StorageMojo

Darn! It looks like I screwed up. I’m sorry. While Microsoft did disable a number of early Word and other file formats, it wasn’t as long a list as I thought.

Textual analysis
I take a text-heavy approach to the content on StorageMojo. I prefer to go to original source material, unpack the meaning and the context, and then give my take on it.

That usually works pretty well. But in this case it didn’t.

What happened?
I read a lot of technical documents. Most never get written about. But the Microsoft knowledge base article was an exception. Since Microsoft was the topic it also got a lot of attention from me and others

There is a lot of emotion around Microsoft. They are a big, powerful, immensely profitable and sometimes clueless corporation whose desktop monopoly is a fact of life for computer users and IT professionals.

I try to stay with the facts as best I can determine them. In this case I got confused by the KB article. That other people made the same mistake is small comfort and no excuse (see a Microsoft take here).

Lessons learned
Other than resolving to analyze content from Microsoft more carefully, I’m not sure what else I would do differently. I didn’t question their motives for the change, only the way it was handled.

However, I do have some suggestions for Microsoft.

• Reducing functionality on an already purchased product is a problem. You should notify users that you are limiting product functionality and give them the opportunity to decline the update. Even if it is for their own good.
• Suggesting that editing the registry or using esoteric admin tools to solve the problem is OK for the tech savvy. But what about my 85 year old neighbor Dorothy, whose computer is a lifeline to her great-grandchildren? Her late husband was an engineer, so she has files that go back quite a few years. Microsoft, you are both an enterprise and a consumer company. Own it.
• Communication is worth spending money on. Tech writers tell me that Microsoft doesn’t pay very well and, as a result, it doesn’t get very good tech writing. Maybe MCSEs are used to the style, but it sure didn’t work for this reasonably tech-savvy consumer.

The StorageMojo take
Tech is complicated and sometimes people - like I just did - get it wrong. Listening to criticism and learning from mistakes is how we all get better, even Microsoft. I hope you’ll keep coming back to StorageMojo and I’ll keep doing my level best to make it worth your time.

Comments welcome, as always.

“They trusted us with their data? Will the fools never learn?”
The Service Pack 3 update to Office 2003 blocks over a dozen old file formats, effectively rendering the data inaccessible. Unless you are adept at the registry editing Microsoft cautions you against.

And they don’t warn you that you won’t be able to access the old files. Whee!

Check out my ZDnet article for the gory details. It isn’t pretty.

Update: While the SP3 does block opening a number of old file formats, the formats in question are older: all Word pre-6.0; PowerPoint pre-97; Excel 4.0 charts; dBASE II .dbf; Lotus and Quattro files; Corel Draw .cdr. See my mea culpa. End update.

Clueless droids?
How does the world’s largest software company make this kind of wrong-on-so-many-levels decision? Is there ANY adult supervision in Redmond?

The decision bespeaks a corporate culture that is painfully clueless about its customers. Gee, why would anyone want to access 5 year old Word documents?

Medical products marketing
Redmond’s blindness echoes that of Detroit’s for the last 50 years. “Safety doesn’t sell.” “Bigger is better.” “Good enough quality is good enough.” “Americans will never buy Japanese cars.”

Microsoft clearly doesn’t get the fact that their products are an intimate part of consumer’s lives, much as medicines are. When 8 bottles of Tylenol capsules were poisoned with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled 31 million bottles and spent on the order of $100 million dollars to restore consumer confidence in the Tylenol brand.

Would Microsoft spend a nickel to protect and reassure consumers? I give it a qualified “maybe.”

The StorageMojo take
In case anyone thought that archiving documents in proprietary formats was acceptable, this is your wake-up call. ASCII text and probably PDFs are OK. Everything else, including RTF - which Microsoft controls - is suspect.

With the growing focus on e-discovery, there should be a market for a high-speed “any format to .txt or .pdf” appliance. Producing unreadable softcopies won’t cut much ice in Federal courts.

Comments welcome, as always.

The most famous computer ad that never ran was created for Data General. As told in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (still a great story of the inside of a major product development cycle) after IBM announced the Series/1, a 16-bit minicomputer designed to compete with DEC’s PDP-11 and the DG Nova, DG marketing came up with a rough draft of a 2-page ad:

They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market.

The Bastards Say, Welcome.

EqualLogic resellers should say welcome, too.

Is Dell sincere about the keeping the channel strong?
The life of a reseller is rarely easy. If you are too successful, the vendor may decide to serve your market directly. If you aren’t successful enough the vendor may cut you off.

Dell’s press release stresses the importance of EqualLogic’s channel to Dell. I think Michael Dell is sincere. He’s got bad judgement in picking Presidents - Rollins and Bush - but very good judgement when it comes to dead Presidents.

Michael Dell sincerely, with all his heart, wants to be richer. He also wants to stick it to Steve Jobs in the worst way. He knows that the direct sales model he pioneered won’t do it.

EqualLogic as an independent Dell brand?
As I read the press release, yes. And that is another smart move. Rollins polluted the Dell brand with crummy support. Good resellers help turn that perception around.

I was talking to the IT director of a 300-person company a few weeks ago. He is also the company’s only IT employee. He hires consultants for everything he doesn’t do himself. A long time techie, he knows what he wants.

Telephone support doesn’t work for that guy. He’s got a business to run and results to deliver. He’s more interested in sleeping well than in shaving every nickel off his costs. That’s where resellers get margins, if they’re good.

The StorageMojo take
Dell did more than legitimize the surviving crop of dot bomb era storage startups. He legitimized EqualLogic, too. EqualLogic resellers should start getting a lot more calls from people had heard of them but were too nervous to deal with a startup.

If you are still a nervous EqualLogic reseller, there are other vendors out there who are hungry and offer good products. Life could be worse.

Comments please, especially from EqualLogic resellers. Or EqualLogic competitors.

Dell’s $1.4 billion, all-cash acquisition of EqualLogic is the beginning of a stampede by big storage vendors to pick up appliance storage vendors.

Dell should know: they’ve been having support nightmares with the Clariion line for years. The stuff is just too complex for the SMB space. Dell has more important support headaches.

Dell accounts for 15% of EMC’s revenue. That won’t go away for some time, but the rest of the company will have to grow faster to make up for the eventual loss. Goldman lowered their EMC rating from buy to hold. Which is Wall Street for “sell!”

Why did Dell take so long?
Kevin Rollins, the unlamented former CEO of Dell, was a bigger disaster than Wall Street imagined. Dell’s accounting got screwed up and their results suffered, but he led two other fiascos: the decline of Dell service; and the failure to pursue storage.

As I noted 3 years ago:

A little context: remember a couple of years ago when Dell got tired of HP’s high printer margins? They cozied up to Lexmark and came up with a Dell-branded set of printers that has been growing rapidly.

EMC sees the writing on the wall: big storage margins equals big risk that Dell will snuggle up to some other commodity storage vendor and come up with a Dell-branded line of storage and oops! there goes a couple of billion in revenue. . . .

If Dell is smart they will dump EMC in 2005 and take all the margins for themselves.

Better late than never.

Who’s next?
Dell’s spin around the buy is:

Dell plans to grow EqualLogic’s successful channel-partner programs with current and future EqualLogic-branded products, and also plans to incorporate EqualLogic technology into future generations of its Dell PowerVault storage line available through the channel and direct from Dell.

EqualLogic has customers in 30 countries, so they do have some channel reach. But the real key to selling storage to SMBs isn’t channels, it is product. Product that is simple to use and easy to configure. iSCSI is the right interconnect and EqualLogic’s complete software portfolio means customers don’t have to think about what they may need because they’ve already got it.

10 years ago, storage management was #6 or 7 on the storage buyer’s list. Today, I believe it is #2, after availability, especially in smaller companies. Michael Dell gets that.

The StorageMojo take
Smart and long overdue move for Dell. Congrats to the EqualLogic team for an all cash deal without the headaches of an IPO. EMC, ouch! ExaGrid should talking to Dell about the SMB archive market. And all the other new storage companies - LeftHand, Isilon, iBrix, iStor and more - are all due for a thorough vetting by the rest of the players. HP in particular needs to get serious.

Comments welcome, of course. Who do you think is next?

In a recent post, A Terabyte in the home? Hitachi’s CTO, the redoubtable Hu Yoshida writes

I don’t believe there will be a market for home storage units. I believe internet service providers will provide the storage and data management for our personal data. They will provide it as a service which we will be able to access whenever and where ever we want. Instead of trusting my data to a low cost home storage unit, I believe an ISP will be able to store it more reliably and cost effectively on a large enterprise class storage system which they can leverage across many thousands of users.

This world view is so at odds with the reality I see that it is hard to know where to start. But I’ll try.

Home storage already has a long history
People have always stored images, and later, text, in their homes. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the wood block prints of Hokusai, people have always enjoyed having images of personal meaning in their homes. Television brought moving images to the home for the first time and later VHS and now DVD allow people to create libraries of moving images.

With the rise of literacy the home library became possible. Among those who could afford it the library became not only a storage area but a shelter from the cares of the world. The 21st century analogue is the home theater.

With the rise of Blu-Ray, it won’t be hard for an average family to acquire 2-3 TB of favorite programming. Especially families with children. People have always collected content and I don’t think that fundamental urge is going to abate any time soon. Today’s content just happens to be in a digital format.

Bandwidth and storage aren’t as fungible as Hu assumes
Home bandwidth is too low to support the kind of easy access to large files the home user wants: home video, graphics, games, movies. More importantly, many people, perhaps most, are visual thinkers. They need to see things to recall them. Thus collecting content in the home serves two purposes: high bandwidth and stimulating memory.

Now the album art images that iTunes displays are a pretty good substitute, especially if you are old enough to remember the LP version. Yet storing even the images locally has many advantages over placing them on the network.

No one is storing such content on a “large enterprise class storage system”
I guess Hu isn’t a regular StorageMojo reader or he’d know this already. Storage clusters and low(er) cost modular systems own the ISP storage business. No way are Tagmas or Symms ever going to compete for this business.

With all due respect, Hu needs a reality check on this part of the vision. I know some of the folks at EMC are ahead of him, and by extension Hitachi, on this point.

The StorageMojo take
I agree with Hu that all other things being equal, people would rather not have a storage array in their house. The point is they never will. Consumer-grade storage systems that work a lot better than today’s storage arrays will arrive, such as Drobo.

Those 1 TB disks will also be popular, combined with off-site backup for the truly paranoid, as people embrace the concept of Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. People like having stuff around where they can see and touch it. Home data storage is no different.

Comments welcome, as always. I discovered that I’ve been taking a break from blogging lately without planning to. I’ve discovered some new topics, so stay tuned.

I just did a post over at the more consumer-oriented StorageMojo doppelgänger Storage Bits titled “Who makes the best hard drives?”

In it I attempted to determine, based on simple search requests, if any drive vendor had a real advantage or disadvantage.

Maxtor *had* a lot of online negative comment
Maxtor was 3-4x ahead in raw negative comment - defined as either “Maxtor sucks” or “Maxtor drives suck” - over the next worse in the industry. On a market-share weighted basis they were even worse: 5x or more.

Here’s the data. The total number of Google search results returned in descending order of negative comment. The market share numbers are from an iSuppli report quoted in Digitimes. Market share fluctuated quite a bit for Maxtor due to the acquisition, so they are a very rough gauge. Presumably we’re mostly seeing complaints about the entire installed base, not just the first n months. There could be a bias for complaint when a newish drive fails. Hm-m-m.

Nonetheless the results are startling. Maxtor garnered a weighted 74% of internet negativity. Yikes!

Adding “IBM drives” to Hitachi’s numbers hurt Hitachi some, but very little in the last year.

Looking at only the last year
I went back and did the same searches while limiting results to just the last year. Everyone in the industry improved - except Maxtor! Double yikes!

Calling Dr. Seagate, calling Dr. Seagate
Perhaps readers with more insight than I can comment on Maxtor’s problems. There are a lot of ways to anger consumers including flaky drives, poor out-of-box experience and unresponsive customer service. I suspect drive quality had to be an issue.

For as Seagate noted after their acquisition of Maxtor in one of their SEC reports

We are engaged in integration and restructuring processes whereby we are driving to replace Maxtor-designed disc drive products with Seagate-designed disc drive products. We expect this process to be substantially complete by the end of calendar year 2006. We foresee there to be a transitional period through the first six months of fiscal year 2007 during which we expect the inefficient use of the Maxtor manufacturing infrastructure as we wind down the volume of Maxtor-designed disc drive products and incur up-front investment needed for capacity additions to support the ramp-up of Seagate-designed disc drive products.

My translation: Seagate dumped all the Maxtor designs AND manufacturing as quickly as they could. Endemic problems everywhere? The designs I can understand. The manufacturing? Hm-m-m.

The StorageMojo take
I know this is a crude technique, but in the absence of good information we have to go where we can. Probably the reason that Excelstor, the disk drive company you’ve never heard of, came out on top is the lack of English-language complaints. They’re a fast-growing Chinese vendor, presumably focused on the internal Chinese market. Their stuff could be junk and we’d never know.

It certainly looks like Seagate performed a service in taking Maxtor’s stuff - not the brand - off the market. In a consumer-driven technology market it hurts everyone when a single player is a point off the curve. Everyone gets tarred with the same brush.

Comments welcome, of course. If anyone is using the 10k Raptor in their home machine please tell me how much of a difference it made over a 7200 rpm drive. I’m thinking I “need” one for the new StorageMojo quad-core Xeon mainframe with 5 GB of RAM and 4 SATA drive bays.

John had a great comment. Let me quote:

I turned the question around a little, and asked, “If somebody is talking about a drive that sucks, what is the probability that it was manufactured by [vendor name]?” Algebraically: P([name] drive | drive sucks)

My results:

End of John’s comment
Is that a great comment or what?

I got into it today on ZDnet with one of the other bloggers, George Ou, who published Why dumb-downed no-RAID storage is bad for consumers. As I believe that RAID is an idea whose time is coming to a close, I responded with Why home RAID won’t fly.

So far, ZDnet readers seem more persuaded by George
I’m in my trailer, sulking. How could they?

The exchange has sharpened my thinking, as George and some other folks came back with some good comments, and a couple of the more perceptive - obviously - folks came to my defense.

While I like the Drobo storage robot concept and Geoff Barrall personally, I’ll be very interested to see what kind of market they develop. Which is marketing-speak for “I’m dubious.”

Why?
The secular trend in computers is that technologies scale up from consumers - not scale down from the enterprise. But so what? The real question is why.

Because consumer stuff is cheap and enterprise stuff is expensive. Because one is high volume and the other low volume. Because volume enables low-cost experimentation and improvement. Because building cheap stuff usually forces people to focus on what really works for customers who won’t open a manual.

Home RAID? I don’t think so
Why not? Let me count the ways:

1. Complexity: RAID fails ugly. Pick the wrong drive to pull or copy and your protected data is no more. And due to the redundancy, RAID systems have failures much more often than a single disk does.
2. Completeness: while RAID solves some problems, it isn’t a substitute for a backup. Getting customers to understand that is hard. Not all the ZDnet readers get it.
3. Cost: HW RAID means a controller, a chassis. A lot of money before you buy the first disk. SW RAID is cheaper - with Intel’s ICH8 chip almost free - and consumers still need to understand why they are buying a second drive and not getting more capacity.

The vast fetid swamp of consumer ignorance
In my small town I often help people with computer problems. Often these are small business people who’ve been using computers for years. What I’ve found is that these people don’t have the faintest idea how their computer works or how the components work together. To most people computers are magick.

Case in point: a professional photographer lives across the street. Two Macs, scanner, several photo quality printers, a couple of fancy digital SLRs. One Mac does color correction. The other is her main machine. Photoshop and a bunch of other image processing software that she knows how to use. Pretty sharp lady.

And she doesn’t know the difference between disk and RAM. It is all “memory” to her. She never added RAM to the skimpy amount Apple provided, so her disks are thrashed all day. She’d let the disks fill up, not realizing that she needs at least 10% free space just for the OS to use. A few hundred megabytes sounds like a lot to her.

This is the person you are going to sell RAID to? She’s your target market, with hundreds of gigabytes of valuable digital assets to protect. How would you start the conversation?

She does understand the value and process of making copies, which she would still need to do even if she bought your RAID gizmo. So how do you explain your value-add?

The StorageMojo take
Home RAID for the masses is an uphill battle. Backup is the battle the industry can win. What kind is the issue. Across the net to Mozy, Carbonite or some more fully featured option? Local backup to a DAS hard drive or to a simple USB-attached NAS drive? Those “one-touch” Maxtor drives?

Comments welcome, of course. Leaving for Boston today. If you’re in the neighborhood this weekend, send me an email and we’ll do coffee. I’ll be staying at Copley Square. Moderation may be a little slower than usual, but moderate I will.

Over at Storage Bits, my new ZDnet blog, I wrote about Secure Erase, a feature that Walter Purvis at Data Mobility Group told me about.

Secure Erase (SE) excited so much attention over there that I thought I’d take a more leisurely stroll through it here.

Free, secure, ATA drive erasure
SE is built into virtually all P/SATA drives built since 2001, when it became part of the ATA standard. It is virtually unknown however, because many BIOSes block the command and some even lock the drive to keep the data safe from Murphy’s-law-abiding citizens. Not to mention evil virus writers.

More secure than external wipers
Since it is internal to the drive, it doesn’t exact much overhead compared to external wipers like the open source Boot and Nuke or similar commercial products. Even better, it is more secure, protecting the data from keyboard (file recovery utilities) attacks and laboratory attacks.

In fact, NIST rates SE’s effectiveness on a par with degaussing a hard drive. Degaussing (strong magnetic field) is losing favor because of a combination of increasing media coercivity and improved magnetic shielding. Once HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) arrives, it may be practically impossible to degauss a drive short of a nuclear weapon’s electro-magnetic pulse. Then we’ll likely be down to Secure Erase and physical destruction as NIST-approved methods of sanitizing disks.

A blunt instrument
SE doesn’t give you many choices: it erases all the user space on the drive, one track at a time. It can erase HPA (Host Protected Area) or DCO (Device Configuration Overlay) areas, if any, as well. Some drives implement an enhanced Secure Erase which instead of writing zeros writes a pattern set by the vendor and that overwrites all bad blocks as well.

When the process is done your drive is empty and ready for OS formatting.

But wait! There’s more!
Check out UCSD’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research to learn more about a leading center of research with the goal of 1 terabit/sq. inch recording. Dr. Gordon Hughes, an IEEE fellow, on the faculty has created a utility that enables SE on Windows machines, available from his CMRR home page. This utility is for experienced storage heads and is not noob-friendly.

Dr. Hughes has also co-authored a paper (pdf) called Data Sanitization Tutorial that gives a brief, 12 page overview of the requirements and options for secure data elimination.

If you are in government, or deal with those who are, you should also check NIST’s special Computer Security publication page. Of special interest is publication 800-88 “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” which covers disks and other media as well.

The StorageMojo take
Secure Erase is an interesting and little known addition to the storage pro’s toolkit. If anyone whips up a tool for using it under Mac OS X or Linux, please let me know.

Comments welcome, as always.

Culinary history: old wedding cake in the freezer?
An long time friend of mine is working with the Culinary Historians of New York on a project to gather and preserve the records of a Depression-era WPA project. According to the CHNY:

The mission of “America Eats”– part of the New Deal and abandoned at the outset of WWII– was to send writers and photographers nationwide to document community eating in America from church suppers and clambakes to barbecues and holiday meals. The diverse flavors chronicled in these documents have lain forgotten in scattered archives and are only now being brought to light.

As you’d imagine, this a volunteer organization made up of foodies, not IT gurus. I’m no IT guru either, but not knowing that my friend asked me for help.

Easier to find than preserve
She wrote:

. . . we are trying to organize a search for these scattered and lost WPA documents inc. photographs that are buried in attics, historical societies, and a some collections in Library of Congress. We hope to “digitize” them to preserve in a central location for present and future food scholars to access.

So I asked myself, “Self, how would you build a historical archive?”
In response, I wrote:

CHNY has two problems: getting the materials digitized and then preserving the digitized copies for posterity.

Scanning, the easier problem, IMHO
Scanners can digitize textual and photographic materials quite handily. For text 300 dpi (dots per inch) is fine. Photographs should be scanned at a minimum of 600 dpi. Higher dpi is better; most scanners will do at least 1200 dpi and many will go up to 2400 dpi and beyond. Higher dpi results in larger files which may be harder to store, edit or share, yet if you don’t have the resolution to start with you can’t create it later.

Perfectly adequate text scanners start at $50, while very good photo scanners are available for $400. Photographs of particular interest can be commercially digitized in drum scanners for the very highest resolution and quality. Negatives and slides can be scanned by film scanners that range from $400 to $1200 depending on speed and quality.

Creating an archive of scanned documents
Preserving the digitized data is the more difficult problem. Over the decades file formats may change, data storage devices become obsolete - think 8 track tape - and media decays. There is only one strategy that I would trust and it goes by the acronym LOCKSS: Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

For CHNY I would save every file in at least three formats and distribute the copies on at least three media. For photos use JPEG, PDF and TIFF file formats. For text use ASCII text, PDF and PNG formats. For media store complete collections on DVD, server-attached hard drives and backed up to tape using ZMANDA, a commercial variety of the open-source AMANDA, which can be read without the application.

Ship the DVDs to people who will store the content on their web-servers and make new DVDs for people - DVDs you can burn yourself only have a life of 5-10 years. Also, print out complete copies of the data on archival quality equipment and media and donate them to a couple of archives at research libraries.

This may sound like overkill - it does to me, a little bit - and others may have different opinions as to the best file formats, but the basic LOCKSS strategy is your best bet. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of gathering the source material you never want to have to do that again. So preserve it with LOCKSS.

The StorageMojo question
That was all off the top of my head. I know some of you are smarter about this stuff than I am, so please, what would you do?

I suspect that many small and non-profit organizations have the same problem. If we put our heads together maybe we can put something together that will help a lot of people.

Comments welcome, especially in this case. Moderation turned on to keep spam out of the comments.

Update: I meant to put in a reference to the actual LOCKSS site and didn’t. I thank the commenter for reminding me of that. So I put in a reference above.

In January I wrote about installing a $35 OEM dual-layer, Lightscribe DVD burner in a $30 Firewire/USB case. Since then I’ve been playing with Lightscribe CDs and I must say, I like the technology. It isn’t perfect, but for the extra $5 it cost to get a Lightscribe burner, it is a worthwhile tool.

What is it?
Lightscribe uses a burner’s laser to create monochrome images and text on the surface of a a specially coated CD or DVD. The background is light and the scribed area is darker.

How does it work?
The coating darkens where the laser toasts it. You put the disk in upside down so the laser can reach it, and then flip it over to read or write the disk.

What is it good for?
Labeling disks with optional decorative flourishes. I burn music CDs from iTunes for car use, and the hastily scribbled “Favorite Rock” isn’t much information 3 months later. With Lightscribe it is easy to burn the playlist on the disk.

Lightscribe quality
Given a print engine of over 2.4 billion dpi, you’d expect pretty high resolution. And indeed the resolution is excellent.

Yet there are two problems with Lightscribe quality: the printing is monochrome; and the contrast is limited. So while the detail is there, it doesn’t leap of the disk at you.

Burn time?
For some reason it takes 10-20 minutes to scribe a disk, which is a little odd when you consider that you can burn 700 MB of data faster than you print a 100 KB bitmap. You can cut the time by scribing smaller areas of the disk as you might for labeling backups.

Software?
There is free software for PCs, Macs and Linux available on the web, including an open-source labeler and a product from LaCie. For Linux and Mac OS I recommend the LaCie product because it has a reasonable number of designs to choose from and is fairly flexible. The software worked fine with my homebrew burner. Play with it though: it took me a while to figure out how to get a long playlist on disk using the LaCie software.

Kudos to LaCie for making the software freely available. They get a nice big LaCie logo on my desk when I use it, which must be worth something.

A quick scan suggests that most commercial disk labeling packages also support Lightscribe.

Playing catch the iTunes playlist
iTunes doesn’t make it easy to get an editable playlist. You can export a playlist, but it includes much junk, like file paths. The workaround I found: select the playlist; go to Print Setup; select an all text design; select Print; then Print Preview. Select the preview’s text, copy, and paste into the label creation software.

Hey, Apple, how about a cleaner way to get an editable playlist?

Lightscribe vs printable media
Color inkjets can produce very nice labels and the media is a little cheaper than Lightscribe. I did see a report of a printed disk that delaminated in an optical drive, destroying it, which seems to be an uncommon experience. Lightscribe disks are coated, so I wouldn’t expect that to be a problem.

On the other hand, once you’ve bought the disk, you don’t have to pay for ink or wrestle with carriers or what-have-you to get the disk printed. The total cost of ownership is probably similar once ink coat is factored in.

The StorageMojo take
I’m hell on my car CDs, so I’m not totally sold on paying the extra money for Lightscribe media, but maybe you are more careful than I am. I definitely like being able to see a playlist on the disk. Since I use a laser printer, inkjet printable media isn’t all that attractive.

The sweet spot for Lightscribe, IMHO, is low-volume back up media. You can label each disk with a fair amount of detail and file it. When restore time comes, you don’t have to guess what you’ve got. That is worth something in peace-of-mind.

Comments welcome, of course. How do you label your backup media? Other insights into labeling media, inkject media printing or ???

Google released a fascinating research paper titled Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (pdf) at this years File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’07) conference. Google collected data on a population of 100,000 disk drives, analyzed it, and wrote it up for our delectation.

In yet another twist of consumer-driven IT, the disks Google studied, PATA and SATA drives, are the same drives you and I would buy for personal use. As an ironic result, we now have better data on drive failures for cheap drives than the enterprise does for its much costlier FC and SCSI “enterprise” disks with their much higher MTBFs.

Google found surprising results in five areas:

• The validity of manufacturer’s MTBF specs
• The usefulness of SMART statistics
• Workload and drive life
• Age and drive failure
• Temperature and drive failure

I’ll give you the skinny on each after a note about MTBF and AFR.

Vendor MTBF and Google AFR
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) is a statistical measure. When the vendor specs a 300,000 MTBF - common for consumer PATA and SATA drives - what they are saying is that for a large population of drives half the drives will fail in the first 300,000 hours of operation. MTBF, therefore, says nothing about how long any particular drive will last.

Ideally, if you had 600,000 drives with 300,000 hour MTBFs, you’d expect to see one drive failure per hour. In a year you’d expect to see 8,760 (the number of hours in a year) drive failures or a 1.46% Annual Failure Rate (AFR). Is that what Google found? Nope.

There’s some discussion of this result in the Age and Drive Failure section, so be sure to keep reading.

Manufacturer’s MTBF specs
The vendors tell us what the MTBF rate is, so what else do we need to know? Quite a bit. Vendors define failure differently than you and I do. And, oddly enough, their definition makes drives look more reliable than what you and I see.

Vendors typically look at two types of data. First are the results of accelerated life testing, which are good at identifying the effect of some environmental factors on drive life, but don’t do a good job of reflecting real world usage. Second, vendors look at their returned unit data. Vendors typically report “no trouble found” with 20-30% of all returned drives, but as the Googlers note:

Since failures are sometimes the result of a combination of components (i.e., a particular drive with a particular controller or cable, etc), . . . a good number of drives . . . could be still considered operational in a different test harness. We have observed . . . situations where a drive tester consistently “green lights” a unit that invariably fails in the field.

Bottom line: MTBF figures are just like any other storage performance statistic: it’s a miracle if you see them in real life.

How smart is SMART?
Not very, as Google found, and many in the industry already knew. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) captures drive error data to predict failure far enough in advance so you can back up. Yet SMART focuses on mechanical failures, while a good deal of a disk drive is electronic, so SMART misses many sudden drive failure modes, like power component failure. The Google team found that 36% of the failed drives did not exhibit a single SMART-monitored failure. They concluded that SMART data is almost useless for predicting the failure of a single drive.

So while your disk drive might crash without warning at any time, they did find that there are four SMART parameters where errors are strongly correlated with drive failure:

• scan errors
• reallocation count
• offline reallocation
• probational count

For example, after the first scan error, they found a drive was 39 times more likely to fail in the next 60 days than normal drives. The other three correlations are less striking, but still significant.

The bottom line: SMART can warn you about some problems, but miss others, so you can’t rely on it. So don’t. Back up regularly, and if you do get one of these errors, get a new drive.

Over work = early death?
A teenager might want you to believe that, but the Googlers found little correlation between disk workload and failure rates. Since most of us, including enterprise IT folks, have no idea how much “work” our drives do, utilization is a slippery concept. The authors defined it in terms of weekly average of read/write bandwidth per drive and adjusted for the fact that newer drives have more bandwidth than older drives.

After the first year, the AFR of high utilization drives is at most moderately higher than that of low utilization drives. The three-year group in fact appears to have the opposite of the expected behavior, with low utilization drives having slightly higher failure rates than high ulization ones.

As the graph shows, infant mortality is much higher among high utilization drives. So shake that new drive out while it is still under warranty. And don’t worry about doing those daily backups to disk and other I/O intensive work.

Age and drive failure
This is the most irritating part of the paper, because the team admits they have the goods on who makes good drives and who doesn’t, but clam up due to ” . . . the proprietary nature of these data.” Hey, Larry, Sergey, isn’t Google’s mission to “. . . organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”? How about right here?

Google buys large quantities of a certain drive model, but only for a few months, until the next good deal comes along. As they say:

Consequently, these data are not directly useful in understanding the effects of disk age on failure rates (the exception being the first three data points, which are dominated by a relatively stable mix of disk drive models). The graph is nevertheless a good way to provide a baseline characterization of failures across our population.

The AFRs are neither as smooth nor as low as vendor MTBF numbers would have you believe.

Sudden heat death?
One of the most intriguing findings is the relationship between drive temperature and drive mortality. The Google team took temperature readings from SMART records every few minutes for the nine-month period. As the figure here shows, failure rates do not increase when the average temperature increases. At very high temperatures there is a negative effect, but even that is slight. Here’s the graph from the paper:

Drive age has an effect, but again, only at very high temperatures. Here’s that graph:

The Googlers conclude:

In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that data center or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives.

Good news for internet data center managers.

The StorageMojo take
There is a lot here and the implications may surprise.

1. Disk MTBF numbers significantly understate failure rates. If you plan on AFRs that are 50% higher than MTBFs suggest, you’ll be better prepared.
2. For us SOHO users, consider replacing 3 year old disks, or at least get serious about back up.
3. Enterprise disk purchasers should demand real data to back up the claimed MTBFs - typically 1 million hours plus - for those costly and now much less studied drives.
4. SMART will alert you to some issues, but not most, so the industry should get cracking and come up with something more useful.
5. Workload numbers call into question the utility of architectures, like MAID, that rely on turning off disks to extend life. The Googlers didn’t study that application, but if I were marketing MAID I’d get ready for some hard questions.
6. Folks who plan and sell cooling should also get ready for tough questions. Maybe cooler isn’t always better. But it sure is a lot more expensive.
7. This validates the use of “consumer” drives in data centers because for the first time we have a large-scale population study that we’ve never seen for enterprise drives.

On that last, the smart folks at CMU did a study that sheds light on that very point. Look for coverage of that paper here in StorageMojo RSN.

Update: Alert reader Julian points out in his comment below that I assumed the Mean TBF is equal to the Median TBF in my calculation of the AFR, and that I got the arithmetic wrong. He is absolutely correct. The mean tells us nothing about the distribution of failures: half the drives could fail on day 1 and the other half could last 10 years and we’d still have the same MTBF. With the “ideally” qualifier, I was attempting to suggest that if failures were evenly distributed over time, there would be one failure per hour. But that is a big “if” and as the Google data show, not how disks fail in the real world. Also, I fixed my arithmetic, so the vendors look even worse.

Google curious???
How do those bad boys build the world’s largest data center? Check out Google File System, Google’s BigTable Storage System, Architecting the Internet Data Center and Google vs Amazon: A Choice Not An Echo. There’s more, so don’t be afraid to rummage around.

Update: NetApp has responded. I’m hoping other vendors will as well.

Comments welcome, as always. Moderation turned on to limit spam. You’ll just have to find your free ringtones somewhere else. Sorry.

I love the product reviews on sites like Tom’s Hardware, Ars Technica and AnandTech
There is something irrationally satisfying about getting a lot of details and test results on a product that, more likely than not, I will never use. So I’ve decided to write a hardware product review. However this will not be one of those long, drawn out reviews where you have to click through dozens of pages. That isn’t why you come to StorageMojo. At least I hope it isn’t, since you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Upgrading the corporate mainframe
Technically, it is the LLC mainframe. Which, despite being oodles more powerful than the VAX 11/780 (5 MHz 32-bit processor, 2 MB RAM, 13.3 MB/sec system bus, $185,000) I started out selling back in 1981, looks like a notebook computer. It is also the StorageMojo labs test system.

Lab testbed configuration
OK, it is a notebook computer. A MacBook 2 GHZ Core Duo with 2 GB of RAM (the max), a 120 GB SATA 2.5″ drive, single layer DVD burner, external 22″ DVI LCD monitor (yes, DVI is noticeably better than VGA), sitting on a laptop stand with two USB powered fans for cooling, running Mac OS 10.4.8.

I recently added a combo external drive enclosure, a cute Newer Technology miniStack V2, a quiet box about the size of 4 CD jewel cases with a 160 GB PATA drive and a 3 port USB2 hub and a 2 port FireWire hub. BTW, 400 Mb/s FireWire is noticeably faster than 480 Mb/s USB2. Weird, huh?

The test product: Samsung LightScribe 18X Super-WriteMaster Double Layer DVD+RW IDE/ATAPI Drive
I decided to blow the StorageMojo annual lab budget ($35) on this baby because I hadn’t seen a LightScribe enabled DVD burner for such a low price. I picked it up at Microcenter.com, the online presence of the Micro Center stores. Also, I wanted a dual-layer DVD burner for some reason. In the Mac world, the Panasonic drives that Apple uses seem to be most popular and most expensive.

Lightscribe enables your disk burner to inscribe a monochrome label on a lightscribe writable CD or DVD. I understand it is a slow process - 20 minutes per disk - but it gives more professional results than the Sharpie I usually use. It also cost just $5 more than the non-LightScribe version of the same Samsung drive. So, WTH!

Always read the specs
The Micro Center website was clear about this drive:

Supported Windows Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows 98se, ME, 2000, XP

No Mac support promised, by them or Samsung. It can get lonely, here on Planet Mac.

Delivery
It took two business days for the drive to arrive using the cheapest delivery. Opened the box, and there, nestled in the bio-degradable foam chips, a plastic bag held the bare drive, along with a sheet of instructions in 17 languages, a solitary CD containing six Nero “softwares” including Express, BackItUp, Showtime and Lightscribe - all for Windows - and four screws.

Installation
I’d had a Plumax 5.25″ combo FireWire/USB 2.0 enclosure kicking around for just such an occasion. I took it apart, found three internal connectors - power, PATA, audio - and connected them up. Tip, start with the big one. The connectors are all different and keyed, so it is hard to get them wrong.

Then screw the case onto the drive. Put the top on, connect power and FireWire, hit the power switch and do the smoke test. Passed!

Integration of unsupported OEM device with Mac OS X
Now came the part I’d been waiting for. Would this $35 unsupported drive (+ $30 for the case - try Mwave.com) work? After all, obtaining and installing drivers is one of the joys of Windows maintenance. This beast has no Mac drivers.

Brought up iTunes. Put in a CD of Al Green Is Love/Full of Fire, two LPs on one CD, to rip. A long pause. Was it going to CDDB for track names or unsupported device hell? Turned out to be CDDB. Ripped about 40% faster than the internal Mac drive, peaking at 16x, even though the specs say 48x reading, and the Core Duo wasn’t max’d.

Now for CD burning
Cued up my latest mix, a mind-expanding brew of Jack Johnson, Fela Kuti, Kentucky Headhunters, Peter Green, Freddie King, Radio Dogma, Traffic and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Hit “Burn” and after asking me if I wanted to use the internal or external drive, burn it did. Twice as fast as the internal burner. Three minutes for 78 minutes of music. Not 48x, but what StorageMojo reader believes storage specs anyway? See Lies, Damned Lies and Storage Performance for a thorough debunking.

DVD-R burn test
Created a Burn Folder on my external USB 2.0 drive of about 3.5 GB and 7,000 files. Selected the folder, hit “Burn” and away it went. Took about 15 minutes, which may partly be due to USB 2.0 hard drive. Also, it only does 8x on DVD-R media.

LightScribe and dual-layer burning
Didn’t test those: no LightScribe or dual-layer dvd. LightScribe software for the Mac is readily available on the web - just search “lightscribe mac” on Google.

I have no reason to doubt that dual-layer burning will work just as well as everything else has with this “unsupported” drive. I will test both and update this post later.

The StorageMojo take
One Mac tagline is “it just works.” That is certainly true in this case. While I tested only one of many DVD burners, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t also true of other ATAPI burners.

I’m a fan of Samsung products in general and the LightScribe 18X Super-WriteMaster Double Layer DVD+RW IDE/ATAPI Drive has again confirmed that they produce good kit at good prices. The ease of “integrating” this unsupported drive with the Mac OS points to the good work of the Mac OS X engineering team and the fine folks at the the IEEE 1394 committee.

If you are still paying Symantec for lame virus-protection, you might ask yourself why. The Intel Macs are great machines, run Windows if need be, and can take advantage of geek toys like cheap OEM DVD burners.

Comments welcome, as always. Moderation turned on because moderation is a virtue, except in the defense of liberty.

Update on Microcenter’s service: I ordered two items - another storage product, natch - and only the DVD burner arrived in the box. I thought maybe they shipped from differentl places, but after a week I realized they hadn’t. Called Microcenter, told them the problem, they said no problem, and a few hours later I got the ship notice for the second product. No hassle. Kudos to Microcenter for fixing a mistake so painlessly.

One of the wonderful things about the storage industry is how rapidly prices fall and new technologies become available to more people.

What is less wonderful is that as this sophisticated technology moves down market, it keeps the same terminology and mindset from bigger, more sophisticated applications. Several friends have small businesses and I’ve been watching their struggles with technology - and helping where I can - and the experience has given me a new appreciation for how far apart Main Street and Silicon Valley are. So this post is a NAS primer for the SOHO market.

SOHO NAS - some definitions
Small Office, Home Office, Network Attached Storage. If you have broadband, either DSL or Cable (or as I do, a Wireless ISP), you have a network. Usually ethernet is used to connect your computer to the broadband modem/router. If you have more than one computer in your small/home office, you almost certainly have them networked together, either with an ethernet cable or wirelessly, using Wi-Fi.

The network is important because without a network, you can’t have Network Attached Storage (NAS from now on). The advantage of NAS is that everyone on the network can store files on the NAS box. NAS systems are often used to back up important data and to share data among two or more PCs. On a Windows system the NAS box will appear as another disk drive, like Drive H.

You can plug it into your broadband router using an ethernet cable. All the computers in your office will be able to access it from there.

Easier, better and much, much cheaper
NAS systems got started about 15 years ago, when they cost over $10,000 for a few GB of storage. Today you can get a 1,000 GB of raw capacity for less than $1,000.

It’s a paperweight, drink warmer and storage appliance!
Today there several toaster-sized NAS boxes intended for home and SOHO use. The good folks over at AnandTech just did a low-end NAS round up which, if you aren’t technical, is pretty incomprehensible. I’m using their careful research and my experience with storage and small businesses to translate their data into something non-technical SOHO folks can use.

And no, you don’t want to use your NAS appliance as a drink warmer.

Move 16 bits & what do you get? - one day older & deeper in debt
I’m assuming you have a SOHO workload. That means you have up to 10-15 PCs with people looking up or generating business documents such as invoices, quotes, letters, tax forms, spreadsheets, presentations, ads, direct mail postcards and the like. You AREN’T editing uncompressed video, performing 3-D resevoir modeling or storing movies on your PCs.

This is important because business documents don’t take up much space. One megabyte (MB) is pretty big for Word or Excel files. The NAS boxes we are looking at can all store 500,000 one MB files, so each of these boxes should be able to handle your business needs for years to come.

SOHO priorities
Unless your small business is a computer or software shop, you don’t want to be fussing with computers. You just want them to work. Thus this list of priorities is different from what you’d read about in an evaluation of these products in the computer press.

In my view, SOHO computer product priorities are:

1. Ease of use
2. Reliability
3. Price
4. Performance
5. Expandability

The first three are tightly bunched, while performance is a distant fourth. Why isn’t performance more important? Because the performance of these boxes exceeds what even 15 SOHO PCs are likely to require. Also, it is likely that your SOHO network is operating at 100 Mb/s, which even a slow single drive can saturate, and these boxes have four drives. So while the fastest NAS box might read or write a one MB file a few milliseconds faster than the slowest, you won’t be able to tell the difference

Reliability is why I strongly recommend RAID 1 over RAID 5 or the dangerous RAID 0. RAID 1 creates two complete copies of your data. Disk drives are very reliable devices, but they do fail, often without warning, and having two complete copies of your data ensures that your business life continues with minimal disruption.

Techies like RAID 5 because it offers greater capacity for the dollar, but when something breaks, RAID 5 is much more likely lose your data than RAID 1. RAID 0 is not for business use, unless your business is video editing or the like, where you always keep a copy of your data in a safe place, and you need the very highest performance and your file sizes are large.

Meet the contenders
These four-drive NAS boxes are:

• Buffalo TeraStation
• Infrant NV+
• Intel SS4000-E
• QNAP TS401-T

Ease of use
AnandTech and a recent PCWorld article agree that set up is easy - at least for the kinds of people who do these reviews. And much of the complexity of these devices is imposed by Windows and Active Directory. If you have Active Directory you probably have a knowledgeable support person who can handle these devices. My comments are aimed at people who don’t have AD and don’t have an on-site support person. But if you can’t program your Tivo, then get help. These things are harder than Tivo.

For example, watching non-techies try to figure out how to log into a device’s webserver can be sobering - the idea that entering a URL (what’s that?) into a web browser would give one access to a device’s functions is non-obvious. I checked the manuals and here’s what I found:

• Buffalo TeraStation: Includes a Windows utility called TeraNavigator that loads from a CD. It leads you to the TeraStation’s administrative webpage, which you can bookmark. You’ll want to refer to this daily to see if there are problems, like a drive failure, that you need to fix. Buffalo also covers how to access the storage from a Mac. The storage should show up on the Mac desktop automatically, and they cover what to do if it doesn’t. It seems like the browser-based management should work also, but they don’t say. Other than recommending RAID 5, Buffalo’s manual was pretty good, with lots of pictures and diagrams and seemed usable by novices.
• Infrant NV+: Has a helpful bit with its Windows/Mac/Linux RAIDar management utility. RAIDar is used to discover Infrants’s ReadyNAS devices on the network and start the ReadyNAS web-based configuration utility. The manual, which is the best of the lot, does a good job of detailing the issues with clear explanations and lots of diagrams and pictures.
• Intel SS4000-E: Intel’s documentation definitely has a technical bent. The quick start guide is densely packed and a little intimidating. All the information is there. You’ll just have to buckle down and focus on each piece. The user manual is designed for technical resellers, not end users. The information is there and well-organized, but if you don’t have some familiarity with subject matter, you’ll get lost pretty quickly.
• QNAP TS401-T: The best documentation of Mac OS 9 of the bunch - just five years out of date. Also, the best documentation of the LCD display for any of these boxes. But if you are a Mac OS X user, forget it. The Linux portions seem pretty lean too. The Windows client is geeky as well.

Reliability
I’ve scanned the web for reliability information and haven’t found anything that points to any exceptional or problematic behavior. Four disk drives and RAID controllers don’t use all that much power - maybe 75 watts - which is well below what the mass produced power supplies offer. These boxes don’t offer much redundancy beyond data redundancy, but my several hundred watt receiver - which I often crank up - hasn’t had any problems in five years. Ethernet components are very reliable, so unless the Disk Array Angel of Death visits you, I don’t think there is a whole lot to recommend power and network redundancy for SOHO use. It’s a wash.

Price
The SOHO business folks I know tend to be price-aware, if not price-sensitive. QNAP’s distribution is retarded, so the $1,000 plus price - without drives - I found online may reflect limited competition more than anything else. The drive-less Infrant NV+ can be had for a more reasonable ~$600 online, the same as the channel-oriented Intel box. But the hands down value winner is the Buffalo Terastation: available online with 500 GB of RAID 1 capacity for ~$700.

Performance
I don’t think performance is all that important in the SOHO space, which is why I put it fourth on the list. The files aren’t very large, the I/Os per second are few, even with 15 PCs on the LAN. AnandTech spends a lot of time testing RAID 5 performance which, due to parity calculation requirements, varies quite a bit. I haven’t seen any tests of pure RAID 1 performance, so it is probably safe to assume the box’s network interface limits performance. AnandTech did test RAID 0 performance, and sure enough, the Buffalo is the slowest, topping out at about 7 MB/sec, while the QNAP and Infrant do 3-4x that. Which sounds conclusive unless you think about the SOHO environment: lots of small files. A one megabyte file, which is large for a Word document, will take about 1/5th of a second on the Buffalo, and 1/20th of a second on the fast boxes. Can you really tell the difference?

Expandability
These boxes all have USB2 ports for storage expansion. Some offer print servers and some don’t. They all support 500 GB drives and may support larger, once they’ve tested them. Some offer two gigabit ethernet ports for redundancy and others only one. Not a lot of differences. If you know you’ll need more storage than a couple of these boxes will provide then you probably need to move upmarket to a larger appliance with more bells and whistles.

And the winner is:
Oddly enough, they come out in alphabetical order:

1. Buffalo TeraStation - Pros: Lowest cost, reasonable documentation, 7×24 telephone support. Cons: slowest, docs not as good as Infrants, requires Windows PC.
2. Infrant NV+ - Pros: Fast, fine documentation, cross-platform RAIDar management utility. Cons: Higher cost.
3. Intel SS4000-E - Pros: Intel quality and support (for resellers). Cons: Geeky (though complete) docs, higher cost, reseller focus means they don’t expect or support average SOHO users directly.
4. QNAP TS401-T - Pros: Fast, lots of features. Cons: Higher cost, poor docs, limited US distribution.

The StorageMojo take
Lots of vendors aim for the SOHO market, usually when they are getting chased out of higher margin markets. The “appliance” idea has been popular in Silicon Valley for over a decade, yet few “plug it in and it works” products actually reach consumers. Buffalo seems to have done the best job of understanding what the SOHO market needs and delivered it. You won’t go wrong with the other products though, you’ll just spend more. And that is a big improvement over just five years ago, for which we can all be thankful.

Comments welcome, as always. Moderation enabled to keep spammers on their toes. Pointers to other products in this space welcome, as are experiences with any SOHO storage product.

Update:Rather than spread this post over two URL’s, I decided to continue it in one piece, so I changed the title from yesterday’s.

Update: It is official. See here. Then come back and read the rest of this post. Thanks to alert reader Oskar for the tip.

French website Mac4Ever reports - thanks to Babelfish translation:

. . . the few innovations of Leopard, one read these last months, several rumours on the integration of a new filing system, the ZFS, which presents a revolution in the field of the storage of data. This rumour seems to be confirmed, since one sees finally apparaitre in the utility of discs of Leopard, an option to create images and partitions in this format.

They include this section of a screenshot:

Which seems pretty convincing. Or at least someone had fun with Photoshop. For the record, I believe.

I forget, so why is this cool?
See ZFS On Leopard: How Cool Is That? for more details, but the main coolness is:

• No more disk utilities. The entire data store is self-validating.
• No RAID controllers needed: ZFS gives you fast RAID for free. Just add drives.
• No more volumes and, therefore, no more volume management. ZFS eliminates the whole volume concept. Add a disk to your system and it joins your storage pool. More capacity. Not more management.
• Easy, fast backup through snapshots which means that Time Machine could give you a view of your data every hour on the hour, all day long.

But That’s Not All!
For in-depth treatment of ZFS see here and here. Includes links to more technical info and benchmarks.

FWIW, StorageMojo called it first . . .
Competitive analysis is not for the faint of heart, and I confess I wavered on whether or not Apple was really doing ZFS, until the iTV announcement three months ago. Then it all became clear - to me - while the silence from the rest of the Mac community was deafening (see Means, Motive & Opportunity: Apple Kills the Media Center PC). I even tried to bet the inimitable John Siracusa of Ars Technica a drink - only to find he doesn’t bet or drink!

The StorageMojo take
Why is this even slightly important? For the same reason I said four months ago:

StorageMojo.com has devoted time to this issue because today’s computer business is largely driven by consumer computing, not enterprise computing. Putting a really modern integrated file and storage management system on a consumer OS would raise the bar for everyone else.

No doubt Apple will first recommend ZFS for Mac OS X Server, just as they did with HFS+. Yet it won’t be long before it becomes the default file system, and not a moment too soon.

Update: I updated this post with some additional explanatory material, for those few people who haven’t been following ZFS and Leopard as avidly as I have.
YAU: Looks like Leopard’s Disk Utility also supports iSCSI natively. Another plus.

Comments welcome, of course.

Remote PC backup made easy
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviews (subscription required, I believe) two remote PC backup services, Carbonite and Mozy, this morning.

Mozy: now they have something
I wrote briefly about Berkeley Data Systems, parent of Mozy, in September and concluded

They compete with Carbonite with a twist: like a friendly pusher, the first two GB of backup are free. Cool. Now they should just do away with the 30 GB limit on their $5/mo plan and they’d have something.

As of today they’ve dropped the 30 GB limit and now they have something. But they’ve also dropped the reference to “. . . potential telekinetic security breaches.” These guys are getting serious! Darn.

Mossberg’s money quote:

Of the two products, I prefer Mozy. Carbonite is a little quicker and simpler to set up, but it’s more limited. If you want to go beyond the default backup choice — your most common documents and settings — you have to troll through your hard disk to select additional folders and files for backup. Mozy also has a default setting, but makes it much easier to alter or customize it.

Mozy offers more-versatile restoring and scheduled backups, and unlike Carbonite, will back up an external hard disk. Mozy will also send you a DVD of all your files, for a fee. Carbonite won’t. Mozy also keeps multiple versions of any file for 30 days. Carbonite doesn’t.

Still, you won’t go wrong with either of these two services, and you’ll sleep better at night.

I agree. None of the other online backup services comes close to either Mozy or Carbonite on price, ease of use, or features. Every business laptop should be backed up to one of these services so IT can focus on more important things.

The StorageMojo take
I’m glad to see Mozy took my most excellent advice and dropped the 30GB limit. Most home users will never come close to that, as I’m sure they’ve figured out. Sadly, neither company supports Macs, although Carbonite is on track for support in April. I’ve pinged Mozy for their date and if they respond, I’ll update this post.

Update: Josh Coates, the founder, says that MacMozy is in alpha right now and they “. . . hope to release it as a beta to the public in the next couple of months.” So us MacHeads may see MacMozy in April as well. Not as good as Right Now, but better than Never. Thanks, Josh.

Comments welcome, of course. Moderation turned on to defeat the banality of the Empire of Spam.