Thursday, October 18, 2007 Ng: More than just storage By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
ONE of the often cited examples to show the growth of Chinese companies is the purchase by Lenovo of IBM’s personal computer division.
Then there’s Chinese company TCL, which bought Thomson Electronics, maker of RCA televisions. Haier, another Chinese company, was planning to boost its presence by offering to buy Maytag but did not push through.
Now, there is another deal that will attempt to showcase Chinese companies’ aggressiveness. Huawei is China’s largest networking company. A few years ago, it part-nered with 3com to create the Huawei-3com Consortium which expanded into the Asia pacific market. However, the last few years have not been very good for 3com, as it lost out in the switching market and was not able to establish a good lead in its other markets.
A few weeks back, Bain Capital (a private equity company) offered to buy 3com for $2.2 billion. Apparently, they will not be the only owners. Huawei is talking to Bain Capital and have submitted its intention to acquire 16.5 percent of 3com, plus an option for another five percent later on.
HYBRID DRIVE. If you want to have more video, pictures or even music in your hard disk, there is now much more space available- current hard disk space is now up to one terabyte. A friend said he already has a 16-gigabyte USB thumb drive. Wow! But there is something even more exciting than more storage, in my opinion. It is the introduction of what is called the hybrid drive, which essentially combines these two technologies together.
Hybrid drives would have the traditional magnetic disk platter for storing data, plus solid state flash memory (just like the one in thumb drives) as the cache memory.
What is the advantage? For one, you keep the most frequently accessed data in solid state as cache, which would prevent the hard disk from firing up. This means the average access time could be much faster.
There is also another benefit—the actual hard drive can then be powered down, if not in use, and thus save electricity. Note that this time, solid state memory means that the data will still stay there even if the electricity is turned off! In various tests, Seagate claims that the average boot time or seek time was lowered by more than 20 percent, while the average consumption was cut from 0.78 watts to 0.45 watts. Of course, if the platter does not have to turn as often, it will also lengthen the life of the hard disk.
According to the ma-nufacturers, as soon as the drives are optimized, the data cache seek time will even be much better, more likely an exponential increase.
You may have noted that Albert Fert of the University of Paris and Peter Grunberg of Germany have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for 2007 because of their discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomena. This was done in 1988 and 1989, and it recognizes the change in electrical resistance of a material when it is in the presence of an external magnetic field.
Suffice it to say that this eventually helped increase the density of computer storage which is now hitting one terabyte (that’s about 200,000 times more storage than my original hard disk 25 years ago!). The technology could also result in the development of magnetic random access memory which, they say, will be the successor of Dynamic RAM which is found in most PCs today. It could also lead to the development of optical or quantum computers.
