Hu's Blog

Flash memory has a limited life that is determined by the number of times it is written and formatted. Data is written to a page of formatted cells, and the formatting is done to blocks of pages. Single-level cell (SLC) flash memory has a durability of 105 writes while the durability of multi-level cell (MLC) [...]

I have written several times about the declining rate of areal bit densities in hard disk drives (HDDs).  Below is a chart that was published in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, which shows that the decline has been going on since 2010. This means that the price erosion of hard disk capacity, which has been about [...]

The history of magnetic recording has been one of the most amazing technology achievements in the last 50 years. In 1956 IBM announced the first commercial hard disk drive (HDD) with 2000 bit/in2. Last year, Seagate announced 1 TB/in2 with their new Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology (HAMR).  This represents a more than 109 improvement [...]

In my last blog, I talked about the impact of virtual servers on storage systems and the need for a scale up storage architecture to satisfy the demand for storage resources as we add more and more virtual images onto a physical server. There is also a need to look at the server bottlenecks.

If you Google modular storage and monolithic storage; you will find that many of the analysts’ definitions are very similar. Basically, modular storage is considered to be lower cost, two controller systems that are usually packaged in a 19-inch rack. Monolithic storage is considered to be big expensive boxes that are great for mainframes but [...]