Dumbing down tech

Who said consumerization of IT would be all good? I certainly didn't. It is happening and you either get with the program or . . . . Case in point I was doing an on line search for the zone info on hard drives. App note? Disk manual? Nope. Only these info-free PDFs...

A random write down flash street

Dr. Hetzler pointed me at this In a 30 second explanation of NAND flash, Steve concluded by saying "read the application notes!" In my dazed state that sounded reasonable. Now that I've spent a few hours poring over them I'm thinking I should have asked him to go over...

Build your own notebook flash drive

Can't afford a new notebook? Pimp your old one with flash A couple of folks sent me this link to the $30 Addonics CF drive adapter. Plug in a couple of 8 GB CF cards, or better yet, 16 GB cards and you have an upgradeable flash drive whose components you can re-use....

Finally, some drive model failure numbers

I wish I could report that one of the big guys stepped up . . . Instead, Jon Bach of Puget Custom Computers in suburban Seattle offered his company's data on his blog post titled Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea. It is a good post and well worth reading in its...

IBM Fellow Steve Hetzler

Venturing forth from the Shire I went back to Silicon Valley last week to see if I could still deal with more than three people in a room. Living in a remote mountain valley and working at home, I don't get out much. Visited Cisco and some clients. A good trip. The...

Storage Bits on ZDnet

As if I wasn't busy enough already I've taken on another blog called Storage Bits at ZDnet. I'd been blogging for Computerworld on a volunteer basis, so when ZDnet started waving obscene amounts of money (obscenely low, but at least a positive integer) at me, I...

Documentum, RSA and VMware Price Lists

It might not look like it, but the StorageMojo elves have been hard at work combing the internet for publicly available pricing information. These aren't exactly storage companies, but they are owned by a storage company, so what the hey? Check out the new lists:...

Transparent File System – Can You See It?

Guess what? There were TWO best papers at FAST '07 I wrote about "Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You? (see Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong). So it is equal time for the other the other "best paper" "TFS: A...