The Storage Architect » Western Digital

Drive Prices Increase – Who Will Suffer Most?

Chris M Evans — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:24:21 +0000

Storagezilla calls out hard disk availability in his recent post. In fact, I discussed the subject of drive prices last week with James Carter of Touchdown PR on my way to SNW Europe. James highlighted he was seeing prices on standard drives having doubled recently.

I went back and looked at my last drive purchases – two Western Digital 2TB SATA-II drives at around £65 each. Currently these are now retailing on Amazon for £150 each, with the latest 2TB drives around the £100 mark.

Prices have clearly risen sharply due to the flooding in Thailand, however I wonder, which vendor suffers the most in this scenario?

The most obvious answer would appear to be that the vendors with the least margin will suffer most. Think of the likes of Drobo or Overland, who sell relatively low cost hardware. Theoretically vendors such as EMC and Netapp should be able to swallow the additional cost, especially if they are already charging 10-15 times the underlying raw cost of the drive on a per terabyte basis. The drive cost makes up a small part of their overall price. The big vendors should also have the muscle to fulfill their demand first with what supply is available.

However I don’t think things are that simple. Drobo arrays can be purchased without disk drives, allowing them to use whatever drives are available, so drive prices won’t hurt bare array sales. These arrays also allow mix and match and to upgrade per drive, so are potentially more flexible.

Bear in mind savvy customers of EMC and others will have negotiated quarterly price erosion, so those on existing deals will probably not see much change. I would expect the big boys to have hedged their supplies through multiple supply lines and stockpiles but their margins will be affected if supply problems persist.

It’s also worth thinking about efficiency at this point. If you’re not using thin provisioning or other data reduction technologies, then you should be. If your vendor doesn’t offer it, then there are plenty out there who do. As prices rise, it may be time to look again at implementing these features and fixing the processes that stop you using them today.

One last thought. Are NAND prices being affected? If not then the SSD array manufacturers must be rubbing their hands together with glee.

Review: Western Digital WD20EADS 2TB SATA-II Hard Drive

Chris M Evans — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:25:19 +0000

We’re starting to see a flood of 2TB drives coming on to the market from all of the major hard drive manufacturers. This review covers the Western Digital WD20EADS, a 2TB SATA-II drive with green credentials.

The Basics

The WD20EADS is part of the Caviar Green range of drives. These are aimed at desktop computing and offer high capacity with power saving functionality. Physically, the drive is a standard 3.5″ form factor (1″ or 25.4mm height). The most notable physical feature of this drive is the weight. At 730g, it feels heavy and that isn’t surprising as the drive uses four platters of 500GB each to deliver the 2TB capacity. This represents an areal density of around 400Gb/in². Here’s a summary of the hardware basics:

Model Name: WD20EADS
Capacity: 2TB (2,000,398MB)
Form Factor: 3.5″
Platters: 4
Areal Density: 400Gb/in²
Interface: SATA 3Gb/s
Rotational Speed: 5400-7200 rpm
Max Sustained Throughput: 100MB/s
Power (Typical): 7.4W
Power (Idle): 3.9W
Power (Standby/Sleep): 1.1W

Advanced Features

The Caviar Green range has a number of advanced features which reduce power consumption during idle periods. These include IntelliSeek, NoTouch and IntelliPower.

IntelliSeek – optimises seek speeds to minimise power consumption, noise and vibration
IntelliPower – optimises spin speed (between 5400 and 7200 rpm) to reduce power consumption
NoTouch – the reading head is doesn’t touch the recording surface.

WD claim an overall saving of 40% by implementing these saving techniques. Obviously there’s a compromise between power savings and performance, however the aim of this drive is to provide capacity rather than speed, so any penalty on performance may be acceptable. We’ll see in the performance tests.

Performance Graphs

The following graphs show performance test results of the WD20EADS using IOMETER 2006.06.27. The tests measure sequential and random I/O, covering both reads and writes. My standard evaluation PC runs Windows 7 with 4GB RAM and an AMD 64 X2 4400+ processor.

The first graph shows sequential performance with a constant queue depth as the block size is increased. With caching enabled or disabled within Windows, the throughput trends towards the expected 100MB/s as the block size increases. Compare this to the reference drive (shown in green on the graph), a WD 5000KS (500GB SATA drive), which only achieves around 70MB/s sustained throughput. This profile is pretty much what would be expected from a SATA drive; it offers good throughput for sequential workloads such as backup and archive.

The subsequent graphs show how the I/O profile changes for a fixed 16K block size and variable queue depth. For sequential I/O, the 100MB/s threshold is maintained for reads whether cache is enabled or not. Writes on the other hand, rely on the cache for improved throughput.

For random workloads, maximum throughput never exceeds 2MB/s and compared to the reference WD5000KS, the WD20EADS underperforms this model. A throughput of 1.95MB/s represents around 125 IOPS or a response time of 8ms.

The interesting comparison will be with other 2TB drives. I already have the WD2002FYPS (the WD20EADs faster brother) on test and am looking to acquire other 2TB as they come on the market.

Summary

The boundaries of HDD capacity continue to be pushed. At the current rate, we will be using 3, 4 and 5TB drives within a few years. As capacity increases continue to outpace throughput improvements, large drives (those 500GB+ today) will be used for online archiving and storage of data rather than primary input. Clearly, drives that offer power saving functionality will fare best as organisations strive to optimise large farms of multi-terabyte configurations. For the home user, storage will become an “always on” requirement, used for storing multimedia and personal information. Before we know it, the 2TB boundary will seem trivial.

This drive is now in my Drobo, giving me currently 4.5TB of raw storage capacity.

You can find the original press release for the WD20EADS here.

You can find the product details here.

Analysis: Brocade

Chris M Evans — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 07:07:00 +0000

This is the next of a series of posts on storage companies.

** DISCLAIMER: This and related blog entries are for fun only and do not represent investment advice. You should make your own opinions on investments or consult a financial adviser **

Background

Brocade Communication Systems Inc is one of the leading manufacturers of storage networking hardware. As one of the original developers of the fibre channel protocol, Brocade is positioned at the centre of storage networking technology. In addition to storage hardware, Brocade also markets and sells FAN technology, including Wide Area File Services and file virtualisation software.

In January 2007 Brocade purchased (merged with) McDATA Corporation reducing the major players in the fibre channel market from three to two.

Market Details

Brocade is quoted on the NASDAQ market with the ticker code BRCD.

Shares Outstanding: 389,774,000
Market Capitalisation: $ 3,617,102,720
Earnings Per Share: $ 0.54
P/E Ratio: 17.19
Yield: None

Figures from http://www.nasdaq.com/ on 6 November 2007

Brocade does not declare dividends, so all future value in the shares needs to be gained from the increase in value of the shares. With a P/E Ratio of over 17, Brocade’s shares are priced to expect future value. Clearly as an investment, the question is whether this is likely to occur.

Competitors

As previously mentioned, Brocade merged with one of their major competitors in January 2007. In the fibre channel switch space, this leaves Cisco Systems as the only major competitor for high end fibre channel switches. In the FAN market there are many competitors, including Acopia, Netapp, EMC/Rainfinity and others.

Outlook

The fibre channel market is maturing and as such, growth in this market is incremental. Port prices (the usual way FC hardware is sold) have reduced from over $2000/port to less than $500 in the current market. Brocade are certainly not bringing anything new to the party in terms of their FC business. In fact, FC is likely to be eroded by iSCSI and potentially FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) which poses the possibility of relegating expensive fibre channel hardware in favour of standard Ethernet technology.

Consequently I see times being tough for Brocade. The McDATA purchase wasn’t an easy one. McDATA were on a slide and I believe Brocade acquired them for market share and their customer base. In the FC space, integrating the McDATA technology with that of Brocade initially proved a nightmare as the roadmap for FC wasn’t clear. Brocade now faces a significant challenge against Cisco and so needs the other non-FC markets to grow their business. For a company that currently does not declare dividends that makes the stock purchase a simple one; how quickly will revenue and profit grow to increase the asset value of the shares?

I think slowly and so I’d make Brocade a “hold”.

On the subject of Seagate, Stephen posted and asked whether I saw it as a sell, hold or buy. At this stage I think I would like to hold a hard disk manufacturer in my virtual portfolio, however whether that is Seagate or WD (Western Digital) remains to be seen. I’ll make the decision once I’ve evaluated WD.

Green Poll

Chris M Evans — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:27:00 +0000

Here are the results from the green poll (13 votes only )

Q: Is the discussion of green storage just hype?

54% – Yes it is hype, vendors are riding the bandwagon
15% – No, it is an important issue and vendors are solving it
15% – I’m not sure still deciding
15% – No, it is an important issue and vendors are not solving it

Highly unscientific due to the poll size but I have to agree that a lot of the discussion is smoke and mirrors.

While we’re on the subject I had a look at Western Digital’s “green” hard drives. They are claiming with a little bit of clever code, they can reduce the power demands of their higher end SATA range. Here’s a clip of the specific new features taken from their literature:

IntelliPower™ — A fine-tuned balance of spin speed, transfer rate and cache size
designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance.
IntelliSeek™ — Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption,
noise, and vibration.
IntelliPark™ — Delivers lower power consumption by automatically unloading the
heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag.

The use of these techniques is claimed to reduce idle time to 4.0W and average read/write to 7.5W per drive. I’ve had a look at other manufacturers and this is a saving of about 4W per drive. WD make plenty of statements as to how much this represents in cost and no doubt it is a good thing that manufacturers are thinking in this way, however it does make me think we should be examining exactly what data we’re storing on disk if we are happy with a just large saving in idle time. If this data is not inactive then obviously the power savings are less, but there’s no free lunch here and if data is active then a drive is going to use power. SATA drives may be able to compromise on performance but I can’t imagine anyone purchasing nice fast 15K drives will want to compromise in any way. (While I think of it, developing a tiered storage strategy should include evaluating the “cost” of accessing the data in power terms)