
Review incomplete -- CPU utilization
The transfer figures look nice, but what was the CPU utilization? I have read elsewhere that USB 3 will use substantially more CPU than eSATA, and was hoping for a comparitive set of numbers....
Making the claim for the “first certified SuperSpeed USB 3.0 storage devices” is Western Digital with its new My Book 3.0 external desktop hard drive. Available as standalone models or in a kit form, which includes a USB 3.0 PCIe card, these 1TB and 2TB drives promise to raise the bar for external storage transfer speeds. …
The charts show that esata was nearly as fast except for reads. CPU utilization of USB 3.0 is completely relevant as USB 2.0 alone can drive some major CPU time.
However, I still believe that USB 3.0 is a good path forward compared to that LightPeak garbage Intel was trying to propagate in its place. (Since when has fiber optic ever been resilient or cheap?)
The main problem for USB2 is indeed the CPU killing nature of it. Any self respecting geek is already extremely well aware of that.
To do one of the first reviews of an actual in the flesh device replete with performance graphs with not even a passing mention of the CPU impact smacks of schoolboy ignorance at best, despite what some knobhead AC might think
Western Digital has confirmed the board is considering "strategic alternatives" for the storage supplier, including spinning out its flash and hard disk businesses.
This follows calls last month by activist investor Elliott Management, which has amassed a $1 billion investment in WD equating to a six percent share stake, for a "full separation" based on those product lines.
In a statement, CEO David Goeckeler said: "The board is aligned in the belief that maximizing value creation warrants a comprehensive assessment of strategic alternatives focused on structural options for the company's Flash and HDD businesses.
Embedded World Chipmaker Micron is offering a microSD Card for embedded applications with an impressive 1.5TB capacity, enough to hold four months of continuously recorded security camera footage, according to the company.
Announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron's new i400 [PDF] is claimed to be the highest-capacity microSD card yet and was designed with a focus on industrial-grade video security applications.
The device is sampling with potential customers now.
Early details of the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are out, and it's expected to deliver data rates of up to 512 GBps bi-directionally for data-intensive applications such as 800G Ethernet.
The announcement from the The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI SIG) was made to coincide with its Developers Conference 2022, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California this week. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the PCI-SIG itself.
While the completed specifications for PCIe 6.0 were only released this January, PCIe 7.0 looks to double the bandwidth of the high-speed interconnect yet again from a raw bit rate of 64 GTps to 128 GTps, and bi-directional speeds of up to 512 GBps in a x16 configuration.
India’s Reserve Bank has lifted its ban on Mastercard issuing new cards within the nation.
The ban was imposed in July 2021 when the Bank (RBI) found Mastercard to be “non-compliant with the directions on Storage of Payment System Data”.
Those directions were issued in April 2018 and gave banks and payment systems six months to store “full end-to-end transaction details / information collected / carried / processed as part of the message / payment instruction” on Indian soil. If a transaction involved a foreign entity, replication of data offshore was allowed.
Splunk has released a major update to its core data-crunching platform, emphasizing reductions in the quantity of data ingested and therefore the cost of operations.
It also addresses a few security flaws that may not be fixable in earlier editions. The release is called Splunk 9.0.
As explained to The Register by Splunk senior vice president Garth Fort, the changes reflect users' concerns that Splunk sucked up so much data that using the application had become very expensive. Fort even cited a joke that did the rounds when Cisco was said to have $20 billion earmarked to spend on Splunk and observers couldn't be sure if that was the sum needed to buy the company or just pay for licences.
Amazon Web Services has launched two significant challenges to on-prem hardware.
One is the addition of Dedicated Hosts to its on-prem cloud-in-a-box Outposts product.
Outposts see AWS drop a rack full of kit, or individual servers, onto customers' premises. AWS manages that hardware, which is designed to run its own cloud services such as the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on-prem.
Immersion cooling has long been the domain of larger datacenter operators but with increasing density and therefore smaller datacenter facilities, there is a need for shops of all sizes to get around heavy-duty AC and air cooling.
This is the target for German server maker RNT Rausch, which has teamed up with cooling specialist Submer to provide immersion cooling for RNT's server and storage systems
The partnership means businesses of any size can deploy liquid cooling in their datacenter. A relatively small space is required for this as it eliminates the need for air-conditioning units to cool servers, or for expensive and sophisticated fire extinguisher systems, the companies said.
Imagine a future where racks of computer servers hum quietly in darkness below the surface of the Moon.
Here is where some of the most important data is stored, to be left untouched for as long as can be. The idea sounds like something from science-fiction, but one startup that recently emerged from stealth is trying to turn it into a reality. Lonestar Data Holdings has a unique mission unlike any other cloud provider: to build datacenters on the Moon backing up the world's data.
"It's inconceivable to me that we are keeping our most precious assets, our knowledge and our data, on Earth, where we're setting off bombs and burning things," Christopher Stott, founder and CEO of Lonestar, told The Register. "We need to put our assets in place off our planet, where we can keep it safe."
Cloud storage company Panzura has received an $80 million injection in a Series B funding round, which CEO Jill Stelfox says it'll use to build a "different" kind of storage company.
"The whole storage industry and management of end user data hasn't changed in 20 years," Stelfox told The Register. "We think we've got a shot at bringing it all together and making a real change."
Panzura competes in the enterprise cloud-based NAS market, with its hybrid cloud-based CloudFS. More recently, the file sync-and-sharer added cloud outage failover, shared NFS and SMB access, and Hyper-V support via its Data Flex release in February this year.
Updated Activist investor Elliott Management is pushing for Western Digital Corporation's board to break the business in two by splitting the hard disk drive and NAND flash divisions into separately traded entities.
In an open letter to the board [PDF], Elliott – which has over time invested roughly $1 billion in WDC, representing about a 6 percent stake – says it is almost six years since WD bought SanDisk for $19 billion, scooping up its NAND memory biz.
At the time, this purchase was "nothing less than transformative", the letter adds, propelling five-decade-old WDC beyond HDDs into one of the biggest players in flash. Synergies, a better strategic position, and enhanced financial profile were among the rationale for the deal, says Elliott.
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