InfoQ

InfoQ

Topic/Tag specific view

HDD Content on InfoQ


News about HDD

The 4 KiB Sector Performance Issue

Topics
Operations,
Architecture,
Infrastructure,
Hardware,
Western Digital,
Storage,
HDD

If using HDDs from Western Digital (WD) with the string "EARS" in the model name, poor performance may have been encountered. Normally HDDs store data with a sector size of 512 bytes; WD's Advanced Format Technology uses 4096 byte sectors. Alignment of data on disk is essential to get the best performance. It's also only a matter of time until other vendors ship disks with non-512-bytes sectors.

MySpace Replaces Storage with Solid-State Drive Technology in 150 Standard Load Servers

Topics
Operations,
Deployment / Datacenter,
Infrastructure,
Architecture,
SSD,
HDD,
MySpace,
Benchmark

MySpace and Fusion-io recently announced they are working together to reduce datacenter operations costs. Using Fusion-io's ioDrive SSDs, MySpace replaced 150 standard load servers, and reduced their number of heavy load servers from 80 to 30. Overall a reduction of 51% in server footprint was achieved, and MySpace will replace over 1700 of their remaining 2U servers as they reach end-of-life.