Pillar Data Systems joins several other companies in claiming to be the first to offer 2TB drives for their storage systems. Pillar offers the 2TB as an option for their Axiom systems which, combined with their 80% utilization guarantee, might make their systems even more interesting than before. Other companies that have announced their use of 2TB drives include Xyratex, Winchester Systems and several others.
“It’s high time that businesses get to use more of the storage that they purchase,” said Bob Maness, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Channel Sales, Pillar Data Systems. “As drive sizes continue to increase, more storage will be wasted unless you have a storage architecture that can utilize the full capacity with no performance degradation. Pillar is the only company that can make that guarantee. Our latest innovations around SSDs and now 2TB drives will make it even easier for end-users to increase capacity and performance, while improving the overall efficiency of their system.”
The press release adds that the Axiom systems offer “the fastest rebuild times in the industry”, but I’d like to note that this is based on a test that is over a year old, used 500 GB instead of 2 TB drives, and was conducted using the Axiom 500 system that is no longer listed on their website.
So the test itself is no longer that relevant; but considering performance of your disk system is always a good idea. You should always consider worst-case scenario’s when comparing new systems, and with most storage systems that includes degraded mode (one drive missing in a RAID-5 array, or up to two missing in a RAID-6) and performance during rebuilds. I wouldn’t consider the actual rebuild time to be the most important metric when using RAID-6/RAID-DP protection though; when using dual parity drives the chances of more than two drives failing are so low that is doesn’t really make a difference whether the rebuild takes a day longer…
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