February 1998
QUANTUM MAKES A LEAP IN DRIVE PERFORMANCE
Hard disk drives are mechanical devices. While this technology has made some stunning advances in recent years, certain limitations still remain. Drives now spin at up to 12,000 revolutions a minute. This means they run hot. Very hot. To ensure they don't burn out, manufacturers put heat sinks and fans on them. Large heat sinks and large fans. And no matter how fast drives get at moving data, the drive heads still require long, performance robbing seek times. Quantum (Milpitas, CA 408-894-4000) is solving some of the limitations by replacing the mechanical components with silicon chips. This means there's no seek time. All data is instantly available all the time. Institutions that process thousands of transactions per second use solid state hard drives.
Solid state hard drives have many other benefits. Since there are no moving parts, there's nothing to wear out. This keeps the failure rate low. Each solid state drive comes with a battery and an auxiliary hard drive for backup.
The drives remain cool during operation. This suits users doing video work because solid state hard drives can maintain high performance without periodic thermal recalibration.
For all applications, solid state hard drives lead to faster and smoother operation. I tested the RU3013, a 134 megabyte solid state hard drive, with a number of different applications. All of them ran smoother. The only limitation was the speed of the SCSI bus. The drive improves performance of disk intensive applications and system services such as virtual memory and network caching.
It is easy to see how using a solid state hard drive to store directory and parity information could improve the performance of a RAID system. Imaging applications that use hard drive caching to store images and scratch disks will benefit from a solid state drive.
The drawback to the solid state drive is cost. A modest 134 megabyte unit costs $6,750. A 1.6 gigabyte drive costs $63,000. This means the solid state concept is used only in cost insensitive applications.
Solid state hard drives are not for routine storage but are worth considering for applications requiring large amounts of virtual memory, AV quality drives or large scratch disks. Applications that move large amounts of data to and from hard drives will also benefit from the speed of a solid state disk. They are standard SCSI devices and can be connected to any computer.
Solid state hard drives from Quantum come in a number of different capacities ranging from 134 megabytes to 1.6 gigabytes. You can get them with SCSI-2 ports but they work best with either the Wide SCSI-3 or Differential SCSI ports.
