storage News - Page 9 of 12 - CNX Software

August 20, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Which Are the Most Reliable Hard Drives?

All mechanical hard drives fail after a while. For consumers, it may not be that big of an issue as long as data is properly backed up, but for businesses, a higher failure rate may lead to extra maintenance costs and downtime. As a cloud storage company, Backblaze has lots of drive, and by a lot, we mean over 140,000 hard drives from different vendors, and they happen to provide quarterly and yearly updates to the failure rates of different drives. The latest one is for Q2 2020. Drive days represent the number of days, hard drives were operational during the period, basically drive count x (365/4) – maintenance/replacement days. AFR stands for “Annualized Failure Rate”. HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard drive acquired by Western Digital in 2012, but the company still sells HGST parts… More on that later. There were three drive models without […]

August 12, 2020August 12, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

How to Fix Unreliable USB Hard Drives, Stalled Transfers in Linux

Last June, I reviewed a Ryzen Embedded SBC with Windows 10, and the USB hard drive I normally use for review had all sorts of problems including very slow speeds and/or stalled transfers but no error messages. Last week, I tried again by installing Ubuntu 20.04 on the same Ryzen Embedded SBC, and the USB hard drive had troubles again, so just assume there were some hardware incompatibility issues between the SBC and the drive, and there may not be a fix or workaround. Sometimes, it’s indeed a hardware issue with the drive getting too many bad blocks, and if that’s the case, and the drive is still under warranty you can return it and get a fresh new (or refurbished) drive for free. But that drive was still working with my laptop getting around 100MB/s. So I ran out of ideas until numero53 commented he had similar problems with […]

August 4, 2020February 20, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

MINIX Unveils USB-C Hub with 960GB SSD, 100W USB Charger

MINIX USB-C Hub with 480GB SSD, 100W USB Charger

MINIX, the Hong Kong company, is well-known for its Android media hubs and Windows 10 mini PC‘s but in recent years they’ve started designing accessories for Windows & Mac computers and laptops. In the past, we’ve checked out MINIX NEO C Plus USB-C Adapter, an M.2 SSD card pre-loaded Windows 10 Pro for N42C-4 Mini PC, and another USB-C hub with integrated 120 or 240GB SSD. The company has now unveiled four new accessories with three USB-C hubs, including one with a 480GB or 960GB SSD, and one compact 100W USB charger using the latest Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology. This morning, I received two pairs of USB-C hubs with different colors and two 100W USB chargers. The model I did not get – MINIX NEO Storage Pro – is specifically made for Apple MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with built-in SSD storage, HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz, […]

July 21, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

WCH CH569 RISC-V SoC Offers USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, High-Speed SERDES & HSPI Interfaces

RISC-V open architecture has made its way into low-cost low power general purpose MCUs such as Gigadevices GD32V or WCH CH32V103, Western Digital hard drives, some AI processors notably Kendryte K210, and even Linux capable boards including Microsemi’s PolarFire SoC Icicle kit. But more applications featuring RISC-V architecture are coming with, for instance, WCH CH569 RISC-V processor featuring USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, DVP camera, and 1.25 SERDES block all managed by a RISC-V core clocked at 120 MHz. CH569 (and CH565) processor key features and specifications: CPU – RISC-V (RISC-V3A) core @ 120MHz with hardware multiplication and division, programmable interrupt controller, low-power two-stage pipeline Memory – 16KB 32-bit SRAM, 32/64/96KB configurable 128-bit SRAM Storage Internal – 448KB code flash, 32KB data flash External – SD/eMMC controller with single-wire, 4-wire, 8-wire data communication mode. Complies with eMMC card 4.4 and 4.5.1 specifications, and compatible with 5.0 specifications Networking – Gigabit Ethernet […]

June 18, 2020July 26, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Beelink GS-King X Review – Part 1: Unboxing & Teardown

Beelink GS-King X is a 3-in-1 media center that works as an Android 9.0 TV box, a NAS with support for two 3.5″ hard drives, and a HiFi audio system with two ESS9018 audio DACs powering RCA and balanced audio outputs. The company sent a review sample, and I’ll start by checking out the hardware and accessories, show how to install the hard drive(s), and attempt to tear down the device to check what it’s really made of. Beelink GS-King X Unboxing There’s no mention of TV box nor Android on the package, just “STORAGE” and DTS plus Dolby Audio… The bottom of the package lists the Beelink GS-King X specifications which we already discussed in our previous articles. There’s a red ribbon that helps to take the device out of its package. I wish more companies would do this. Accessories include the voice remote control, an HDMI cable, a […]

May 20, 2020May 20, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

SD 8.0 Specification Promises Dual-lane PCIe 4.0 SD Express Cards with up to 4GB/s Transfer Rate

SD 8.0 specification SD Express up to 4GB/s

The SD Association seems to be releasing new specifications faster than the industry and consumers can pick up. In June 2018, the SD 7.0 specification added SD Express cards with PCIe and NVMe interfaces for theoretical transfer rates up to 985 MB/s, followed by SD 7.1 specification in February 2019 adding SD Express to MicroSD card as well. The just-published SD 8.0 specification ups the ante further with SD Express now supporting dual-lane PCIe 4.0 with transfer rates up to 4GB/s. SD 8.0 is for full-sized SD Express cards that use the same NVMe upper-layer protocol, and remain backward compatible with earlier SD standards including UHS-III. The new higher bitrates will be used for data-intense wireless or wired communication, super-slow motion video, RAW continuous burst mode and 8K video capture and playback, 360-degree cameras/videos, gaming systems, multi-channel IoT devices, automotive devices etc… SD Express will be offered on SDHC, SDXC, […]

March 6, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Marvell OCTEON TX2 CN9130, CN9131 and CN9132 SoCs Target 5G Base Stations, Edge Networking, Storage Applications

A while ago, I was informed three new Marvell processors had made it to mainline Linux, namely CN9130, CN9131, and CN9132, but at the time, the description was a bit cryptic: The CN9130 is made of one AP807 and one internal CP115. There are three development boards that are made of this SoC: * CN9130-DB * CN9131-DB (with one additional modular CP115 compared to CN9130-DB) * CN9132-DB (with two additional modular CP115 compared to CN9130-DB) No other public information was available either, but Marvell has now published more details and those are OCTEON TX2 Infrastructure processors with four Cortex-A72 cores @ 2.2 GHz, up to 18x SERDES IO, and 10GbE. Octeon TX2 CN9130 key features and specifications: CPU – Quad-core Armv8 Cortex-A72 @ up to 2200 MHz with 48 KB I-cache, 32 KB D-cache, 1 MB total L2 cache divided into two clusters of 512 KB ECC shared cache, 1MB […]

February 8, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

20TB HAMR Hard Drives Coming in 2020, up to 80TB Drives Expected in a Few Years

We first wrote about HAMR technology in 2017. HAMR stands for “Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording” and aims at increasing data density in order for manufacturers to cram even more bytes into 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives. You can learn more about HARM technology in your previous article. At the time, Seagate had built over 40,000 HAMR drives for internal testing, and expected volume shipments of 20TB+ drives in 2019. There have been some delays, but Seagate recently announced their first formatted and fully functioning 3.5″ 16TB enterprise hard drive platform based on the technology. Bear in mind that those are only internal test units, and will not be brought to market in this configuration. Instead, the company plans to start selling its first HAMR drives with at least 20TB storage capacity later this year. The new drives behave just like existing PMR drives and are just plug-and-play in existing systems with SATA […]