drives contained information about patients' medical conditions and treatments, disability living allowance forms and children's reports.

They also contained staff National Insurance numbers, home addresses, criminal convictions and suspected offences.

The storage devices were in a batch of 1,000 disk drives that had been earmarked for destruction and had been stored in a room at Brighton General Hospital that was only accessible using a key code.

However, a data recovery company then purchased them online, along with two other drives, in December 2010.

"The ICO was assured in our initial investigation that only four hard drives were affected, [but] a university contacted us in April 2011 to advise that one of their students had purchased drives via an internet auction site," said the ICO in a press statement.

"An examination of the drives established that they contained data which belonged to the Trust."

It is thought that at least 252 of the 1,000 drives were removed from the room without permission, and the ICO claims the Trust has been unable to provide an explanation.

That being said, the ICO statement suggests a member of staff working for a third party IT supplier may have been involved.

David Smith, the ICO's deputy commissioner and director of data protection, said the size of the fine reflects the "gravity and scale" of the breach.

"Patients of the NHS, in particular, rely on the service to keep their sensitive personal details secure. In this case, the Trust failed significantly in its duty to its patients, and also to its staff," said Smith.

At the time of writing, IT Pro was awaiting a comment from the Trust about the data breach.

Nick Banks, vice president of EMEA and APAC at Imation Mobile Security, said the situation could have been easily avoided.

"Had these drives been encrypted and managed, the drives would have been disabled and the data kept secure, so the trust could have avoided a massive financial penalty, distress to patients and very serious damage to its reputation," said Banks.

"Instead it will have to find room in its budget to pay a 325,000 fine, money which will come from the public purse."

External hard disks are ten-a-penny, and it's easy to see why they're so popular: 3.5in models serve up a huge amount of storage and offer more versatility than internal disks, whereas the 2.5in models combine capacity with portability.

However, few external disks take security into account - something iStorage has concentrated on to set it apart from rivals.

Maximum security

The primary feature on the bizarrely named 3TB diskAshur DT is the number pad. In fact, you can't start using the device without setting up a PIN.

Setting a password requires keys to be held down simultaneously and default passwords entered in a seven-point process. A PIN can be between 6 and 16 digits long.

The number pad has lock and cancel buttons, as well as letters on the keys in similar fashion to phone keypads, but it's not a particularly intuitive system to initially use.

The diskAshur DT is set up for business use. Administrators can have their own account and store ten separate PIN numbers on the device. This allows groups of people to use the device with admins able to restrict information. This is ideal if you're storing or backing up sensitive data.

The diskAshur DT comes with 256-bit AES military grade protection

There's little chance of the PIN number being guessed or hacked. It's protected by 256-bit AES hardware encryption, which meets the US military's security standards.

The 256-bit version of the algorithm is the toughest there is. It sends text and data through a number of "transformation rounds", converting plain characters into encrypted data. The 256-bit version goes through 14 rounds of transformation, with the weaker 128-bit and 192-bit versions using 10 and 12 rounds of encryption respectively.

The drive is easy enough to use when it's unlocked and initialised and the PIN number isn't the only security feature included. Mechanisms are in place to prevent brute force attacks, with these unsophisticated yet common hacking methods stopped in their tracks.

There's also an automatic encryption feature. Any data placed onto the device is kept protected even if the hard disk is compromised.

Plain Design

iStorage has the bases covered when it comes to the drive's physical profile, too. It's a plain-looking device, but it's very much function over form. We've never seen an external hard disk as strong as this one, with no give found in its sturdy metal chassis. With its strength and matte finish, the diskAshur DT will be able to withstand the toughest office environments.

The drive weighs 1.13kg, putting it in laptop range, and making it heavier than other storage devices on the market, but it is still portable.

The device weighs in at 1.13kg and requires a power supply

On the rear is a USB 3.0 socket, which is now the standard for USB devices, PCs and laptops. It comes with a range of enhancements over the previous USB 2.0 standard, including a huge increase in bandwidth.

Transfer speeds can now reach a theoretical maximum of 5GB/s, whereas USB 2.0 hit a ceiling of 480Mbit/s. USB 3.0 also has two data paths so content can be sent and received simultaneously. The interface is capable of sending more power than its predecessor, although the diskAshur DT still needed an external power supply.

Mixed Performance

One area where the iStorage device provides mixed results is speed. Its large file write result of 140.9MB/s is decent. The drive read large files at a fantastic 320MB/s, putting it up there with the best internal hard disks. It was also faster than the Western Digital MyBook Thunderbolt Duo, which boasted a next-generation Thunderbolt interface, but only recorded scores of 103.08MB/s and 101.05MB/s in the same tests.

When working with small files the iStorage faltered badly. It wrote our group of small files at 38.6MB/s, and read them at a marginally worse 36.7MB/s. This is especially poor when compared to the Western Digital, which coped well with small files. In the same tests, the Thunderbolt device scored 71.09MB/s in the small file write tests but 29.1MB/s.

In our AS SSD benchmark tests the iStorage delivered a set of middling scores: 128.37MB/s in the sequential file writing benchmark, and 126.08MB/s in the equivalent file reading test. This is half the speed we'd expect from a new 7,200rpm internal hard disk.

Overall

The 3TB model we've reviewed here will cost a hefty 299. Chop away those security features, and the same amount of external storage can be had for much less cash. The Western Digital MyBook Essential, which has the same capacity and also uses USB 3.0 can be picked up for 120.

The iStorage is available in 1TB and 2TB versions. These cost 194 and 215 respectively. This makes the latter drive better value, but if you can do without its security features the same amount of storage can be found much cheaper - 2TB external hard disks cost less than 100.

The iStorage diskAshur DT isn't designed to be cheap or fast, it's been built for security, from its PIN entry system and military-grade encryption to its rock-solid, sensible exterior. If those are your primary concerns when looking for external storage, this is a worthwhile - if expensive - investment.

Verdict

Pricey and slow, the iStorage diskAshur DT doesn't look like much of a contender when it comes to external storage, but this unique device has plenty going for it. A PIN number system that locks out anyone trying to get at your data, numerous other security features, and build quality that few drives can match. It's expensive, but if security is important, it's a price worth paying.

Ports: 1 x USB 3.0

Capacity: 3TB, 2.72TB usable,

Encryption: 256-bit AES

Dimensions: 114 x 189 x 41mm

Warranty: 1yr RTB

Thunderbolt has had a slow start in life, despite being championed by Apple. After starting off as Intel's Light Peak, the high-speed data transfer technology has only appeared on a couple of Apple laptops and a handful of peripherals, including Western Digital's MyBook Thunderbolt Duo.

It's easy to see why Apple is pushing the Thunderbolt interface and less obvious why other companies have not started rolling it out.

Thunderbolt combines technology from PCI Express and DisplayPort connectors into a cable that's longer and cheaper than most of its rivals. Each port can work individually or as part of a group so up to seven Thunderbolt devices can be "daisy-chained" together.

Current cables don't make full use of the technology, however. To cut down on costs they're made from copper rather than the more expensive optical fibres originally proposed. This adversely affects the performance, which is seen with the MyBook.

Performance

Western Digital makes full use of the interface by offering a pair of Thunderbolt ports on the rear. Beside is the AC adapter connection. The two 2TB hard disks can be arranged in either RAID 0 or 1. The former stripes the data for improved speed, while the latter mirrors any stored data for added security, albeit with half the capacity on offer.

The firm's decision to use two Caviar Green hard disks to create the 4TB capacity on the MyBook Thunderbolt Duo appears to negate many of the advantages of Thunderbolt.

There are two Thunderbolt ports located on the back

The drives are eco-friendly and we've no complaints about the capacity or the 64MB cache afforded to each one. But their spindle speed means they can't match the sort of pace offered by traditional hard disks, which typically run at 7,200rpm.

Western Digital has calibrated each Caviar Green drive to run at the most efficient point between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, so you're never quite sure of the exact speed of the drive just that it won't be up to speed with standard disks.

Our file transfer benchmarks evaluated large and small file writing and reading, with a single 1.5GB file used for the former benchmarks and 15,000 100KB files used for the latter tests. The drive was configured in RAID 0, which is typically faster than RAID 1.

In our large file write test, the MyBook scored 103.08MB/s half the speed we'd expect from a typical internal hard disk. This was also slower than the 112MB/s write speed of a RAID 0, two-drive LaCie USB 3, which is rather dated.

There was little joy in our large file read test, either, with the Western Digital's 101.05MB/s result falling well short of the 141MB/s achieved by the USB 3-equipped LaCie.

Smaller files such as photographs, videos and documents are common in business environments, and we expected the MyBook to perform well in our tests.

Results were a mixed bag, though. In the small file write test, the MyBook scored 71.09MB/s, but when tasked with reading small files the drive's pace plummeted to 29.1MB/s. In comparison, the LaCie yielded a slower write speed of 35MB/s, but over double the read speed at 68MB/s.

Switching to RAID 1, which mirrors the data for greater protection, didn't improve matters in the same benchmarks the Western Digital was 20 per cent slower.

The design is good, but the performance doesn't justify the price

Apple-style design

The MyBook's design and build quality is impressive. It's been billed for use by "creative professionals", and there's no doubt it'll look at home beside an iMac on a trendy desk thanks to curved silver exterior and minimal design. Western Digital has kept indicators simple too, with an Apple-style blue pin of light on the front of the unit.

Western Digital has clearly put a lot of care into the design of the external hard disk, but it isn't practical. Tap the glossy tab on the top of the machine and the meshed lid swings backwards, revealing a small plate of metal protects the hard disks. This plate is easily removed with a single screw, and a pair of plastic tabs can be pulled to gently snap the hard disks free of their SATA ports.

Software

The software included in the MyBook is dubbed WD Drive Utilities. This comes with a simple scanning tool, which allows you to check for bad sectors across both hard disks. There is a RAID management utility to allow for quick switching between RAID 0 or RAID 1 or no RAID at all. There is also a drive erase tool, if you need to start from scratch.

They're useful options, but there isn't the sort of depth on offer that larger businesses may want when it comes to management tools.

Overall

Aside from the poor performance, the main problem is the price. At 400, this is an expensive external hard disk and one that doesn't even include a Thunderbolt cable. This will set you back an additional 35 at least, courtesy of Apple's high prices.

It's well-made and easy to use, but the combination of Caviar Green hard disks and the Thunderbolt ports feels like a missed opportunity. Apple is the only firm currently shipping Thunderbolt-equipped hardware, so you'll need the relevant kit to use the MyBook, such as the latest MacBook Air.

When such middling performance is paired with such a high price, this is impossible to recommend.

Verdict

Thunderbolt devices promise much with theoretical bandwidth on offer. Western Digital’s MyBook Thunderbolt Duo offers a pair of these ports alongside 4TB of space.

However, the use of Caviar Green hard disks, the restriction to selected Apple machines and the high price put us off, though. It is hard to image large enterprises, let alone SMBs investing in this product. Thunderbolt’s time will come, but it has a way to go yet.

PORTS: 2 x Thunderbolt

CAPACITY: 4TB (2 x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green hard disks)

RAID: 0 and 1

SOFTWARE: WD Drive Utilities

DIMENSIONS: 165 x 99 x 157mm

WARRANTY: 3yr RTB

More than one in ten second-hand hard drives contains recoverable data belonging to the original owner, claims research from the Information Commissioner's Office.

The data protection watchdog asked computer forensics firm, NCC Group, to acquire 200 hard drives, 20 memory sticks and 10 mobile phones from online auctions and trade fairs.

The haul of devices was then trawled through using freely available forensics tools. It was then discovered that 11 per cent of the hard drives contained personal data from the previous owner.

At least two thirds of the drives contained enough information - including bank statements, passports and medical records - for criminals to steal the owner's identity.

Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, said: "We live in a world where personal and company information is a highly valuable commodity. It is important that people do everything they can to stop their details from falling into the wrong hands.

"Today's findings show that people are in danger of becoming a soft touch for online fraudsters simply because organisations and individuals are failing to ensure the secure deletion of the data held on their old storage devices."

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security vendor Sophos, said the deletion of data on old devices is not always the responsibility of the previous owner.

"It can be that they've trusted a third party organisation to handle the secure disposal of assets," he said. "But it's always us, the unfortunate member of the public, who is most exposed by the sloppy practice."

He said, although many companies go to great lengths to dispose of old computer equipment responsibly, there's clearly still more work to be done.

"Once again, it's time for users and companies to consider the benefits of fully encrypting their hard drives as well as getting in the habit of securely wiping drives as they are junked," Cluley added.

HGST today announced a new range of hard drives, offering enterprise class storage with 4TB capacities.

The company which used to be part of Hitachi but was bought out by Western Digital in March this year claimed the Ultrastar 7K4000 portfolio would bring the largest capacity hard drives available to the enterprise, helping companies deal with the data deluge they are facing today.

Despite a 33 per cent rise in capacity over its previous drive the 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000 the Ultrastar 7K4000 is the same size, 3.5in. HGST claims it even lowers the watts per GB needed by 24 per cent.

By offering an extra TB of storage in the same casing, companies can achieve 2.4PBs of capacity in a standard 19in storage rack with 60 bay enclosures. This saves an enterprise time, space and power.

The Ultrastar 7K4000 still spins at the same speed of its predecessor as well, recording 7,200 RPM,and features a 6Gbps SATA interface and a 64MB cache.

It also features an option for bulk data encryption (BDE), enabling enterprises to put security in place for huge amounts of storage in one fell swoop.

Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST, claimed to be "humbled" by enterprises that were sticking with HGST products but believed they would see the benefits for their loyalty.

"With our new Advanced Format Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, we are providing enormous capacity earlier than otherwise possible for environments optimised for this technology, while delivering yet another offering that takes advantage of the Ultrastar family's long-standing tradition of delivering high-reliability and low power for high-density cloud and big data applications," he said.

This is the largest capacity hard drive available, with only Seagate providing 4TB too. However, the rival firm only offers the 4TB as an external drive, rather than fitting within enterprise level storage like the HGST Ultrastar 7K4000.

HGST said the new range is shipping in limited quantities now, with customer samples also available.

Hard drive disk (HDD) shipments are set to return to growth following a difficult 2011.

So claims research firm IDC, which believes the natural disasters in Thailand and Japan hit the HDD market hard but the future of 2012 was looking brighter.

HDDs will continue to be the primary storage technology used in PCs and enterprise systems for most of this decade.

The report claimed the first half of this year would continue to focus on repairing factories in the regions, but in the second half, HDD shipments will see a record year-on-year growth of 7.7 per cent following the 4.5 per cent decline in the previous year.

IDC also claimed the market would achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 per cent between 2011 and 2016.

John Rydning, research vice president of HDDs at IDC and author of the report, said the troubles faced by the industry had given it the opportunity to start again with pricing structures, which had been falling at an excessive rate.

"In many respects, the hard disk drive industry has collectively hit the 'reset' button," he said.

"A reset of the HDD industry structure should allow for the remaining HDD industry participants to slowly reduce HDD prices from current levels at a rate that still delivers value to customers, while at the same time ensuring sufficient funding is available to develop new HDD technologies that are needed to improve HDD capacity, performance, reliability, power consumption, and security."

However, Rydning claimed HDD vendors couldn't return to just providing the basics to an

industry with changing devices and new ways of implementing storage.

"Long-term revenue growth will only be realised if the remaining participants transform into storage device and storage solution suppliers with a broad range of products for a wide variety of markets," he added.

The other issue with returning to growth for HDDs is also the growing threat of the solid state drive (SSD) market.

A report released at the beginning of March by DRAMeXchange, a subsidiary of larger analyst firm TrendForce, claimed SSDs are set to fall below $1 per GB for the first time in 2012, which would help remove the barrier of high prices and speed up adoption of the technology as a replacement for HDDs.

However, Claus Egge, analyst and partner at Rainmaker Files, claimed there was some way to go before HDDs were taken over by their faster, more expensive cousins.

"The [shipment] volume is much higher for HDDs than SSDs, 25 times or more," he told IT Pro. "My personal prediction is it will take more than five years before prices converge, and Flash has got its flaws [too]."

"So I don't see SSD usurping HDDs in the coming five years. Most capacity shipped only needs HDD performance [as it] is more than adequate, so SSD will post high growth, but from a lower base."

Rydning concurred that HDDs are here to stay for a while yet. "SSD adoption is growing, but SSD pricing is not dropping quickly enough to displace HDDs in the majority of new PCs," he told IT Pro.

"The percentage of new PCs shipping with an SSD continues to be a very small.HDDs will continue to be the primary storage technology used in PCs and enterprise systems for most of this decade."

Hard disk drives have been doing the rounds for decades. It is nothing short of a miracle that manufacturers have been mass producing devices consisting of multiple platters spinning at up to 15,000 RPM with no noticeable faults.

However, solid-state drives (SSDs) are firmly established as the storage medium that will replace traditional spinning disks.

In the last five years, the price of SSDs have reduced to the point where they are now a viable proposition for consumers and enterprise users.

As the number of hard drive manufacturers dwindle, a gaggle of SSD vendors are lining up to take a chunk of the growing market. Established vendors such as Intel, Western Digital, Samsung and Kingston are going up against relative newcomers in the shape of ADATA, Micron, OCZ and Corsair.

Of course not all SSDs are the same and IT Pro is on hand to give a rundown of the 10 key features to look out for before making a purchase:

1. Capacity

You shouldn't simply pick an SSD based on the amount of data that will be stored. SSD performance is typically measured in input/output operations per second (IOPS) and read/write bandwidth in MB/sec. Much like hard drives, these figures are affected by the capacity. Due to aggregation of bandwidth and the physical number of NAND chips increasing with capacity, performance and in particular IOPS increases with capacity.

Currently, SSDs storage ranges from 64GB all the way up to 1TB, with specialist vendors offering multi-terabyte products. Going beyond 256GB sees very steep increase in price per gigabyte. SSDs with capacities between 128GB and 256GB offer a good balance of price and performance.

2. Form factor 2.5in or 3.5in

Due to SSDs not having platters, drive manufacturers have managed to attain considerable improvements in physical storage density. The vast majority of SSDs on the market are in the 2.5in format. This means that they will fit into most laptops. A 'drive adaptor' can also be used to fit an SSD into a 3.5in drive bay.

Desktop users can also stack two 2.5in SSDs in a single 3.5in drive bay, allowing for an improvement in drive density without the need for a bigger case.

Certain enterprise orientated SSDs, such as OCZ's VeloDrive have add-in boards that plug into PCI-Express connectors. Such drives carry a significant price premium, but feature multiple SSD controllers to make use of the increased bandwidth of the PCI-Express interface.

3. Reliability

Given the relatively recent arrival of SSDs, there have been questions over long term reliability, especially when compared to hard drives.

When it comes to the longevity of SSDs two factors need consideration - the reliability of the NAND memory chips and the controller chip.

NAND flash memory production is a mature technology and semiconductor giants such as Intel, Samsung and Toshiba have all honed their skills over the years in producing reliable chips. However, the SSD controller is of much greater importance when it comes to reliability.

Intel used to design and build its own SSD controller chips, which were highly regarded for their reliability. However, in recent generations the firm has moved away from its own SSD controller chips and started using third parties such as SandForce.

SandForce has recently been acquired by LSI, a long established storage vendor, giving the brand some enterprise credibility. Whilst SandForce did encounter problems with its first mass-market controller, the SandForce 2000, the firm has moved on and its controllers are found in Intel's latest 520-Series SSDs further suggesting the firm's troubles are behind it.

4. Warranty

SSDs typically come with three year warranties, which are comparable to those provided by hard drive manufacturers. Intel has taken the lead by providing five year warranties on its two consumer-orientated SSD ranges.

It is always good to have extra coverage for future replacements, but the frantic pace of SSD development means that in three years time it is highly likely users will want to upgrade to faster and larger drives.

Currently, the warranty period offered by manufacturers has little correlation with the endurance of the NAND flash chips, making it a relatively useless indicator of long-term reliability.

It is far more prudent at this stage to base a buying decision on underlying reliability. It is best not be an early adopter and wait a few months for SSD manufacturers to iron out any SSD controller firmware bugs that may exist.

It should also be remembered that warranties do not protect against drive failure and that users should always backup content.

5. NAND memory types

SSDs replace the platter found in hard drives with NAND flash memory chips. While other types of flash memory exist, NAND flash currently has the right balance of price, performance and reliability to make it the preferred choice in SSDs.

NAND flash memory consists of cells, which can be layered. Single layer cell (SLC) NAND flash can store a single bit of data whereas multi layer cell (MLC) can store multiple bits in a single cell meaning storage density can be greatly increased.

Traditionally, consumer orientated SSDs featured MLC NAND flash due to its significantly lower cost and increased storage capacity. In the past MLC NAND flash had considerably lower read/write cycles and lower write bandwidth compared to SLC NAND, but significant investment in MLC NAND development has mitigated performance and endurance worries.

SSDs using SLC NAND flash have all but evaporated from the market due to the aggressive development of MLC NAND flash. Even in the enterprise market, which was once dominated by SLC-shod SSDs, conservative vendors such as Intel have moved towards MLC to leverage its price andand capacity benefits.

6. TRIM / Operating system

SSD's biggest problem is the drop in performance over time. Hard drive performance varies given the location of data on the platter, whereas SSD performance decreases as the NAND cells go through read/write operations.

TRIM is a command that was developed to mitigate the performance degradation by performing garbage collection and executing a wear-levelling algorithm so that all the cells in the SSD receive an even wear rate. Although TRIM is a command implemented at the SSD controller level, operating system and file system support is needed for proper operation.

Microsoft supports TRIM with NTFS in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The Linux kernel has supported it since version 2.6.38, though not all file systems support it. Apple's Mac OS X 10.7 supports TRIM on the SSDs used by the firm.

TRIM support is almost ubiquitous throughout the SSD market, but it is vital to ensure the operating system supports this feature otherwise the performance degradation will become noticeable within months for heavy workloads.

7. RAID

Combining multiple storage devices to appear as one is a process known as redundant array of independent disks (RAID). This has been used to introduce fault tolerance and/or increase performance of hard drives. However with SSDs, RAID can have a crippling effect.

The problems with setting up RAID on SSDs come from TRIM command support that uses a wear levelling algorithm to increases the useful life of SSDs. When SSDs are configured in RAID, the majority of SSD controllers are unable to support the TRIM command. This results in significant performance degradation over time. Although fault tolerance may be improved, the harsh drop in performance over time means it is not currently advisable to use SSDs in any existing RAID configurations.

8. Interface

SSDs use the same external interfaces as hard drives, with Serial ATA being the most common. Up until last year, SATA II, which has a maximum bandwidth of 3Gb/sec was common and deemed adequate for hard drives. With SSDs able to saturate the interface, there has been a push towards SATA III, with a 6Gb/sec bandwidth, offering a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 768MB/sec.

It is advisable to go for a SATA III SSD as a means of future-proofing, even if the current system only supports SATA II. The connectors are identical and SATA III drives are backward compatible with SATA II, with a motherboard upgrade or a relatively inexpensive after market SATA III card can provide a performance boost in the future.

Other interface options include PCI-Express, with OCZ and FusionIO popularising the interface for enterprise orientated SSDs. PCI-Express has considerably higher bandwidth when compared to SATA III, with a second generation PCI-Express interface having a maximum bandwidth of 8GB/sec - close to 11 times the bandwidth of SATA III.

However, PCI-Express SSDs have significantly lower bandwidth than the interface's maximum and given the price difference over SATA III units, all but the most demanding applications can make PCI-Express SSDs good value for money.

9. Storage hierarchy

Although SSD capacities have increased in the past two years, enterprise users may need to consider deploying a storage hierarchy - a setup that consists of both SSDs and traditional hard drives to achieve value for money.

In desktops and workstations SSDs can act as fast 'scratch' drives. This is where users store the operating system and programs on an SSD to achieve low boot times and snappy application loading times. To store media such as videos and images, traditional hard drives can be used where price per gigabyte is significantly lower than SSDs.

Although SSDs have significantly higher performance than hard drives, the sequential transfer rates afforded by high capacity hard drives are more than adequate to stream media.

Even in server environments SSDs can be used to cache popular data with hard drives providing wider storage needs of an organisation. SSDs have been embraced by enterprise storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp to provide hybrid storage area networks that consist of both SSDs and hard drives.

10. Workload analysis

In the enterprise, SSDs can be used as a surgical tool to maximise the bang for your buck. In the same way that a storage hierarchy can effectively use SSDs to speed up parts of a larger data library, doing some basic workload analysis can allow companies to pinpoint SSD deployment for particular use cases.

Those who have upgraded to SSDs often wax lyrical about the improvement in responsiveness. This vague statement is really a reference to what is often an order of magnitude increase in IOPS over hard drives. IOPS as a performance metric is a combination of latency and the SSD controller's job scheduling capabilities, effectively the higher this number is, the more read/write operations can be done in a second.

SSD manufacturers like to mention read/write transfer bandwidth but it is important to realise these are sequential transfer bandwidth. So when a manufacturer states an SSD has a 400MB/sec read bandwidth it refers to a single 400MB file being read in one second, not that 400 1MB files can be read one second.

If a workload is reading or writing data very often, for instance, if it is being used as an operating system's swap drive or a database file store, then IOPS has a greater effect on overall performance than read/write bandwidth. Manufacturers like to mention headline grabbing read/write bandwidths, but only workload analysis can provide you with an answer as to whether you actually read or write 400MB files very often.

The difference between read/write bandwidths and IOPS is an important one because very few workloads read or write very large single files, meaning a purchaser making a buying decision based on sequential bandwidth figures could well be disappointed.

The key is to understand how your workload deals with data, a task that may seem tedious but can reap significant performance and financial rewards.

Buffalo this week launched its latest storage device, aiming itself at the small and medium business (SMB).

It still packs a punch with the choice of two, four, six or eight bays and the HDDs come fully populated within the device.

The TeraStation 5 is a network attached storage (NAS) solution, based on the iSCSI network standard.

It contains the more traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) rather than the still pricey, but beginning to fall, solid state drives (SSDs). However, it still packs a punch with the choice of two, four, six or eight bays and the HDDs come fully populated within the device.

The TeraStation 5 runs on Intel's Atom dual-core processor which, whilst not as weighty as others Intel has on the market, is designed with powering the smaller product in mind.

"At Buffalo we continually pride ourselves on providing IT solutions that are easy to deploy, run and manage for the SMB [and] the SME market," Paul Hudson, sales director for Northern Europe at Buffalo, told IT Pro.

"The TeraStation 5 is no exception, it includes important features from the rest of the TeraStation range as well as new and improved ones, offering enterprise class performance."

One of its key new functions is the ability to fail-over to a second device, which it calls its hot-spare function. This update adds more security from losing your data if things go wrong at the storage level. However, for those not wanting to stump up for two boxes, it also continues to have hot-swap functionality as well, meaning if just one drive fails within the TeraStation 5, it can be removed and replaced without losing any data.

Buffalo has also added mobile capabilities to the new solution under the title of WebAccess. This enables up to 10 users to access the TeraStation 5 remotely, using either a PC, laptop, iPhone or Android-based smartphone, and gives them mobile backup through the inclusion of NOVABackup, taking away some of the fears of working on the move and losing your device.

By building in a power scheduler to device to decide when it is off or on, Buffalo claims SMBs can cut down on CO2 wastage by switching it off when not needed and cut down on energy bills.

The Terastation 5 contains 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a choice of two or four 10, 100 or 1000 Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to five USB ports. It is available now with a three year warranty.

Western Digital today confirmed the acquisition of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST), boosting its already significant share of the storage market and giving it a stronger Hard Disk Drive (HDD) unit.

The deal sees Hitachi pocket $3.9 billion (2.5 billion) in cash, along with 25 million shares in Western Digital, valued at just under $1 billion. The shares equal 10 per cent of the company and gives Hitachi the right to appoint two of its own members to Western Digital's board of directors.

The completion of this acquisition is a truly momentous event in the 42-year history of our company

There were question marks as to whether the deal, first proposed in March 2011, would ever go through regulatory bodies had to see whether it was competitive to give Western Digital such a large portion of the HDD market and if it would push its main rival Seagate out of the business.

After a year of debate, the deal has finally received approval and Hitachi GST will run as a separate, but wholly-owned subsidiary, of Western Digital.

John Coyne, chief executive (CEO) of Western Digital, will take on the CEO role at Hitachi GST, whereas Steve Milligan, Hitachi GST's former CEO, will take on the role of president.

Both the chief operating officer (COO) and chief financial officer (CFO) roles will be kept by Western Digital staff.

"The completion of this acquisition is a truly momentous event in the 42-year history of our company," said Coyne.

"With ownership of two successful companies and the best talent available in the industry, we expect to accomplish great things as we build the new Western Digital to be the world's leading storage solutions provider with the industry's deepest technology capability, broadest product portfolio and best-in-class execution."

But what about Seagate? It had always been the larger of the two firms but will it continue to be competitive in the HDD market? Claus Egge, director of his own analyst firm, believes so.

"Seagate has been very strong for many years," he told IT Pro. "The fact that Western Digital has bought Hitachi GST and wanted to add enterprise drives to its portfolio won't [change] that.

"They have their own sales chains and have their markets. Both companies will continue."

ioSafe this week unleashed its product family onto the UK market, giving us storage it claimed could survive any disaster.

The US firm targets its products at small and medium businesses (SMBs) or branch offices for larger firms, although some solutions fall into the consumer category.

It sells the devices through channel partners and has just signed an agreement with Micro-P to get distribution moving in the UK.

The idea behind the range is that it can withstand fire, flood or even theft

"Now is the right time to expand into the UK," Robb Moore, chief executive (CEO) of ioSafe, told IT Pro. "We have had lots of requests for our products over here and the UK is a fantastic marketplace."

"If you combine the UK's understanding of data storage and its care about security, it is the right move for us."

The idea behind the range is that it can withstand fire, flood or even theft thanks to built in physical protections to the hard drives and SSD-based technologies.

"Encryption and network security are often used to protect data," read a statement from ioSafe. "Wildfires and hurricanes care little about whether the data is encrypted [and] firefighters won't ask your permission before hosing down your entire computer system."

"Physical security of data is often overlooked. Nearly every business, large or small has vulnerabilities [and] ioSafe specialises in hardware to help protect vulnerable data wherever it may reside."

There are two main lines of storage products from ioSafe, the desktop range and the portable portfolio.

The Solo and SoloPro offerings come with either HDD or SSD and are both bulky, designed to be kept in-house. However, with this bulk comes resilience, as the company claims they can withstand 30 minutes of 1,550F heat or up to 72 hours under 10ft of water without losing data.

The Rugged Portable drives are more about the risks data faces on the move. Again with the choice of HDD or SSD, these products can survive the crush of up to 5,000lbs and a drop of 20ft whilst still retaining their data, claims ioSafe.

For more reassurance, ioSafe offers a one-year warranty alongside a one year data recovery service, which can be extended up to five years if paid for. The promise with these services is to get replacement hardware after a disaster occurs with all your original data restored to it.

"We have a 99.99 per cent success rate of keeping and retaining that data so it makes a big difference to businesses and people," added Moore.

"We have products shipping now and, although we are just getting started, we are really excited about expanding here in the UK."

SMART Global Holdings today announced the formation of a new independent company, built to focus on flash and solid state disks (SSDs) for enterprises.

SMART Storage Systems plans on taking advantage of the growth in the SSD market as more companies begin to move from traditional hard drives to the speedier storage technology.

2012 is the year of SSD it is finally becoming a proven platform for high-speed transactional storage.

As a standalone organisation, it will have its own executive team separate from its parent company, as well as independent engineers, sales and marketing employees, and a dedicated manufacturing plant in Malaysia.

"Organisations in nearly every market sector are finding that the need to access and process information is outpacing the performance capabilities in traditional hard-drive based server environments," said John Scaramuzzo, president of SMART Storage.

"SMART Storage is not only focused on overcoming these bottlenecks by bringing high-performance SSDs to market, but also on solving the inherent endurance issues of flash."

The year of SSD' has been touted for sometime now, and is a belief held by SMART Storage and SMART Global Holdings. Now, it seems, industry analysts are on-board as well.

"Yes, 2012 is the year of SSD it is finally becoming a proven platform for high-speed transactional storage, and is now available as a tier 0 option in the vast majority of new storage systems," Clive Longbottom, founder and senior analyst at Quocirca, told IT Pro.

"As a tier -1 solution, companies such as TI and Fusion io are also pushing the envelope with their PCI-X SSD systems that push performance even further."

However, he did question the idea of having a purely SSD focused company for the storage firm, as although pure SSD offerings will be useful for OEMs and for certain applications, most customers will be looking at a hybrid approach.

"The long term successful storage vendors from any area will be those who can figure out how to build in such intelligence as close to the storage components as possible and those who have a balanced portfolio will be better positioned for this than any company attempting to specialise in just one type of storage," concluded Longbottom.

SMART Storage has been created from the funding acquired by the parent company in August last year from Silver Lake Partners and Silver Lake Sumeru.

Researchers today revealed a new technique of recording data magnetically, which they claimed would make the process "hundreds of times faster" than current hard drives.

The four year study was led by the University of York's physics department, partnering with Radboud University in Nijmegen, and involved a close working relationship with Seagate.

It claimed recording data by using heat would improve both speed and energy efficiency when it comes to writing data onto storage.

For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order.

Today's storage technology uses the standard magnetic theory of North and South poles of a magnet being attracted to each other, with the same directional poles repelling one another. Then, by introducing a third magnetic field, the poles are inverted and write a piece of data to the storage.

By increasing the strength of the third magnet, the speed of the information being written could be ramped up.

The new research shows, rather than adding a third magnetic field, heat could be added in the form of a ultrashort heat pulse' and have a much stronger reaction, speeding up data recording hundreds of times over.

"For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order," said Dr Alexey Kimel, from the Institute of Molecules and Materials at Radboud University, who also took part in the research.

"Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium."

Professor Roy Chantrell, from the department of physics at York, told IT Pro a new project to extend the research had already received funding and will start in the next few months, but it will be some time until the technologies hit the market.

"The next phase of magnetic recording technology will be Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, where a laser is used to heat the medium to allow recording to take place," he said.

"This will span up to maybe 10 years, after which new technologies, such as our proposed approach, will be needed."

The research has been published in February's Nature Communications journal.

Scientists at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science have built what they claim to be the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit.

According to the scientists, their technology enables storage more than 100 times denser than current hard disks and solid-state drives, and could lead to significantly smaller drives for mobile data in future devices.

As components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom.

The scientists said they had successfully stored one bit of data in only 12 magnetic atoms, and claimed the ability to manipulate matter by its most basic components atom by atom could be vital as conventional miniaturisation becomes unsustainable.

"The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom," said Andreas Heinrich, lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research.

"We're taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit - single atoms - to build computing devices one atom at a time."

IBM said nanostructures built to exploit an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism could allow people and businesses to store 100 times more information in the same space.

The team engineered 12 antiferromagnetically coupled atoms that were able to store information for "a few hours" by taking advantage of their inherent alternating magnetic spin directions.

This property, the scientists said, enabled them to pack adjacent magnetic bits much closer together than was previously possible without disrupting the state of neighbouring bits.

Western Europe IT spending will shrink by 0.7 per cent in 2012, due to the eurozone and hard-disk drive (HDD) shortage crises.

That was the prediction of Gartner, which today said the fallout from the Thai floods and global economic problems were going to hit IT spending hard this year.

Austerity measures from various Governments across Europe will also make a significant impact on public sector IT spending.

The scenarios are not great. They range from bad, to very bad to catastrophic.

Gartner downgraded its worldwide forecast too, claiming spending would total $3.8 trillion (2.5 billion) in 2012, representing a 3.7 per cent increase from 2011. It had previously predicted 4.6 per cent growth.

"Until the uncertainty is out of the way, we're just going to see continued gloom hanging over the eurozone," Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, told IT Pro.

"The scenarios are not great. They range from bad, to very bad to catastrophic."

Gordon suggested the HDD situation, which has led major vendors like Intel to downgrade their own financial predictions, would continue to plague the IT industry for the rest of 2012.

"There are plans to rebuild but that's going to take time. You can't put in extra capacity overnight. It's quite sophisticated and specialised manufacturing technology," he said. "Our hard drive guys says there is only a week's worth of inventory. So there's not a lot in the channels.

"So likely through the first half of this year and even in the second half we're going to see that disruption. By the time we get to 2013, the industry will be back on its feet again. But this year is going to be quite severely impacted."

Thanks to the eurozone situation, IT departments will have to wait until the middle of the year for any big decisions, as that is when they will know more about the financial situation in Europe, the analyst said.

"In the short-term, I think businesses are going to be very cautious where they place their bets," he added, claiming it was likely IT departments would not be making any "Big Bang" changes in the next six months.

A cloudy future?

As in the recent recession, the cloud computing industry looks set to benefit from the downturn.

"All the uncertainty we've seen over the last four years has helped the case for cloud. More and more companies are liking the look of cloud solutions because it keeps them away from that capital exposure," Gordon added.

"If anything, the ongoing uncertainty will provide more impetus behind cloud just because of all the flexibility it offers."

Seagate has closed a deal to acquire Samsung's hard disk drive (HDD) division, at a time when an HDD shortage is causing chaos.

The deal will see Seagate gain both Samsung's HDD products, including the M8 line of 2.5-inch HDDs, as well as a range of employees from South Korea.

Seagate plans to have those workers "focus on development of small form-factor products for the mobile compute market."

The deal was announced back in April, as the two sought to expand on their partnership, which sees Seagate supply disk drives for Samsung consumer products, whilst the South Korean firm provides chips for the US firm's solid state drives (SSDs), amongst other devices.

"Together, Seagate and Samsung have aligned our current and future product development efforts and roadmaps in order to accelerate time-to-market efficiency for new products and position us to better address the increasing demands for storage," said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

"It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets including mobile computing, cloud computing, and solid state storage."

The partners also extended their patent cross-licensing deal and will seek to expand their cooperative work on enterprise storage products.

"The strategic relationship will open new opportunities for the two companies by mutually complementing each other's creative technology solutions for a broad diversity of IT applications," said Oh-Hyun Kwon, vice chairman of device solutions of Samsung.

The value of the agreements came to $1.4 billion (896 million), Seagate added.

The deal closed at a time when the effects of the Thai floods have caused carnage in the disk drive market. With supply down, prices have risen and PC shipments are expected to go down.

Intel this month warned HDD supply shortages would hurt its current quarter revenue.

For a few years now, large manufacturers and some of the more forward-thinking consultants have been modelling risk in the global supply chain.

Largely, they have done this quietly, behind closed doors. No-one wants to frighten customers, or spook the markets into cutting the share price. But concerns over the fragility of supplies, and some hi-tech components in particular, are very real.

Most large vendors tend to have defined contracts with only a few key suppliers. If one of these suppliers is knocked out of action, by a natural disaster for instance, then the vendor's supply chain is often impeded, if not totally crippled.

Just how real is demonstrated by Intel's recent forecasts. The Japanese earthquake and more recently, the floods in Thailand, have hit supplies of critical parts. Although manufacturers always hold some inventory, shortages are now becoming a real problem.

The problem may well have hit manufacturers sooner, were it not for sluggish demand due to the wider economic climate. But low demand has done little more than delay the problem; it has not solved it.

Almost all hi-tech industries have been affected to a greater or lesser extent. Camera manufacturers are short of glass for lenses, and even TV and film production companies have run short of a particular type of videotape. Both products are mostly sourced from Japan. But the longer-lasting impact may well be on the IT industry.

Consolidation among manufacturers has led to some extreme concentrations of hardware and components in just a handful of factories, often in the same small area. Most of the world's hard drives are now made in Thailand, in the area hit by the floods. This has prompted Insight, a distributor, to warn that drives could be in short supply over the next few months, and that prices could rise.

If they continue, shortages of drives, memory and other parts will surely push up the cost of servers and PCs. Computer and IT equipment makers work on narrow margins and cannot absorb component price rises for long

This could lead to a short-term spike in equipment costs, so IT directors may want to secure important upgrades now - or look at alternatives to outright hardware purchases, such as using the cloud.

But in the longer term, it is possible that increasingly fragile supply chains might prompt a rethink in the way manufacturers source materials and key parts. Using multiple suppliers, or suppliers close to home, will help.

Even better use of supply chain planning tools can only go so far to help, suggests Antony Bourne, global industry director at IFS, an ERP software company.

"Most large vendors tend to have defined contracts with only a few key suppliers. If one of these suppliers is knocked out of action, by a natural disaster for instance, then the vendor's supply chain is often impeded, if not totally crippled," he says.

Providing an alternative source of parts could be good news for manufacturers in the US, and even the UK. But it could also mean an end to the days when we assumed the only way technology prices could go, was down.

Stephen Pritchard is contributing editor at IT Pro.

The European Commission has approved Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi's hard disk drive business.

The approval, under the European Union (EU) merger regulation and subject to conditions, clears US-based Western Digital to buy rival Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST), a subsidiary of Hitachi of Singapore recently renamed Viviti Technologies.

The approval is conditional upon the divestment of Western's production assets for 3.5in hard disk drives (HDD), including a production plant and the transfer of personnel and supply of HDD components.

The EC also said it cannot complete the Viviti acquisition until it has found a suitable purchaser for the divestment that must also be approved by the Commission.

Joaqun Almunia, European Commission vice president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement that the proposed divestiture would ensure that competition in the industry is fully restored before the merger is implemented.

"Hard disk drives are a key component of computers and other sophisticated electronic devices as they are used to store a growing bulk of data in the digital economy," he stated.

The commission said its decision was based on findings that there are separate worldwide markets for HDDs based on their form factor (3.5in or 2.5in) and different end uses, including in desktops, mobile and consumer electronics devices and enterprise business and mission-critical applications.

Without the divestment, it found the merged entity would only face competition in markets for 3.5in desktop HDDs and consumer electronics HDDs from the recently merged Seagate and Samsung, preventing customers from multi-source HDD purchases.

The transaction will reduce the number of competitors to three and in some markets to two, including the merged Western Digital/Viviti and Seagate/Samsung entities and Toshiba.

It also noted that Toshiba only recently entered the market for 3.5in business critical HDDs, but was uncertain whether it could replace competitive pressure presently exerted by Viviti.

Today's approval comes seven months after Western Digital announced its intention to buy HGST. The commission said it also took the Seagate/Samsung merger in the same sector into account, as it received its notification one day earlier than the HGST deal and approved it on 19 October.

It's not often we get excited about a hard disk, but when it's the world's first 4TB hard disk then we'll make an exception. Sadly, the GoFlex Desk is an external USB3 desktop disk rather than an internal disk that could be fitted inside a server, but it's still notable for having so much storage.

Although the GoFlex Desk range has been around for a while, the design has been refined. The 4TB model has a more angular appearance compared to the curvier look of older models.

One aspect that hasn't changed is the GoFlex connector. The base of the hard disk with the USB3 port detaches so you can connect a range of adapters for other interfaces, such as eSATA or FireWire 800 for systems without USB3, and potentially newer standards such as Thunderbolt. This flexibility could be attractive if you plan to keep the disk around for a while. Although the GoFlex connector is a barely disguised SATA port, the opening is too narrow to allow it to be connected to a PC directly over SATA.

The base of the hard disk with the USB3 port detaches so you can connect a range of adapters for other interfaces, such as eSATA or FireWire 800.

Seagate doesn't state the specifications for the internal disk inside the 4TB GoFlex Desk, but judging from our benchmark results we suspect it may be a model with a 5,400rpm or variable spindle speed. We've seen USB3 desktop 7,200rpm disks reach speeds of 100MB/s or more, but the 4TB GoFlex Desk struggled to reach 70MB/s when reading and writing small files. It came close to 100MB/s when reading large files, but couldn't quite reach 80MB/s when writing them. It's still a fast disk, but it's not as quick as other, albeit lower capacity disks.

We have our concerns about cooling. Like previous models, the 4TB GoFlex Desk relies entirely on passive cooling there's no fan of any kind. Although this makes it very quiet and it didn't become uncomfortably hot during extended use, we would be hesitant to use the GoFlex Desk for projects which require heavy, constant disk access, especially in offices with less-than-perfect ventilation.

Included on the disk itself is a Seagate-branded lite version of Memeo's AutoBackup program. It's not going to replace any dedicated backup software you already use, but this little app can backup your files automatically in the background while you work and also supports incremental backups, so it potentially could still be a useful extra.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

At 6p per gigabyte, the 4TB Seagate GoFlex Desk isn't extortionately priced for a first-of-its-kind massive capacity disk. It's not suitable for all projects and it's not quite as fast as we'd like, but if you need 4TB of storage in one box and can live with its limitations then it's a good choice. If you can wait though, we suspect other manufacturers will be introducing their own 4TB external disks soon.

SPECIFICATIONS Product type: external hard disk Capacity: 4TB Formatted capacity: 3.83TB Price per gigabyte: £0.06 Interface: USB 3.0 (replaceable) Spindle speed: Not stated Part code: STAC4000200 BENCHMARKS Large files write 77.6 MB/s Large files read 93 MB/s Small files write 65.6 MB/s Small files read 69.3 MB/s

Thunderbolt has been a long time coming. Although the PCI-Express-based interface for external peripherals has been available on Apple Mac laptops since February of this year, the first Thunderbolt-equipped storage peripherals are only now trickling onto the market. The Promise Pegasus R6 is the first Thunderbolt storage device to arrive and it's a beast. The R6 is a six-disk RAID storage array, so it doesn't come cheap.

The current Apple Thunderbolt cables are so expensive since they have a Gennum transceiver and signal booster chip at each end.

Although the R6's price of 871 ex VAT will make some eyes water, it's easy to see where some of the money went. The metal case is robust and looks nice too. It's not too noisy either we only noticed its whirring hum in a quiet room. When placed next to a server underneath an air conditioner, it was barely audible. There's a second Thunderbolt port for daisy-chaining other Thunderbolt peripherals, including Apple's Thunderbolt-equipped Cinema Display. Bear in mind that a Thunderbolt cable isn't included, so you'll need to buy one from Apple for around 40 ex VAT.

Our review sample came fitted with six 1TB 7,200rpm Hitachi Deskstar hard disks. Although various capacities and a cheaper four-disk variant are available, a diskless version sadly isn't an option. The disks themselves are screwed into four easily removable trays, so replacing a failed disk or fitting a bigger disk is very easy. The trays aren't lockable though.

The R6 supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10. Configuring the Pegasus with your chosen RAID level is straightforward using the setup program. The interface is a bit cluttered and could do with some tidying up, but it won't faze anyone who's ever had to configure a router, server or any other storage array. It's Mac-only, just like the drivers, which isn't surprising since Thunderbolt ports have yet to appear on Windows PCs. Once configured though, the Pegasus can be used with a Windows installation virtualised under OS X using a program such as Parallels Desktop.

When the Pegasus was configured using a RAID level with more data redundancy, large files performance was generally a bit slower while small files performance was a bit quicker.

The Promise Pegasus R6 is incredibly fast when configured as a RAID 0 array.

To see how much of this incredible performance was due to RAID rather than the Thunderbolt interface, we also tested the Promise R6 with just a single disk fitted. In this configuration large files were written at 176MB/s and read at 122MB/s. Small files were written at 169MB/s and read at 109MB/s. Even without the benefit of RAID, a Thunderbolt-connected disk is still clearly, if not so dramatically faster, than the alternatives. USB3 disks, for example, can reach 100-120MB/s when writing large files.

The Promise Pegasus R6 isn't as awe-inspiringly fast when fitted with just a single disk, but it's still fast.

Although the Pegasus R6 isn't available diskless or pre-fitted with solid state disks (SSDs), we wanted to see how just fast it could copy files when fitted with SSDs. We installed a pair of 240GB Kingston HyperX SSDs configured as a RAID 0 array. Although it was faster than a hard disk configuration in almost all of our tests, it wasn't dramatically quicker. Large files were written at 576MB/s and read at 596MB/s. Small files were written and read at around 208MB/s. The hard disk configurations did have the benefit of six disks though, where as our SSD configuration used just two SSDs. In any case we can't imagine too many SSD Thunderbolt arrays in actual use, if only because of the added expense on what is already a very pricy array.

The Promise Pegasus R6 is fast when fitted with a pair of Kingston HyperX 240GB SSDs, although not as breathtakingly quick as we were expecting.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

There's no doubt that thanks to Thunderbolt, the Promise Pegasus R6 is one of the fastest storage products we have ever seen. It's also very expensive, although its price per gigabyte of 18p, while high, isn't outrageously extortionate. However, even if you have the modern Macs required to use it, you'll need to transfer and manipulate seriously massive amounts of data regularly, such as HD or 4k video files or sprawling databases, to justify its high price.

SPECIFICATIONS Chassis: Desktop Storage: 6 x 3.5in 1TB 7,200rpm SATA2 hard disks in removable disk trays (not hot swappable) Array support: RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 Network: 2 x Thundebolt Other ports: 1 x serial port Management: Promise Utility 3.16 Price per gigabyte: 18p Power consumption Idle 42W Active 50W BENCHMARKS RAID 0 Large write 590MB/s Large read 499MB/s Large average 545MB/s Small write 196.9MB/s Small read 104MB/s Small average 150.5MB/s RAID 5 Large write 482MB/s Large read 374MB/s Large average 428MB/s Small write 220MB/s Small read 111MB/s Small average 165.5MB/s RAID 6 Large write 494MB/s Large read 250MB/s Large average 372MB/s Small write 185MB/s Small read 113MB/s Small average 149MB/s RAID 10 Large write 344MB/s Large read 228MB/s Large average 286MB/s Small write 141MB/s Small read 148MB/s Small average 144.5MB/s SINGLE DISK Large write 176MB/s Large read 122MB/s Large average 149MB/s Small write 169MB/s Small read 109MB/s Small average 139MB/s RAID 0 SSD Large write 576MB/s Large read 596MB/s Large average 586MB/s Small write 209MB/s Small read 208MB/s Small average 208.5MB/s

If you've deleted some files by accident or on purpose there are ways to get them back. In this tutorial, we'll explain step-by-step how the process works and when it's likely to work.

If you're using Windows, the files may still be in the Recycle Bin, in which case you can quickly and easily restore them. However, if you're in the habit of pressing Shift-Delete to avoid filling up the Recycle Bin, it's altogether harder to recover them.

Deleting files on a memory card, USB flash drive or other external disk isn't protected by the Recycle Bin, but as long as you act quickly, it's usually possible to recover deleted files. It's crucial that you stop using the drive in question immediately, and don't allow any data to be written to it.

If the situation is more serious and your disk is physically damaged, or not readable, you may need to enlist the help of a professional data recovery service, such as Kroll Ontrack.

This guide only applies to the following situations:

1. Deleted files

2. Damaged files (corrupted due to a power cut, for example)

3. Accidental disk formatting

4. Disks infected with viruses

At some point in the past - perhaps even today - you've no doubt experienced that sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach after accidentally deleting an important file or folder. That feeling is even worse if your hard disk fails and you lose its entire contents, including months or years' worth of work, documents, finances, photos, videos and music.

If you've simply deleted a file, the good news is that it's almost always possible to recover it as the file still exists on your hard drive; the area it occupies has simply been marked as available for other data to be written over it. However, if your disk has been dropped, set on fire, submerged in water or any other horror, it might rattle or stop spinning entirely. Here, things become a lot more complicated.

Computer Weekly's fire damaged digital camera and SD card

The extracted and cleaned memory chip from the SD card

Whatever your situation, there are data recovery companies that can attempt to restore your precious data and return your life to normality. One such firm is Kroll Ontrack, based in Epsom, Surrey. IT Pro visited their facility to see how engineers are able to recover lost data in special clean rooms.

Due process

The process starts with a call to one of Ontrack's data recovery team to discuss exactly what has happened, and work out the most cost effective way to recover it. Data on just about every medium can be recovered, from magnetic tape through to the latest SSDs (solid-state drives) including USB flash drives and memory cards in your phone or camera.

Even if the data is stored on a RAID array or in a virtual machine, Ontrack can usually recover it. Robert Winter, Ontrack's Engineering Manager, gave us a guided tour of the lab and explained that, "data is recoverable in the vast majority of cases". Even if the contents of your drive have become corrupted due to a virus or some malfunction, there's still hope.

There are various options depending on the nature of the problem. For example, it might be possible to recover the data instantly via the internet in as little as an hour if it's a simple case of accidental file deletion or corruption and all your hardware is intact and working fine. However, if the hardware is faulty - either a failed disk or other component, such as a RAID controller - you'll almost certainly have to send the equipment to Ontrack's lab. For the most complex or sensitive situations, engineers can visit your premises to repair the problem and recover the data on-site.

There are also various service levels, which determine how quickly your data is recovered and returned to you. For mission-critical business data, Ontrack's engineers will work around the clock, but where budget is more of a concern, rather than time, there are cheaper options.

Recovery position

When your hard disk(s) arrive at Ontrack's lab, they're bagged and tagged to allow them to be tracked through the entire recovery process. They then head to the pre-diagnosis area and are checked to find out if they're physically working. If there are any unusual rattles or the bearings are seized, they head into the clean room. However, for those that will power up and spin, they are connected to one of the imaging PCs.

Bagging and tagging incoming hard disks so they can be tracked throughout the data recovery process

Kroll Ontrack's imaging computers

The disk's contents are then copied with Ontrack's proprietary software. The software can automatically skip over bad areas - portions of the disk that may be damaged or corrupted. It then scans in reverse', backing up as far as it can until it reaches the end of the bad area in order to recover as much of the data as possible. Once the disk has been imaged, the data is stored on Ontrack's severs, which are currently fitted with 140TB of storage. The disk itself is now finished with, but the image must be worked on by the experts in the logical recovery area. This is split into various sub-areas for different file systems including Windows, Mac, Unix, plus other areas for RAID and virtualised systems.

Working on servers and RAID arrays

As well as disks, data can be recovered from tape backups usually for for migration to a different format. Accidental initialisation can also be overcome and backup data recovered.

Clean room

If a hard disk isn't working and can't be imaged in the pre-diagnosis area, it heads into the clean room. The engineers within will first listen to the disk and - using their considerable experience - will be able to determine whether it's safe to remove its lid or not. Some disks' chassis are integral to the spindle so opening it can render the disk useless as it can't be spun up or reassembled.

The clean room is equipped with special benches which prevent any dust or debris falling on the platters. Disks which are deemed safe to open have their lids removed and a visual inspection is carried out to check for problems. Each platter surface is inspected for damage as this can vary between platters.

We submitted our own damaged disk to Ontrack for assessment. Our disk, which spun up but refused to show up on the BIOS, had only minor damage on the upper surface of the platter.

IT Pro's damaged laptop hard disk

Unfortunately, the underside had a spiral scratch due to the head being in contact with the platter as it returned to it's parked position - a classic sign of a disk that has been dropped while operating. This kind of damage means the data can't be recovered from that platter.

If the data lost is mission critical, it may be possible to recover data from platters with minor damage. Ontrack's software allows the engineers to move the heads to a safe, undamaged area in order to copy the 'good' data off before attempting to image the damaged area. Allowing the heads to read the damaged area could cause further damage and destroy good data.

If a particular platter is beyond repair, the software can tell the disk to ignore any data being read from that platter's read/write head in order to trick the disk into thinking it is working correctly - otherwise it may refuse to read any data at all.

Microscopes are used for inspecting platter damage more closely, and to check for any damage that isn't visible to the naked eye. Another recovery technique involves cleaning any debris from the platter surfaces before powering the disk up to image it. Even smoke particles can damage the platter, as they are larger than the gap between the read/write head and the platter - just a few microns - and can get caught between them.

When a disk is dropped or knocked, perhaps when a laptop is placed roughly on a desk, the read/write heads can hit the platters. The damage can be minor or severe, but if any particles are chipped off, this can fly around and cause further damage - this is why it's important to act quickly if you suspect your disk has been damaged following a drop.

Some disks arrive in the clean room with seized bearings. The engineers are able to fix this, either by fitting replacement parts or by repair, in order to get the drive spinning again. Ontrack currently stores around 1,500 different hard disk models which can be used for spare parts to repair failed disks quickly.

Kroll Ontrack claims to maintain a huge supply of spare hard disks

Even circuit boards can be quickly swapped over where the problem is electronic rather than mechanical. Often, you can't simply replace a controller board with an identical model as calibration data is stored on the chips. Ontrack can copy this data to a new board to get a drive running again.

Don't lose your head

Solid-state disks

SSDs are still relatively new, and the recovery process is not yet automatic. Where an interface has been damaged - for example if the SATA connector has been snapped off - engineers can repair the electrical connections in order to copy the data off the drive. The same technique also applies to USB flash drives, which are fairly vulnerable to damage.

Removing memory chips from a SSD with the aid of a microscope

When it isn't possible to repair the interface, or there's another problem causing the data to be inaccessible, the memory chips can be removed from the circuit board and the data read directly from them. Data is usually stored across the chips using RAID, but the data should still be recoverable using Ontrack's proprietary software as long as the intricacies of the chip manufacturer's RAID implementation is documented.

A logical solution

Once the data from the disk has been imaged, it passes to the logical recovery team to recover the files the customer has requested. As long as the file system isn't something obscure, the data can usually be obtained fairly quickly. Even if the data was stored in a virtualised environment, or a RAID, it can be recovered but it adds extra steps to the process.

It's possible to recover files which are either corrupted or written over a damaged area of the disk, but it isn't always possible to extract the full file. Ontrack has techniques to read individual records in databases and emails within Outlook PST files. Engineers can also search for the signatures of particular file types, such as Word documents, and as long as the filename is embedded, this can be restored as well, instead of leaving the customer with a slew of files with numerical filenames.

It's crucial to have a backup strategy in place to avoid having only one copy of your critical files.

Engineers rarely open files to see what they contain only when checking that the data has been restored correctly are files opened. However, should an engineer find a selection of suspicious filenames and suspect they may contain illegal material, they must report it to the police. An investigation can then be carried out and, if the customer is suspected to have broken the law, they can be prosecuted. However, this has only happened once or twice in Ontrack's history.

What's the damage?

As we've mentioned, there are various services depending on how quickly customers need their data back: Emergency (working round the clock), Express (your data has priority, and recovery work continues on Saturdays), Standard (data is recovered during normal office hours) and Home User (time isn't a factor).

To recover a single laptop hard disk for these services would cost:

Emergency 350 + 1,495 to 2,995 + VAT

Express 95 + 795 to 1,495 + VAT

Standard 75 + 495 to 995 + VAT

Home User fixed price 599 inc VAT

For a complex enterprise system, for example a four-disk RAID from a Microsoft Exchange server, the prices are proportionally more, due to the extra labour required:

Emergency 800 + 6000 to 8000 + VAT

Express 500 + 4000 to 6000 +VAT

Standard 300 + 2000 to 4000 + VAT

If you've simply deleted some files or have an operating system or file system problem, you could try Ontrack's EasyRecovery software, which starts at just 25. Of course, while it's remarkable that Ontrack can restore data from hard disks you may have thought completely dead, it's crucial to have a backup strategy in place to avoid having only one copy of your critical files.

Unlike most small business NAS appliance vendors, Thecus has always had its eye on the bigger picture and is still the only manufacturer in this market sector to support SAS hard disks. We first saw this in our exclusive review of the N8800 SAS but the new N16000 shows Thecus is upping its game ever further.

Supplied to IT Pro exclusively by Origin Storage, the N16000 has a firm focus on larger businesses - along with support for 6Gbps SAS disks, it can also be upgraded to 10-Gigabit Ethernet. The review unit was supplied with Thecus' optional C10GT PCI Express card allowing us to hook it up to the lab's 10-Gigabit Ethernet network and put it through its paces.

The N16000 is a 3U rack appliance with room for up to sixteen hot-swap disks. We've shown the price of a diskless model but Origin Storage offers plenty of other options. A system with sixteen 3TB SATA disks costs 7,098 whilst a full house of 600GB 6Gbps 15K SAS disks will set you back 10,618 ex VAT.

Thecus has designed its own system motherboard for the N16000 which sits in the base of the chassis and mates directly with the hard disk backplane via an edge connector. An LSI SAS PCI Express card manages all drive bays and has its two ports connected directly to the motherboard.

Along with six USB2 ports, the appliance has two rear USB3 ports thanks to Thecus' CU30N PCI Express card. The motherboard's SATA interfaces are also cabled through to an eSATA header card, but Thecus does not yet have any expansion shelves for the N16000.

Two embedded Gigabit Ethernet data ports are available and there's a third which is used only as a heartbeat link to another N16000 for high availability (HA). Only HA for systems with one RAID array is currently supported but Thecus advised us it will support HA for appliances with multiple arrays in a few months.

The N16000 runs the same firmware as all current Thecus NAS appliances so the majority of features are consistent across the entire family. Installation using the Setup Wizard is a swift process and for testing we configured six Seagate Cheetah 6Gbit/s SAS disks as a RAID-5 array which took a couple of hours to build.

The N16000's web interface.

The hard disks are only used for storage but fault tolerance extends to the operating system as this is protected by Thecus' dual-DOMs. The second module maintains a backup copy which is called up if the primary one fails and from the web console you can schedule regular backups.

We began performance testing over Gigabit Ethernet using a Broadberry dual X5560 rack server running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit. The Iometer utility reported a fast raw read speed 110MB/s for a mapped Windows share whilst drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 108MB/s. Using the FileZilla client to FTP the video clip also returned the same speeds.

For 10-Gigabit Ethernet testing we moved over to a dual Opteron 4170 HE Dell PowerEdge R515 fitted with a single port Intel 10GBase-SR card. With a direct fibre connection to the appliance we saw Iometer return a storming raw read speed of 680MB/s for a mapped share.

This translated to a massive boost for drag and drop copies with the same tests now returning average read and write speeds of around 470MB/s. Most businesses will more than likely connect the appliance to a switch over 10-Gigabit and use it to link multiple servers over Gigabit and we can confirm that the N16000 is quite capable of handling these demands.

HP's StorageWorks P2000 G3 10GbE iSCSI appliance we recorded raw read and write speeds of 676MB/s and 460MB/s for a RAID-5 array comprising eight 3Gbit/s SATA disks. With a 100GB iSCSI target on the N16000 assigned to our Dell server we saw much faster read and write speeds of 701MB/s and 652MB/s.

Thecus also provides some decent backup software with the N16000 as you get five copies of Acronis' Backup and Recovery 10 for Windows Servers included in the price. We found this easy to use as you create a vault on the appliance and then schedule regular backups of disks or volumes on the server.

Thecus includes Acronis' Backup and Recovery 10 for Windows Servers with a five server license as standard.

For disk and volume restoration you can run a job from the Acronis console or browse the vault and restore files and folders using drag and drop. Plenty of disaster recovery tools are also provided with a boot disk creation tool and the Startup Recovery Manager which modifies the server boot-up process with an extra option for a recovery environment for bare metal restores.

For a 16-bay NAS/IP SAN appliance that supports both SATA and 6Git/s SAS drives, the N16000 is very good value. Unlike most enterprise storage products, the appliance doesn't have any RAID controller redundancy and has no chassis expansion capabilities but it's a real speed demon over 10-Gigabit Ethernet.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The new N16000 moves Thecus into the big league for network storage as it provides high storage capacity and plenty of useful features at a reasonable price. RAID controller redundancy and support for external expansion shelves are not available but Thecus is still the only NAS vendor in this market sector that supports 6Gbit/s SAS drives which showed their mettle in our 10-Gigabit Ethernet speed tests. If you need the best possible performance and you're willing to invest in the 10-Gigabit Ethernet equipment to get it, the Thecus N16000 is a fine choice.

Chassis: 3U rack CPU: 3.07GHz Intel Xeon X3480 Memory: 8GB DDR3 Storage: 16 x hot-swap drive bays RAID: LSI SAS 9211-8i SAS/SATA PCI Express card Array support: RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD, global hot-spare Ports: 6 x USB2; 2 x USB3, 2 x eSATA Network: 3 x Gigabit Ethernet (2 x LAN + HA port) Power: 2 x 700W hot-plug Software: Setup Wizard, Acronis Backup and Recovery Server for Windows OEM (5 licenses) Warranty: 5 years RTB (1st year on-site NBD if disks are sourced from Origin Storage) Options: Thecus C10GT PCI Express card, £316 ex VAT

Many businesses don't use demanding applications. Consequently, they see little point in investing in servers using the latest multi-core Xeon and Opteron processors when most of their computing power will remain untapped.

Boston's Green Power 2200-T is designed for such businesses. It's a low cost, high-density system for running basic applications such as web serving and hosting, mail and BlackBerry services. It uses Intel's Atom processor and brings together eight, independent server nodes into a 2U chassis.

The 2200-T is based on Supermicro's Twin Cubed server platform which consists of a 2U rack chassis and four hot-swap trays each using an X7SPT-DF-D525 motherboard. The motherboards have two embedded 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 dual-core processors and are designed to present each processor as a totally separate server.

One of the X7SPT-DF-D525 motherboards used in the Green Power 2200-T

The chassis has two hot-swap 720W 80 Gold Plus certified power supplies and both are cabled through to the hard disk backplane at the front. The motherboard interfaces are hard-wired though to a hot-plug bridge bar on the side of the tray which mates with the chassis backplane during insertion allowing it to receive power and hard disk storage from a single connector.

The chassis provides a total of 24 hot-swap SFF hard disks so each node gets three drives apiece and the price includes two 500GB disks per node. The motherboard's embedded Intel SATA controller supports mirrors, stripes and RAID-5 so storage redundancy per node is good.

A glance at the rear of each tray shows a complete set of ports for each server node comprising VGA, two Gigabit Ethernet and two USB2 ports. Further expansion isn't possible as the motherboards don't have any PCI Express slots or room for a mounting bracket on their rear panel.

A drawback of using Atom chips is their memory limitations as the motherboards only have two SO-DIMM slots for each node. The Atom's maximum supported memory is 4GB of 800MHz DDR3 and this is also the unbuffered, non-ECC variety so we wouldn't recommend using this server to run mission-critical applications.

System cooling is handled by four large fans located between the trays and the backplane. They aren't hot-swappable and each pair can only be removed when the lower trays have been released and pushed back slightly. With the Atom's staying frosty the fans don't need to shift much air and we found the server to be surprisingly quiet even when under heavy load.

The mounting brackets on the chassis have integral power buttons so you can control each server individually. They also provide a basic set of status LEDs for power and the network ports. The trays are easy to remove as you release the locking tabs on each side of them and pull the unit out from the rear with the two grab rings.

Remote management is possible since each server has an embedded Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) controller which shares access with the first Gigabit Ethernet NIC. This offers a tidy web interface providing full access to the server so you can switch it on and off, reset it and initiate a graceful shutdown.

The web interface provides sensor readouts for all critical components and you can issue SNMP traps and email alerts using thresholds for each sensor. You're going to need full remote control for this system and thankfully it comes as standard.

The remote control came in very handy for us during our power tests as we could control all eight nodes from one workstation.

It also provides virtual media services so devices on the host PC, such as optical drives, can be used by the server under control. We found the KVM-over-IP feature particularly useful as we could remotely control all eight nodes from one workstation during our power tests.

Power usage is incredibly low as each node uses less than a 40W light bulb, even when under heavy load.

With one node powered up and the four fans running we saw usage with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle settling at 89W. With SiSoft Sandra thrashing the Atom processor, usage peaked at only 97W. We then powered up more nodes and took idle and peak measurements as we went.

In idle we saw two, four, six and eight nodes draw a total of 108W, 146W, 195W and 235W and under pressure these figures peaked at 117W, 164W, 216W and 263W. Overall, we were seeing an average power usage per server of only 29W in idle and barely 33W under load which is quite remarkable.

Businesses looking for a high-density compute node solution capable of running low-demand applications will find that the 2200-T fits the bill very nicely. Furthermore, the price for the review system equates to only 699 per server and power usage is incredibly low as each node uses less than a 40W light bulb, even when under heavy load.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The Green Power 2200-T finds an innovative use for Intel’s Atom processor and is well suited to running non-critical applications that don’t need a lot of horsepower. Cramming eight servers into a 2U chassis gives it a high rack density, the cost per node is very low and data centres that have maxed out their utility supply will appreciate its ridiculously low power consumption.

Chassis: 2U rack Power: 2 x 720W hot-plug supplies Eight compute nodes each with the following: CPU: 1.83 GHz Intel Atom D525 Memory: 4GB 800MHz non-ECC unbuffered DDR3 Storage: 2 x 500GB Seagate 3Gbit/s SATA SFF hard disks in hot-swap carriers (max. 3 per node) RAID: Intel embedded SATA controller Array support: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Management: Embedded Supermicro IPMI controller (shares NIC1); Software: Supermicro SuperO Doctor III and IPMI View 2 Warranty: 3yrs on-site next business day

The European Union's Competition Commission is looking into prospective deals from two of the world's leading hard disk companies to ensure all is fair in mergers and storage.

The regulator is examining Seagate's planned take-over of Samsung's HDD division, alongside Western Digital's acquisition of Hitachi's storage arm, to ensure the overall market won't suffer as a result.

Joaqun Almunia, the Commission's vice president in charge of competition policy, said: "Hard drives are the backbone of the digital economy. The sector has already experienced significant consolidation and the proposed acquisitions will further reduce competition."

"The Commission will carefully examine if effective competition is preserved and innovation encouraged."

The sticking point for the Commission is how much it would cut down competition between vendors. A merger of Seagate and Samsung would increase the former's leading position, leaving only Western Digital and Hitachi to compete. If those two merged as well, they would then take over the market and only face competition from the Seagate/Samsung venture and Toshiba.

"This could impact negatively on customers' ability to obtain competitive prices for the product [and] the merger could also reduce the manufacturers' incentives to innovate in the market," said an EU statement.

The investigation will not be conducted overnight though, with the Commission having 90 working days to make a final decision making the deadline 10 October.

As a result, Western Digital has now re-jigged its date for the completion of its acquisition, putting its estimates back to the fourth calendar quarter of this year.

"The company is co-operating fully with the EC in the Phase II review [and] the company indicated that it is proceeding, on plan, with its integration-planning activities associated with the proposed acquisition," read a statement from Western Digital, showing it still believed the Hitachi deal would go ahead.

IT PRO contacted Seagate for its perspective on the investigation but it had not returned our request at the time of publication.

Toshiba claimed to have released the world's first series of self-encrypting drives, with its Wipe Technology targeting the enterprise market.

The 2.5-type MK6461GSYG family was announced today in five different models, ranging from 160GB to 640GB, and has been designed for use in copiers, printers, PCs and other IT devices.

The technology can invalidate encryption keys and data when the drive is removed from its housing or hooked up to an unauthorised host system.

Samples will make their way out to the market by the end of the month, with mass production due to start at the end of June.

"Today, most office copier and printing systems utilise HDD capacity and performance to support productivity and the security of recorded document image data that must be maintained," Toshiba said in a statement.

"Furthermore, data invalidation required overwriting for hours or physically disrupting until now."

Toshiba said it was looking at ways to introduce its Wipe Technology in the MK6461GSYG family into solid state drives (SSDs).

The firm started developing its Wipe Technology in August 2010.

"Reflecting voice of customers to meet varying using conditions, MK6461GSYG family drives not only offer the latest version of Wipe Technology adding the third level of control, but also configure areas for invalidation and encryption, achieving an optimised solution for data security," Toshiba added.

With some significant data breaches in the UK of late, and with the rise in data breach costs, such technology may perform well on these shores.

Seagate has launched the GoFlex Slim external hard drive, claiming its size means it's the best choice for portable storage.

Measuring only 9mm thick, the 2.5in hard drive with 7200RPM is 38 per cent thinner than the previous generation.

It comes with a USB 3.0 connecter, preparing it for when the technology kicks in, and Seagate claims it allows for Windows and Mac files to be shared without any formatting issues.

Coming in at 79.99 for the 320GB model, the price is pretty hefty compared to other drives of the same size on the market.

However, according to Seagate, it is more about the appearance of the outside than the cost of the inside, with the company marketing it to go with the "mobile lifestyle" of "portable, thin, stylish laptops and netbooks."

"Consumers have a desire to have digital content available at their fingertips. However, in some cases, personal libraries of digital content are exceeding the storage capacity available in notebook PCs," said John Rydning, research director for hard disk drives at IDC.

"USB attached HDD storage that is capacious, affordable, lightweight, and in a slim form factor will be appealing to many of these consumers."

The GoFlex Slim is available immediately.

Storing several terabytes of data used to require a multiple hard disk array, but now Hitachi's Deskstar 7K3000 can fit a massive 3TB of data on a single 3.5in disk. Although it's not the first disk to reach this capacity, it is the first with a 7,200rpm spindle speed, which should help improve the speed of file transfers.

The adoption rate of 3TB disks has been slow primarily because they aren't compatible with legacy systems. Device drivers built into older BIOS chips and operating systems can't recognise hard disks with capacities greater than 2.2TB, regardless of how they are partitioned. Unfortunately this includes Windows XP; although other manufacturers have included hardware or software workarounds with their ultra-high capacity disks, Hitachi has opted not to support the older operating system. There are third party tools available that can force compatibility with Windows XP, but the lack of an official solution will surely limit the appeal of the disk for most businesses.

Even when using newer versions of Windows, there are still several constraints to using the Deskstar as a boot disk. Only 64-bit operating systems that support GPT partitioning (i.e. Vista or Windows 7) are natively compatible and you will also need a motherboard with a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface instead of a BIOS. UEFI support is currently limited to Intel's latest Sandy Bridge boards which, due to unforeseen chipset issues, are still difficult to find. This is less of an issue for non-Windows users; both Intel-based Macs and most current Linux distributions can use the Deskstar as a boot disk natively.

In spite of these restrictions, using the disk as a secondary storage drive is very straightforward. On a Windows 7 test machine, it was picked up straight away by the operating system. Setting up the disk using the Master Boot Record (MBR) automatically split it into two partitions to avoid any conflicts with the BIOS; one larger 2TB partition and a second smaller one comprising the remaining capacity. Using GPT partitioning instead, the entire disk can be formatted as a single volume.

It's certainly impressive to find a single disk with a 2.72TB usable capacity, but it's also important that it performs well. Thankfully with its sustained 7,200rpm spindle speed, generous 64MB cache and extra bandwidth provided by SATA3, the Deskstar was exceptionally fast for such a high-capacity disk. It wrote large files at a rapid 104.4MB/s and read them at an even faster 141.6MB/s. As expected, writing a large number of smaller files was slower, but 90.9MB/s write and 100.7MB/s read speeds are still very respectable.

The Deskstar 7K3000 surprised us with its excellent combination of performance and high capacity, as the two are rarely found together. It's also surprisingly well priced, with a per gigabyte price of just 4p. However, it's not without its issues; hardware and operating system limitations make it impractical for use as a boot disk and the lack of Windows XP support will certainly force many users to look elsewhere for a high capacity disk.

With the right combination of hardware and software however, it's still a great way to add extra storage space to a system without requiring multiple disks, or by reducing the number of disks needed to reach a certain capacity in a RAID array.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

With its massive capacity and stellar performance, the Deskstar 7K3000 is an ideal secondary storage disk. Unfortunately current limitations make it impractical to use as a boot disk, unless you have very particular hardware or plan on using it in a Mac or Linux machine. Its appeal is also lessened by uncertainty surrounding warranty support following the news of Western Digital's intention to acquire Hitachi.

Product type: internal SATA hard disk Capacity: 3TB Formatted capacity: 2.72TB Price per gigabyte: £0.04 (based on ex. VAT price) Interface: SATA3 Power connector: SATA Noise: 2.9dbA Spindle speed: 7,200rpm Cache: 64MB Part code: 0F12450 Warranty: Two years RTB BENCHMARKS Large files write 104.4 MB/s Large files read 141.6 MB/s Large files average 122.9 MB/s Small files write 90.9 MB/s Small files read 100.7 MB/s Small files average 95.8 MB/s

The latest microservers are aimed squarely at small business that have traditionally relied on a PC for providing simple file and print services. HP was first out of the blocks with its compact MicroServer N36L and now Fujitsu has introduced its Primergy MX130 S1.

The MX130 targets small businesses of up to 15 users that want a central location for basic file sharing and print services. Along with Windows Server 2008 R2, the server is also validated for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can't see many small businesses wanting to tussle with the latter though as it's far too complicated.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation can be preinstalled for 145 which is good value. Fujitsu advised us it also plans to offer SBS Essentials 2011 on this server when Microsoft launches it later this year.

The system on review looks pricey when compared to the HP MicroServer. However, the Primergy's 3.1GHz AMD Athlon II X2 255 is a lot faster than the little 1.3GHz Athlon II Neo in the MicroServer, although you can save cash by opting for an Athlon 220 or a single-core Sempron processor.

The price for the review system also includes two 1TB SATA hard disks. We shopped around and found an Athlon 220 model with 2GB of RAM and a pair of 250GB drives on EBuyer for around 250 ex VAT which puts it closer in price to the MicroServer.

Rather than design a completely new chassis for the MX130 S1, Fujitsu has simply used its standard Esprimo desktop casing. Physically, it's little different from the Esprimo E5645 that failed to impress us when we recently reviewed it.

However, a big bonus of this chassis is it's designed to be very quiet and we can say it's almost silent. The cooling arrangement is a little strange, though, as the chassis has a fan mounted at the front, but the processor heatsink is barely an inch behind it and is also fitted with its own fan.

The cover is removed by pressing buttons on each side and pulling the complete shell forwards and it can be padlocked shut. The four memory slots are easily accessible and the server can be upgraded to 16GB, but if you opt for Server 2008 Foundation remember this OS only supports up to 8GB.

For storage the motherboard has six embedded SATA ports, but the integral AMD RAID controller only supports mirrors and stripes. Up to two 3.5in hard disks can be fitted with one mounted under the power supply and the other beneath the 5.25in bay.

HP's MicroServer provides far easier access to its four drive bays as they are located right behind its front door with the hard disks fitted in flimsy but easily removable carriers. To get at the drives in the MX130 you need to remove the shell and unclip the front bay or the power supply unit and swing them up.

You can increase the drive count as optional 2.5in hard disk mounting kits are also available. Two drives can be placed under the power supply, two more in the front bay and, if you dispense with the optical drive, another pair can be squeezed in here as well.

There's room to expand as the motherboard has two PCI Express slots as well as another pair of 32-bit PCI slots. They are easily accessible and all support half-height expansion cards.

Some businesses are putting microservers into small remote offices to provide basic file sharing functions with AD access controls. In these scenarios it would be very useful to be able to remotely monitor and manage the server from the head office, but the MX130 is devoid of these features.

The MX130 was supplied to us with Fujitsu's ServerView software installed, but as the server doesn't have an embedded iRMC2 controller there's little you can do with it. We were advised that this will be rectified later this year with the release of a ServerView agent for local management only, along with the ServerView Installation Manager software.

HP's MicroServer is currently your best bet if you want full remote management. For only 55 extra you can have the Remote Access Control PCI Express card. It's surprisingly sophisticated as it has web browser access, hardware monitoring, power controls, virtual media services and KVM-over-IP remote control.

Fujitsu's MX130 S1 has a reasonable hardware specification, is remarkably quiet and has good expansion potential. However, its desktop PC chassis is not designed to provide easy access to the hard disks and if you want full remote management capabilities then HP's little MicroServer is a much better choice.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The Primergy MX130 S1 is compact and quiet with good expansion potential but, apart from support for ECC memory, doesn’t offer much more than a standard desktop PC. HP’s MicroServer may have a slower processor but it costs less, its hard disks are far more accessible and it beats Fujitsu easily for remote management with its optional RAC card.

Chassis: Desktop CPU: 3.1GHz AMD Athlon II X2 255 Memory: 4GB 1,333MHz DDR3 expandable to 16GB Storage: 2 x 1TB WD SATA cold-swap hard disks (max 2 x 3.5in or 6 x 2.5in with optional 2.5in disk mounting kits) RAID: integrated six-port AMD SATA controller Array support: RAID 0, 1 Expansion slots: 2 x PCI Express, 2 x 32-bit PCI Ports: 12 x USB2 (2 front, 6 rear, 4 internal) Network: Gigabit Ethernet Power: 250W internal supply

Storage company Drobo has announced a new range of redundant storage arrays aimed at businesses, along with the after-sales care to back them up.

Drobo's eponymous multi-disk storage arrays used a RAID-like technology, branded BeyondRAID, to ensure data redundancy but, unlike traditional RAID arrays, can consist of disks of any size and are easier to set up and administer. Many previous Drobo arrays have been aimed at consumers, but the new B series models are aimed specifically at businesses.

The massive B1200i is the most interesting since it has iSCSI support and can accommodate up to 12 disks. It supports tiered storage, so frequently accessed data is stored on the fastest available disk, as well as thin provisioning. It's rack-mountable and has dual, hot-swappable power supplies.

The smaller Drobo B800i and B800fs can take up to eight disks, but the B800fs drops iSCSI support. The B800 models will accept SATA hard disks in any combination of capacities. Oddly, Drobo claims that only the B1200i can accommodate SSDs and SAS hard disks. All three models are backed up by the 24/7 DroboCare service which aims to deliver replacement parts on the same business day any fault is reported.

All three models can now be managed from the new Drobo Management console which aims to provide an animated, but logically organised administration interface whether your Drobos are located on another floor or in another country.

The B800-series Drobos should be available shortly with prices from 1,409, but the B1200i won't be available until April. We'll bring you full reviews as soon as we can.

Solid state disks (SSDs) have one crucial advantage over traditional hard disks. Since they don't have any moving parts, they're considerably less prone to damage. This has led to SSDs being fitted in laptops, usually high-end models given their high cost. Nonetheless, their ruggedness, as well as their slenderness, makes them attractive for use in external storage too.

The Iomega SSD Flash is not only one of the first external SSDs we've seen, it's also the first we've seen to come equipped with a USB3 port. In our tests with portable hard disks, we've found that the USB3 models can be four times as fast as their USB2 counterparts, so we were eager to test the file transfer speeds of Iomega's SSD Flash.

Unfortunately, we found the SSD Flash's speed results to be inconsistent. When connected to a PC with a built-in USB3 port, large files were written at 62.8MB/s and read at 154MB/s. Small files were written at 31MB/s and read at 44.8MB/s. Although these speeds are faster than any USB2 hard disk, they're generally much slower than the best USB3 hard disks and SSDs connected internally using the SATA interface which can easily exceed 100MB/s in all our tests.

To find out why Iomega's SSD Flash wasn't as fast as we expected, we cracked it open. Inside we found a 1.8in Micron RealSSD C300. This SSD has a SATA3 connection attached to a PLX OXU3101 SATA3-to-USB3 adapter board, the first of its kind. After consulting with our colleagues at our sister site Bit-Tech, we suspect the performance bottleneck lies in this board, since the C300 should easily be capable of faster file transfer speeds. Unfortunately we were unable to confirm this by directly connecting the C300 to our test PC's motherboard since the C300 has a proprietary SATA power connector which we've never seen before.

Despite its disappointing performance, the SSD Flash is still faster than any USB2 hard disk. Unfortunately we still can't recommend it. At a cost of 2.44 per gigabyte, the 64GB SSD Flash is not only expensive, its capacity is also too small to be useful as a backup disk for most servers and client computers.

It might be useful for backing up SSD-equipped laptops and the boot disks of some servers, but most of these won't have built-in USB3 and upgrading them won't always be possible. Plus, when connected over USB2, the SSD Flash was no faster than a USB2 hard disk in our tests so it's of little appeal even for this task.

The SSD Flash isn't completely without merit. We were quite taken by the sturdy, classy-looking black metal enclosure. It's small and light enough to easily fit in a shirt pocket too. The three year warranty is quite lengthy.

Verdict

The Iomega SSD Flash 64GB is slim and attractive, thanks to its black brushed metal enclosure. Unfortunately its performance is far slower than what we'd expect from both a USB3-equipped storage device and from a SSD. If you must have a USB3-equipped SSD and can live without the warranty, you're better off buying a USB3 enclosure and a SSD separately and fitting them yourself, but we'd still wait until SSD prices are a little more sensible.

Product type: external solid state disk

Capacity: 64GB

Formatted capacity: 58.9GB

Price per gigabyte: £2.44

Interface: USB 3.0

Controller: Marvell

Part code: 35141

BENCHMARKS

Large files write 62.8 MB/S

Large files read 154 MB/s

Small files write 31 MB/s

Small files read 44.8 MB/s

Solid State Drives (SSDs) may be a hot topic in the storage world at the moment but a senior executive from HP believes they have some way to go before they manage to replace standard hard drives.

Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of HP's StorageWorks division, told IT PRO they may be great at performance but hard drives aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

During an interview at HP's Tech Forum in Las Vegas, he said: "Most of our products support [SSDs] today [but as to] when it will replace spinning disk? Not soon."

Roberson claimed for cases where high performance computing was involved they may well be cost effective but added: "In terms of replacing spinning disk [it won't happen] in the near term."

But how long until SSDs do take hold then?

"10 years," he claimed. "Look at tape. Tape is still alive and well and my tape business I am very pleased with. We are selling more cartridges than ever before which is interesting [but] we are not selling more drives than ever before."

Earlier in the day Roberson took to the stage at the Tech Forum and announced HP's new deduplication software called StoreOnce.

When another journalist said the product would cut those sales back, he concluded: "Its OK, they will buy our deduplication software instead. Its alright, the margins are better for deduplication software than they are for tape, I guarantee."

Seagate has confirmed it will launch a 3TB hard disk drive (HDD) later this year but has warned system builders to check their infrastructure is up to scratch before trying to put one in.

The 3.5in drive will be part of the Seagate Constellation ES line, which so far had only reached capacity heights of 2TB.

A spokesperson from the company told IT PRO: "Seagate can indeed confirm that there will be 3TB sometime later this year."

However, she said the reasoning for releasing the information early was "in order to drive awareness/education about the need for people to prepare their systems and be ready for capacities greater than the 2.1TB."

Due to a judgement made almost 30 years ago that capacity would never exceed 2.1TB which in turn led to the logical block address (LBA) range on a hard drive being limited to 16 bytes per drive sector many machines will not be able to handle a 3TB HDD.

Barbara Craig, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, claimed in a blog post the capacity limit was more than sufficient for those it the 1980s, but things have clearly changed.

"With the vast amounts of digital content we're serving up today, we're now faced with operating systems, BIOS controllers, HDD controllers and device drivers that use the same basic limitation of 2.1TB for the maximum size of a hard drive or logical storage device," wrote Craig.

She thinks she has the answer.

"Long LBA addressing (LLBA) is needed," she added. "LLBA extends the number of bytes used in a Command Descriptor Block (a data structure used to format data passed between host computers and hard drives) to allow access to an LBA range that exceeds the 2.1TB limitation."

Craig concluded that those who wanted to look into using these larger HDDs needed to first look into hardware vendors and their LLBA abilities.

Along with the 3.5in version of this larger capacity Constellation ES drive, a 2.5in for laptops will also become available but neither product was given a confirmed launch date.

An executive from EMC has claimed small businesses would be better off financially buying a hard drive than taking up any cloud offerings.

Despite the company talking endlessly about cloud computing over the past few days at its annual conference in Boston, Joel Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager of common storage platform operations at EMC, said it wasn't necessarily the best option for smaller operations.

"Hard drives, just stand alone hard drives, are cheap so in the US you can buy a terabyte for under $100," he told IT PRO in an interview at the party's annual conference.

"So... what you pay for Mozy [EMC's cloud backup service] or one of them, say 10 or 50GB a month for $5, multiply it out and believe me hard drives are cheap. So the idea behind a cloud for us is it is just another place to protect it, it is not the most economic. The most economical is just buying a hard drive."

Schwartz also disagreed with the statement made by his colleague Art Coviello, president of RSA, EMC's security division, that EMC as a company believed "all clouds should be private."

"The private cloud is for IT, companies that have IT staff. Small business and I am talking about... five or 10 employees of which there are more businesses of this size than any other they are not going to have private cloud. They'd prefer to not have a computer at all but they are stuck with it so you might as well figure out how to use it [however] they are not private cloud at all," he said.

"Private cloud is for mid-sized and enterprise class customers and for them we strongly do believe that is the right thing."

For more news from EMC World 2010, click here.

Toshiba has launched its latest 2.5in HDD, aimed at laptops.

The MK7559GSXP HDD has a 750GB capacity, which Toshiba claimed was the industry's highest capacity for a drive of this size, and runs at a speed of 5,400RPM.

The small 2.5in chassis, according to the company, is "well-suited for devices that value high capacity in a smaller footprint," such as laptops, or as an external hard drive.

As well as offering a small form factor and high capacity, Toshiba claims the MK7559GSXP's energy consumption is 14 per cent lower than its previous products.

It keeps up its green credentials by using components that claim to "reduce reliance on harmful chemicals, materials and compounds."

Toshiba has also launched the MK1059GSM, offering 1TB of storage over three platters.

This continues the move of HDD companies from 3.5in to 2.5in sizes when providing such high capacities. However, these drives are designed more for high-end gaming computers or workstations.

Both products are set to ship in spring but UK pricing has yet to be confirmed.