back to article Hitachi GST plugs its areal hole with shingles

Hitachi GST, in the process of being acquired by Western Digital, says Shingle Magnetic Recording is a necessary gap-filler before advanced disk recording technologies come on stream. It is currently talking to Facebook and Google about this. CEO Stephen Milligan said Hitachi GST aims to cover all the storage bases from fast …

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  1. Chris Miller

    "Wintel platform has been a major influence on our product designs"

    How does that work? I can see that the chipset might have some bearing on storage design, but should the OS matter? Do Hitachi produce different* systems for Windows, Unix or z/OS?

    * The interfaces (fibre channel, SATA etc) may well be different, but I imagine the underlying rotating rust is pretty much identical.

  2. BristolBachelor Gold badge

    Hybrid drives

    What I want from a hybrid drive is one that fits in a single space and connects as 1 drive, but presents as 2 drives. You can then use the OS (and / or user) to decide what performs best where. E.G. the OS boot-up and programs can go on the flash. Likewise the index files for things like Adove Bridge and Lightroom, but the bulk data storage can go on the disk. If the user is not so knowledgable about these things, the OS / applications can work it out for them.

    Trying to get the disk to do it for itself just sounds like a bad idea to me; it has no idea about filestructure (and doesn't need to), so all it could do is shuffle individual sectors between flash and disk as it works out which sectors are used most / least often. Does it write everything to the flash first assuming that if it is recently used, then it needs to be faster? If I open a file change it and save it again, how does the disk know that it is the same file, and that I access it often (it could try to 2nd guess from trim commands, but how synchronised are they?)

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