Well it is here, the 1TB disk. I recall my second desktop PC after I came to HDS 11 years ago had an internal 1GB disk, and telling my kids how much stuff can be stored on that machine. So a 1,000 x improvement in about 8 years, amazing.

Capacity is great, it will be so for many home/consumer electronic devices. This drive will find its way into the data center over the next few months. Technology like this will have impact on $/GB (or should we now measure $/TB?). A colleague wrote me a while back and made these observations….

“… with typical workloads, we are often constrained not by disk drive capacity, but by ability to sustain IOPS and MB/s throughput. If workloads are reasonably active and have significant amounts of random write activity, as is very often the case in real life, then RAID-1 is cheaper than RAID-5 because RAID-1 generates fewer back end I/O operations. That means you need to buy fewer disks if you put the workload on RAID-1 parity groups, because you are IOPS constrained, not capacity constrained.

So really, when we are talking cost, if we are IOPS constrained then we need to look at $/IOPS and not $/MB. I would really like people to start looking at workloads to see if the constraint is throughput or capacity.”

 His observations are spot-on. Capacity is good, but in the data center IOPS and availability bear a heavy demand. There is a chart (that I cannot seem to find) from a storage analyst that shows the relationship of performance and cost. It looked something like this (IOPS in red, Capacity in blue):

 If you have access to the ‘real’ charts, please send me a copy.

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