The Future Of Storage

Many computer users know that their computer’s data is stored on a mechanical hard drive (aka: HDD, hard disk, or fixed disk drive). What many people don’t realize is just how old the technology is: The actual design consists of rotating platter(s) being accessed by a mechanical head that levitates above the surface. The platter spins and the mechanical head rotates back and forth much like how a Record player works: The record spins, but you manually move the head between tracks.

The basic design of today’s cutting edge mechanical hard drives (HDD) really has not changed from the 1980. Lots of HDD design tweaks have taken places over the past decades, such as new and faster interface (ATA, SATA, SCSI), and platter speed rotation speeds (7200 RPM, 10,000 RPM), but the fundamental design has not really changed.

Enter the Solid State Hard (SSD). This really is a whole new technology that in the recent past has made remarkable inroads to supplanting our antiquated mechanical HDDs. SDD works on this premise: Take some non-volatile memory, and put in a small enclosure (typically HDD sized), and add an interface connector (ATA, SATA, etc). Then, instead of a spinning platter(s) and rotating the arm, the SDD reads and writes directly to and from memory (which is often flash-based). This results in a potentially massive increase in performance. I say potentially b/c flash is actually not that speedy today. But, it still is improving in performance. And, other flash competitor technologies are rumored to offer even more performance, and do it more cheaply.

The current downsides to SDD are: high cost and small capacities. The good news: The SDD technology is maturing pretty quickly, resulting in larger drives that are getting cheaper. Currently my favorite consumer SDD drive is made by Mtron. This drive is spendy and small, but still very impressive. Their 32 GB drive currently goes for around $1,500. If you are interested, please check out the future of storage:

Tom’s Hardware Mtron SDD 32GB review

I think this is a technology to keep our eyes on.

Update 1: Anandtech’s Mtron SDD 32 GB review

Update 2: Micron is also jumping into the SDD business.

SQL Server 2008 November CTP

The SQL Server team has shipped the November CTP for SQL Server 2008. Of all the upcoming Microsoft releases (Visual Studio, Vista SP1, Longhorn, etc) I am most interested in this one. I think the SQL Server team does a good job delivering solid functional products.

SQL Server 2008 Download and Details

As you may already know, SQL Server 2008 runs on: Longhorn (Windows Code Name) , Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Vista, and Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Here are some things that are new in this CTP

• Data Collection and Performance Warehouse for Relational Engine
• Service Broker Enhancements
• Registered Servers Enhancements
• Synchronous net-changes change tracking for SQL Server
• T-SQL IntelliSense
• Declarative Management Framework (DMF) Enhancements
• Geo-spatial Support
• Analysis Services Query and Writeback Performance
• Robust Report Server Platform
• Integration Services – Lookup Enhancements
• Analysis Services MDX Query Optimizer – Block Computation
• Analysis Services Aggregation Design
• Analysis Services Cube Design
• Reporting Services Scale Engine
• Transparent Data Encryption
• Resource Governor – Limit Specification
• Backup Compression
• Plan Freezing
• Fully Parallel Plans Scale on Partitioned Tables

For excellent info on SQL Server 2008 be sure to check out Dan’s Blog