Toshiba

Toshiba is a notoriously quiet and modest drive manufacturer. You don't see many releases coming out of the PR department, even though plenty of R&D and design advances continue behind the scenes. The company just keeps its head down and cranks out dependable 2.5" drive products, a business Toshiba has been in for over 15 years with greater than 80 million 2.5" units sold.

Toshiba's numbers bring up the rear of our closely knit 2.5" mobile drive group, which is a bit surprising given the unit's 16MB buffer and 5,400 RPM spin rate. On the other hand, Toshiba does offer a three-year warranty on 2.5" drives and a 300,000-hour MTBF.

The Next Big Little Thing? Toshiba is the only drive manufacturer we spoke with currently addressing the 1.8" drive market for channel adoption. According to the company, 1.8" has a growing place in ultra-light notebooks.

Toshiba excels in an area few drive vendors have thought to address yet: 1.8" drives for ultra-mobile whitebooks. According to company reps, Toshiba is placing an increasing number of these drives, the same size used in the Apple iPod, into channel distribution.

"A lot of customers come ask us for 1.8" drives for their thin and light designs," says Linda Morris, vice president of marketing for Toshiba's hard disk drive division. "With perpendicular recording, we're packing even more capacity on the 1.8", and smaller is always better."

Perpendicular recording is a new drive technology that all vendors will be adopting over the next year or two, although some are starting to sample drives already. On today's disk platters, magnetic recording particles are laid flat on the media, placed end-to-end. This is called longitudinal recording. With perpendicular recording, particles are stood on end like dominoes. This allows more particles to be packed into the same space, thus increasing areal density. Engineers estimate that perpendicular recording should yield a roughly 10X improvement in capacity over longitudinal recording in the years to come.

Toshiba expects to release perpendicular recording 1.8" drives in the second quarter this year with a 40GB model. In the third quarter, the company will follow with 80GB units.

Western Digital

With famous brands such as the Caviar and Raptor under its belt, Western Digital has never been a wanna-be, but one can't help but feel that the company aims to overtake Maxtor in the consumer market by emulating it and then working to take the designs a step or two further. For example, after Maxtor delivered the external OneTouch, Western Digital unveiled the Media Center, a 7,200 RPM combo interface external drive with not one but two backup buttons and a flash card reader bolted onto the drive's top/side. Maxtor released the Shared Storage Drive a few weeks back, and now Western Digital has the very similar NetCenter, which sports 320GB of storage over Maxtor's 300GB.

Scorpio Rising The most recent addition to the market's 2.5" drive offerings is Western Digital's Scorpio line. our favorite feature here is WD's reinforced lid, which can help prevent damage while on your build bench.

But this is where similarities start to peter out. The Passport is WD's first 2.5" portable external drive, and while it may not be the fastest option on the market, we love the feel of this unit. A bit thinner than Seagate's Portable, the Passport features soft, rubberized sides and bottom that makes the drive comfortable to grip, all but skid-proof on a desk surface, and resistant to vibration on hard surfaces during operation. The drive can also run with line power from a standard USB cable. Stealthing the AC and USB ports on the side behind a rubber flap will also help protect the unit from travel damage. All in all, a very impressive first showing in this increasingly must-have accessory segment.

We just missed being able to land WD's flagship desktop SATA drive, the Caviar SE16, for testing, but Western Digital was able to provide the next best thing, the Caviar SE (WD3200JD). The difference between the two is that the former has a 16MB buffer compared to the latter's 8MB. The WD3200JD is a three-platter design that still uses a PATA-to-SATA bridge. As we've found in prior drive roundups, there is no observable performance detriment inherent in the bridge design, regardless of what some non-bridge manufacturers may claim. You can see this in our test scores, which are either on par with or, in the case of our 2GB test, above the average. What the bridge does impact is the vendor's ability to incorporate "SATA II" extensions, which require a native SATA design. As such, this is a solid desktop drive but not necessarily one well suited for enterprise-type applications.

Western Digital is still trying to shake its old image of producing hot and noisy drives, and the Caviar SE should silence any doubters. The drive was no louder or hotter than any of the others we tested, and all 3.5" SATA drives were uncomfortably hot to the touch after prolonged testing.

Passport to Mobility Western Digital's 80GB USB-based Passport drive, based on the Scorpio, is the most comfortable portable drive we've sampled to date, and its good looks are sure to charm mobile executives.

With the release of WD's Scorpio 2.5" line, Maxtor is now the only major drive manufacturer without a mobile product family on the market. In our tests, the Scorpio proved to be a very solid drive, testing squarely in the middle of our benchmark results. The Scorpio is another low-power mobile drive with a 5,400 RPM spin rate and 2MB of cache. (There is an 8MB option.) One advantage of the Scorpio for system builders who do a lot of bench work is Western Digital's reinforced steel cover. While the Scorpio offers the same shock specs as Seagate, the drive's cover can withstand more than five pounds of pressure—a great feature if you, like we, are prone to setting something on top of the drive accidentally during operation. The sound of a drive lid pressing on spinning platters is not a reassuring one.

Putting Drives to Work

These days, you would be hard pressed to find a market area in which there isn't a need for value-add storage solutions. If you're into the whitebook market, you have a chance to double dip, first with the internal 2.5" drive (or 1.8" in super-light designs), then again with 2.5"-based portable drives. Not only are these a great corporate item for toting about large presentations and convenient backups of large datasets, but road warriors will love the ability to bring half a dozen ripped movies and several gigabytes of MP3s on trips without the worry of clogging their internal drives. Even the slowest of these drives still has ample bandwidth for movie streaming.

The Best Backup Around DPS's EzBACKUP offers the perfect blend of backup performance with rock bottom downtime in the event of primary drive failure.

"We're seeing the biggest market for 2.5" right now in the industrial space," says Bell Micro's Joe Cousins, "and by that I mean non-PC applications. About 50% of our volume in 2.5" goes into that space. We're also selling 2.5" drives to customers who are putting external enclosures around them, like in a retail environment. That's probably 40% of the business. Then you've got the whitebooks, but that's really the smallest market of the three I just mentioned. Although I certainly think there are opportunities for system builders to differentiate their whitebooks by offering these high capacities that are coming to market and tend to get out into the channel first."

The opportunities for bare 3.5" drives in the SMB market are likely limited, but not always. Even with a few internal drives, you can milk a lot more performance out of a modest SATA RAID with an add-on such as LSI's MegaRAID 300-8X. Whereas motherboard-based RAID can place a heavy I/O processing load on a server or workstation and draw away resources from critical applications, a card such as the MegaRAID can offer processor transaction per second benefits reaching up to 60 percent. The inverse of this idea is that motherboard-based RAID can knock a 4 GHz processor down to under 3 GHz of effective performance. Show the customer the difference in CPU costs versus the cost of a RAID card, and you've likely got an upsell in the offing.

Taking SATA RAID to the next level, you can stack desktop drives in a modest enclosure kit such as Adaptec's 2410SA for some enterprise-level functionality. The 2410SA is a four-drive, hot swapping enclosure along with a 64-bit PCI controller card supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD. Backed with Adaptec's own management software and SCSI-class features such as optimized disk utilization and RAID level migration, the 2410SA mounts into three consecutive 5.25" tower bays and delivers powerful data protection and performance for servers and workstations. If your clients need more capacity, you can always guide them into something like Adaptec's Snap Disk 30, a 16-bay SATA NAS enclosure able to scale into a 31.2TB solution with throughput up to 185MB/s.

One of the best but little known value-adds we've seen for storage comes from Data Protection Solutions (www.ezd2d.com), which has been selling to OEMs for roughly 15 years. DPS has many products spanning RAID and backup applications, but we feel the best SMB play in the company's lineup is a dual-drive, dual-5.25" bay device called EzBACKUP. In a market filled with resource-sucking background tasks and backup solutions that don't actually back up everything (thus requiring the user to waste time reinstalling several software packages before commencing a restore), the EzBACKUP is a sub-$600 way for companies to keep critical systems online 24 x 7 without the complexity of RAID management. At the heart of EzBACKUP is DPS's patent-pending Hidden Device Technology, which places the primary drive in one bay and the backup spare in the other.

CRU-DataPort External Subsystem DataPort solutions enable outstanding value-add opportunities ranging from information security to keeping old PATA drives in regular use.

"Hidden Device Technology (HDT) takes two hard disks in the system—doesn't matter what brand or capacity or operating system—and does full imaging with them," says DPS's Steve Hammond, senior vice president, sales and marketing. "That means doing preferences, settings, the data, the DLL files, everything. We image the entire computer and we keep it separate with our HDT. We call up the drive for scheduled backup, not the operating system, then dismount it when we're done. That's the patented part. You can't see it. Your OS can't see it. This lets you control intrusion prevention and detection, virus threats, and so on. The backup disk is unique in that if you just point the system to it, you're up and running. It's a full bare metal restore. This is enterprise-level technology brought to the SMBs at usually sub-$500 price points. Most users can get in for under $199."

EzBACKUP is not mirroring, and important distinction since a mirrored array will immediately back up viruses, spyware, and other unwanted elements. Incremental files are written in the background with an onboard processor, so there's almost no system resource impact, and backup transfer rates clip along at a comparatively zippy 1GB/min. DPS's solution, when set up with a responsible backup schedule, is one of the most elegant, simple ways for companies to keep data safe and assure virtually no downtime and IT management time expense in the event of drive failure.

Yet another storage manufacturer with a lot to offer channel VARs is CRU-DataPort (www.cru-dataport.com). The core product here is the DataPort, a bay-mounted frame into which slides and locks a removable carrier sled stocked with a PATA or SATA drive. There are plenty of iterations of this, ranging from the plastic DataPort 3 aimed at budget-oriented environments that still want swappable drives, to the DataPort 25ec (Encrypted Chameleon), a 3.5" form factor carrier that holds two 2.5" drives and offers both USB 2.0 and FireWire ports at the back of the carrier.

The 25ec actually emerged as a special request by U.S. Field Marshals who wanted a way to a) mirror their main drive, b) keep all data safely encrypted, and c) enable marshals to take their primary drives with them anywhere so the data on them could be accessed in the field but without the hassle of extra hardware and devices. Because the 25ec allows the carrier to connect back to the motherboard's RAID ports, setting the drives up as a mirrored RAID 0 is a snap. The carrier serves double duty as an internal or external device, complete with the performance benefits of direct attachment to the motherboard. And all encryption is performed at the hardware level onboard the carrier, so everything from the partition table on down is protected with the DES or 3DES algorithm in case of theft and accessible only to the owner who carries the plug-in decrypt key.

"Most competing products using AES implement it in software," cautions CRU-DataPort president Randal Barber. "We think there's enough advantages with hardware over software that the actual encryption algorithm is not as important. Most people who say they want AES want it because that's where the buzz is right now. Especially in the case of 3DES, there have been no known hacks that we have been able to learn of for that algorithm, and it's been attacked for a couple of decades now. While people may think it's old school, it has at least 20 or 25 more years of useful life, according to academic cryptologists."

Many of the two million DataPort devices sold to date have gone into vertical markets and branch office environments. In situations where backed up data needs to be stored off-site, a DataPort offers encrypted security, tons of capacity, high speed, and a convenient removable format built into a carrier designed to withstand heavy beating. The DataPort 3 may open a lot of doors in consumer circles, too, since it gives PC owners the ability to segregate users and applications in a way that Windows accounts simply can't.

Superior SATA Don't let customers think that integrated RAID is all they need. Add-ins like this LSI MegaRAID controller offer better throughput, wider functionality, and unbeatably low system resource impact.

"For families with one computer," says Barber, "this is a nice way for parents to hold all of their stuff that's more private, the financial information and such, for themselves. Or just the fact that when Mom wants the computer to boot, it'll boot. She doesn't want to deal with all the junk the kids have done. The kids have their own independent drive and OS. You can truly share back and forth with that single computer but not have the worry of your files colliding with your kids and whatever malware they've downloaded that day."

Power users may also find DataPort solutions unexpectedly welcome. This author uses a 2-bay external SATA DataPort subsystem with DataPort V plus carriers for two purposes. First, because the carriers can accommodate PATA as well as SATA, the subsystem is a great way to keep old PATA drives that won't fit in a filled PC chassis in service. Second, these old drives are given the task of backing up media files. One 200GB drive holds audio, another video, another family photos, and so on. This alleviates the need for a row of comparatively expensive external drives or slow NAS devices. The labeled carriers and their drives rotate in every week or so to perform incremental backups and get data integrity scans. It's not the most automated system ever devised, but it's extremely fast, space-saving, and cost-efficient.

Drive On

The above are only a few of the many channel-friendly storage solutions you can unearth with a little research. Companies such as DPS and CRU-DataPort probably won't shower you with back-end program incentives, but their solutions lend themselves to high-margin sales and lucrative installations.

Additionally, a whole new wave of value-add solutions will be cropping up in the second half of 2005 as 2.5" and 3.5" SAS products start to debut and you're able to educate clients about the new format's benefits.

"If you look at the high-performance desktop workstations that SCSI goes into today, SAS will be the natural migration for that," says Fujitsu's Hagberg. "But from an interface standpoint, if you have desktops looking for a very high transaction rate, a small form factor SAS drive with 10,000 RPM will give better performance than what you can get on a SATA desktop drive, not just because it's 10,000 RPM but also because of the shorter stroke. It's better access time, better latency, and faster spin."

This is why many experts believe a large slice of the server market will soon transition over to 2.5" drives. You can fit three 2.5" drives in the space of one conventional 3.5" drive, delivering exceptional fault tolerance and thermal/power improvement in the process. Tier-one OEMs are already planning designs for 2.5"-based servers, but most of these won't appear until 2006. Until then, system builders have an excellent opportunity to scoop the OEMs and deliver exceptional servers unrivaled in the industry.

From mobile consumer backup to high-density, racked server RAIDs, vendors are lining up to help you craft storage solutions that fit your clientele. If you've been comfortable with just selling the disk products that were available two or three years ago, it's time to get up to speed on the new technologies and learn how you can custom tailor them. The drives alone might make you a few dollars, but finding smart storage solutions you can run with can make you a mint.