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By William Van Winkle |
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MIND YOUR MEMORY Most of us have been in the industry long enough to feel when it’s time to jump ship on memory formats. It’s sort of like when the forecast calls for 90 and sunny, but there’s a strange chill in the dawn air that presages autumn being right around the corner. Right now, you can feel that chill. There are stranded DDR modules strewn across test benches like dead leaves waiting to be swept up. DDR2 modules are still in regular circulation, but for how much longer? Not too long. Be ready. We’ve been anticipating DDR3 for years. Unlike FB-DIMMs or RDRAM, this new format is universally embraced and does just about everything better than its DDR2 predecessor. While DDR3 modules won’t fit in DDR2 sockets—-the edge connector’s “key” notch position is different—-the new format operates at 1.5V rather than DDR2’s 1.8V. This is partly enabled by DDR3’s fab process shrink to 90nm or 80nm, with 55nm or 45nm expected later in 2008. DDR2 is commonly made on a 110nm node. Also note that DDR3 has double the prefetch buffer of DDR2: eight bits per cycle instead of four.
Perhaps most importantly, DDR3 has double the clock rate range of DDR2, spanning from 800 MHz to 1600 MHz within industry specifications. This compares to DDR2’s usual span from 400 MHz up to 800 MHz, although modules binned at 1066 MHz and higher are popular with enthusiasts. In the same way, we already have DDR3 modules from the likes of OCZ and Corsair clocking at 1800 MHz, and that’s with only a smattering of motherboards on the market to support the format so far. This brings us to the pricing issue. As of this writing, a pair of low-latency (CAS 7) 1GB Corsair DDR3 1066 modules costs $364 on Newegg. A pair of CAS 5 1GB Kingston HyperX modules (DDR2 1200) sells for $221. Obviously, the DDR3 option is considerably more expensive, which could partly explain why Newegg currently lists only 21 SKUs for DDR3 and over 400 for DDR2. DDR3 chip yields per wafer are about 60% of what is obtained with DDR2. Lower pricing will mean manufacturers adopting smaller process nodes, gaining higher yields on those nodes, and CPU/chipset manufacturers pushing the format into the mainstream. That’s exactly what Intel is doing in the 3 Series. The G33, P35, X38, and future X48 all support DDR3, although we’re not holding our breath for DDR3-enabled G33 boards anytime soon. (Be sure to check if the motherboard manufacturer actually implemented DDR3 slots on the board and didn’t go with the option for DDR2.) AMD, on the other hand, announced in early 2006 that it would adopt DDR3 this year. Now, it appears the company’s switch is being moved out to the second half of 2008, most likely to coincide with the move to 45nm and/or Socket AM3. The fact that AMD is making its move to DDR3 a year after Intel won’t pave the way for a smooth, painless transition. This will be a rough one. And don’t think we’re encouraging you to inflate your BOMs by $100 or $200 simply for the sake of being on the bleeding edge of memory adoption.
No, we’re saying that DDR3 makes sense today for high-end, performance-oriented buyers. These are the ones you should push to the new format because it’s the format they’re going to standardize on over the next several months. Come next summer, they’re going to regret having put more money into enthusiast-class DDR2 modules because DDR3-ready enthusiast motherboards will be everywhere. Moreover, many customers are used to running several PCs and consistently changing components in them. This group won’t be quite as willing to tolerate a $100+ delta for DDR3, but how about $50? That sort of a price narrowing won’t take long to arrive, and you should be watching for it to happen. The shorter the price divide, the more opportunities you’ll have to future-proof your clients’ memory choices. While we’re talking about forward-looking memory issues, keep aware that 64-bit applications and operating systems are en route. Sure, we have 64-bit Vista already, but the compatibility issues with Vista today are bad, and they’re worse with the 64-bit variant. The mainstream desktop market is not ready for 64-bit yet, but the day is coming. Right now, 2GB of system memory is still a compelling option. The push to 4GB is coming up quicker than you might suppose, and 64-bit software, whether practical or not, will be a main driver for it. If your customers expect to migrate to 64-bit on their machine, you may find willing buyers to take the 4GB (or more) path today, especially if those PCs will be virtualized and hosting multiple ghost OSes. And one last point-—this time about one of those chuckholes we mentioned earlier. You may have heard some buzz about Intel Turbo Memory coming to desktops from the mobile world. This is a flash memory card designed to install onto motherboards and act as a secondary cache and system accelerator under Windows Vista, much like ReadyBoost drives via USB flash devices. These flash approaches look appealing for lower-end systems, but our own experience and that of many other reviewers with these flash tactics has been disappointing to say the least. Benefits are rarely seen and even then only under specific configuration conditions. In short, for 2007 at least, flash-based acceleration under Vista is a dud. Steer clear and do the right thing: Add another 1GB or 2GB to your customer’s system memory instead.
BLUE LASER BLUES We want so much to give you a good news story on blue laser to take into the holidays. But the fact is that the whole scene sucks. Xbox has an HD DVD player, PlayStation 3 supports Blu-ray Disc, and regular home theater player components start at $300 for HD DVD and almost $500 for Blu-ray. You’re never going to hit critical market mass with price points like that, not with a full blown format war still raging. And without adoption in the home theater space, PC blue laser drives will continue to languish. Ugh. We’d like to rant and rave about how and why a blue laser format war still exists. None of us at RAM have bought a single piece of blue laser technology-—player, recorder, movie, blank media, or anything else—-and we’re all early adopters for cryin’ out loud. If the market would just pick a direction, we’d jump. But it hasn’t, so we won’t. The high-def cable channels will have to do for a while longer. And yet...if we were hardcore multimedia fans buying new systems, would we be tempted to blue laser? Probably. After all, Blu-ray champion Pioneer has its BDC-S02 drive headed to the U.S. with an expected MSRP of $300. That’s decent for 5X BD-ROM and 2X dual-layer reads. The trouble is that the drive only writes to DVD media. Would we pay $300 for a PC drive that can only read blue laser at a time when no software ships on that format? Hardly. We’d just buy a PlayStation 3. How about HD DVD on the PC? This is the part we can’t believe. Despite plenty of evidence that HD DVD is a more liberal, friendlier format for computers, there are no ATAPI or SATA HD DVD drives in the channel. You can’t even find one on Amazon, Best Buy, or Newegg. They don’t exist. The only place you’ll find such drives is pre-installed in OEM desktops and notebooks. Buffalo has its half-height HDV-ROM2.4FB drive, which it OEMs from Toshiba, but this only seems to circulate in Japan. Here in the U.S., you can score an Xbox 360 HD DVD player and a mail-in offer for five free HD DVD movies for $170, then simply use the USB 2.0 connection to run the drive on a Windows machine. True story.
That all said, we don’t recommend that you start selling Blu-ray or HD DVD as a future-proofing strategy. Our Magic 8 Ball is staying mum on which format will win, and you probably should, too. The best course of action is to equip your customers for both formats until further notice. You could sell two drives, but this seems both costly and cumbersome. You could sell one particular format and urge people to buy Time Warner’s Total Hi Def (Total HD, or THD) format discs, which contain a Blu-ray version of the movie on one side of the disc and an HD DVD version on the other, but there are no discs. Time Warner promised content on THD for 2007, then backpedaled last summer and said early 2008. And even if there were discs available, doesn’t THD sound like a silly Band-Aid strategy? Does anybody doubt that THD discs will cost more than their single-format counterparts? No, the only thing that makes sense is a hybrid drive able to accommodate both blue laser formats. Broadcom, Horizon Semiconductor, NEC, and STMicroelectronics all have their own single chip/laser able to read both Blu-ray and HD DVD. However, the only company that has yet made a true hybrid product is LG with its Super Multi Blue line of home theater and PC drives based on NEC’s chip. The GGW-H10N (black) and GBW-H10N (beige) are LG’s first-generation hybrid PC drives, and they carry street prices of around $1,000. Even some LG sources (off the record) acknowledge that this price is far too steep to allow anyone but an extreme early adopter into the game. Moreover, the drive supports the interactive and recording features of Blu-ray but not those of HD DVD. The drive is essentially a full Blu-ray/DVD/CD burner with some basic HD DVD playback tacked on. We love the concept behind this drive, but we sure wouldn’t buy one for ourselves. However, we expect LG’s second-gen hybrid PC drives, the GGW-H20LI and GGC-H20LI, to be available right around the time you read this. (Launch was originally set for mid-September, but rumor has it that LG is still monkeying with the interactivity support for HD DVD.) The GGW-H20LI will read both blue laser formats but only write at 6X on dual-layer BD-R/RE (Blu-ray write-once and rewriteable). The drive will also support DVD burning and will sell for $500, half the price of its predecessor. That’s a game changer. At $500, we don’t think this drive will fly off the shelves, but it’s a lot more attractive, and the future-proofing story comes into much clearer focus. Even if the new product won’t do HD DVD burning, you’ve still got a solution that will play media in both blue laser formats and record up to 50GB per dual-layer disc for data archiving. Mind you, 50GB blank media are still MIA, but 25GB single-layer BD-RE discs are now well under $20 each, with write-one BD-R discs approaching $10. Hey, at that price, movie pirating almost starts to look feasible. (Did we say that out loud?)
For those who don’t care about data archiving, LG’s second new drive, the GGC-H20LI, supports both formats of blue laser playback but will only record on DVD media. The upside is that the drive will retail for $400, which finally looks more attractive than shelling out $500 for a kludgy collection of Xbox and Pioneer drives to accomplish the same thing. But come on-—only $100 to add BD burning? That’s what future-proofing is all about. IDC has gone on record saying that hybrid drives won’t become popular unless there is “no clear blue laser format winner” by 2008 or “the price premium compared with mainstream single-format products drops below 20%.” With this new set of LG drives, we’re not quite down to a 20% delta, but we’re getting dangerously close. And going into the 2007 holiday season, with many movies still releasing only on one format, we see no end in sight to the format war within the next 12 months. That means that, for now, LG is the best bet around for enabling and safeguarding your buyers’ optical media needs. EXTERNAL OPTIONS EVERYWHERE There’s only one way not to future-proof a customer’s storage sub-system: Sell him a single small to mid-sized drive and don’t tell him about any way to expand it. Unfortunately, this is how most systems are still sold. With numbers that seem almost too low to be believed, comScore announced statistics in August detailing the average hard drive capacity found in U.S. computers across home, work, and university locations. As of April, only 13.3% of systems had capacities in excess of 100GB. Over one-third of PCs fell in the 30-49GB category. A full 18.7% had 29GB or less. The upsell opportunity here boggles the mind. The catch is that you have to remember that SATA drives didn’t really kick into play until about the 200GB or 250GB mark, meaning that the more than 85% of machines running those small-cap drives probably don’t even support SATA. So we’re not going to tell you to push the 750GB and 1TB internal drives from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital as upgrade options. We expect those to be your go-to products for new builds. Instead, we see external drives being the hot move for ordinary users needing to expand their usage models. Externals require no screwdriver work, are easy to move from machine to machine as needed, and can be simply locked up in a secure cabinet at night—a plus in many corporate or education environments. Of course, external USB hard drives abound on the market. According to numbers from IDC and NPD, external storage has a compound annual growth rate of 27% in the U.S., rising from just over 200,000 units in 2006 to roughly 450,000 by 2009. Meanwhile, the numbers on internal drives are essentially flat. If you want cheap, nothing will beat a 300GB internal drive wrapped in a $25 USB enclosure. But we’re here to discuss future-proofing and adding value. The fact is that external drives have so much more to offer than just more megabytes...if you let them. There are two key players in this field: Seagate/Maxtor and Fabrik/SimpleTech. The cream of Seagate’s crop is its recent FreeAgent Pro drive, a surprisingly sexy upright unit considering that its two colors are brown and yellow—err, cocoa and amber. The five-year warranty and capacities up to 750GB are great conversation openers, but the good news really starts with the models that feature FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA connectivity. Not only is the drive flexible, but the eSATA capability finally brings internal drive speed into an external format. Also note that Seagate’s bundled Tools software is stellar, providing a simple UI that covers everything from backup to system rollback to synchronization with locations both local and online. The idea is to help users do more with the data they’re storing without increasing complexity.
Under its Maxtor brand, Seagate just introduced the OneTouch 4 series. We’ve been fans of the OneTouch line since its 2001 inception and have always admired the sense for smart innovation that the people behind Maxtor have applied to their products. So when we first laid hands on the trapezoidal, 2.5” x 6.75” OneTouch 4 Plus, we liked the much smaller footprint versus the OneTouch III, but we didn’t care much for the blocky aesthetics. We also missed having an eSATA port. As always, Maxtor’s backup and sync software is brilliant, but what sets this product apart from its peers is its SafetyDrill feature-—an ill-chosen name that would otherwise have you miss the coolest part of this product. SafetyDrill is another name for bare metal backup. With bare metal, you back up everything on a drive, even the operating system and core system files—-things that most system backups miss. Without a bare metal backup, a restore procedure has to begin with a fresh OS installation, which is a huge hassle for many users. Maxtor bundles a SafetyDrill recovery CD with its package. The user simply boots to the CD, and then the last saved drive image copies back to the host machine. (Note that SafetyDrill won’t work if the user has enabled Maxtor’s DrivePass Security encryption and password protection features.) On the other hand, if the user doesn’t need bare metal backup—-crazy thought that it is—-the drag-and-drop encryption feature of DrivePass is pretty sweet. The October launch of Fabrik/SimpleTech’s new external takes storage in a slightly different direction. Sure, it’s a plain looking set of drives—-you almost expect them to ship with a roll-up can opener, like for sardines—-but still elegant in their way and useful for being smartly stackable. According to Fabrik, the drives can be daisy chained via USB, just as has been common for years with FireWire externals. This has been very popular with clients, such as video professionals, who want to take multi-terabyte projects on the road. Those who want faster performance can opt for the twin-disk Duo Pro Drive (available in capacities up to 2TB), configure it for RAID 0 (striping), and use the 3 Gbps eSATA interface. Prior dual-drive externals offered little to no performance gain because, without eSATA, the interface bottlenecked any gains. Fabrik numbers show that a standard USB 2.0 drive will average about 200 Mbps. The single-disk Fabrik Pro Drive using eSATA will average 445 Mbps. The Duo Pro set in RAID 0 will nail 856 Mbps. So if you want to address a customer’s future needs for performance-based but portable external storage, this is the best product we’ve seen for the job yet. But don’t think Fabrik’s line is strictly for professionals. Before acquiring SimpleTech in February of 2007, Fabrik was a software company with a strong taste for Web 2.0-type thinking. This is why every Fabrik drive now not only comes with local backup capabilities but also 2GB of free backup on the company’s online storage service. We’re not fans of hardware vendors pushing monthly subscription services, but Fabrik will upgrade users to unlimited online storage for only $4.95 per month, and we just can’t say no to that. It’s not bare metal backup—-the archive sizes would be impractically large for online retrieval—but with audio/video collections now easily running into hundreds of gigs, who wouldn’t see the sense in safeguarding those irreplaceable assets from accident, theft, and disaster in a repository double-encrypted by 128-bit SSL and 448-bit Blowfish for only $5 a month? ...more |
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Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
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