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Data Storage vs. the Laws of Physics

Data storage hardware has improved, yet still strains at the limits. Data storage expert Henry Newman looks at the underlying science and discusses trends in storage capacity over a multi-year timespan. This is an update of one of my first articles for Enterprise Storage Forum from way back in 2002. The article was well received, […]

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Henry Newman

Nov 4, 2010

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Data storage hardware has improved, yet still strains at the limits. Data storage expert Henry Newman looks at the underlying science and discusses trends in storage capacity over a multi-year timespan.

This is an update of one of my first articles for Enterprise Storage Forum from way back in 2002. The article was well received, so I figured it was time to see what has changed – if anything – in our industry over the last 8 years. What I found is that things have only gotten worse when it comes to managing storage. Simple physics defines the limitations under which you have to work. The movement of data from applications to hardware devices is limited by physical constraints within the computer and its storage hardware.

First, let’s compare the fastest computers and the fastest storage disk storage devices from 1976, 2002, and today, to get a better understanding of the changes we’ve seen over the last 26 years.

Year	CPU Performance *	Disk Drive Type	Disk Drive Size	Disk Seek Plus Latency	Transfer Rate
1976	CDC 7600 25 MFLOPs **	Cyber 819	80 MB	24 ms	3MBps half duplex
2002	NEC Earth Simulator 40 TFLOPS ***	Seagate Cheetah 10.6K RPM	146GB	7.94 ms ****	200 MB/sec full Duplex******
2010	Oak Ridge Lab Jaguar 1.75 PFLOPs ******	Many vendors	2TB 3.5 inch 10.7K RPM SATA; 146 GB 2.5-inch 15K RPM SAS; 600GB 2.5 inch 10K RPM SAS	~13.6 ms write; ~5.3 ms write; ~7.5 ms write (Flash SSD average access time is 20 to 120 microseconds)	800 MBps full Duplex********

* Though this might not be the best measure of throughput it is a good comparison ** Million Floating Point Operations Per Second *** Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second **** Average seek and latency for read and write ***** Using FC RAID with 2 Gb interfaces and RAID-5 8+1 in ******According towww.top500.org6/2010 (A new machine from China is expected to be faster and will be announced in mid-November) ******* Using RAID-5/6 8+1 or 8+2

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.

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Henry Newman

Henry Newman has been a contributor to TechnologyAdvice websites for more than 20 years. His career in high-performance computing, storage and security dates to the early 1980s, when Cray was the name of a supercomputing company rather than an entry in Urban Dictionary. After nearly four decades of architecting IT systems, he recently retired as CTO of a storage company’s Federal group, but he rather quickly lost a bet that he wouldn't be able to stay retired by taking a consulting gig in his first month of retirement.

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