Western Digital Targets Surveillance Storage Market with Purple Hard Drives

Western Digital's campaign to delineate hard drive market segments and the accompanied colour-based branding has proved to be very popular. The Red drive lineup for the SMB / SOHO NAS market and the Black drives for the enthusiast segment have been greeted with good market acceptance. Today, Western Digital is expanding this initiative with the Purple branding for hard drives targeting the growing surveillance market (NVRs and NAS units dedicated to recording feeds from IP cameras).

Background

All SATA hard drives fulfill the same basic functionality of storing data on platters. Most hard drives use the same hardware circuitry (except for enterprise drives which have features such as RAFF - Rotary Accelerated Feed Forward - that require extra sensors on the drive to better handle vibrations in storage arrays). The scope for differentiation boils down to the firmware. The SATA protocol has a number of optional features intended to improve performance for specific scenarios. One example is NCQ (Native Command Queuing), which allows for reordering of commands to improve efficiency. Another example is the ATA Streaming Command Set, which targets A/V setups by providing features targeting video payloads. Drives targeting the A/V and surveillance markets can optimize the firmware around this optional specification.

History

Western Digital has been serving the DVR / STB / surveillance storage market with the WD-AV GP product line for quite some time now. Hardware-wise, these drives happen to be the same as the Green drives, but the difference happens to be in the firmware. WD's ATA Streaming Command Set implementation under theSilkStream tag supports up to 12 simultaneous HD streams.

Most NVRs are based off NAS platforms in RAIDed environments. Since the WD-AV-GP drives were not specifically geared for use in NAS devices, it makes sense for WD to develop firmware optimized for video surveillance storage using the Red drives as the hardware base. The result is the WD Purple lineup.

Features and Specifications

The Purple hard drives (WDxxPURX) are dedicated to service the surveillance market. Similar to the WD-AV GP lineup, these are also built for 24x7 operation. The SilkStream tag for the optimized firmware in the WD-AV GP lineup is replaced by AllFrame in the WD Purple. The optimizations work with the ATA Streaming Command Set to improve playback performance and reduce errors / frame loss. While SilkStream was advertised to support up to 12 simultaneous HD streams, AllFrame is designed to support up to 32 HD cameras / channels. Obviously, advantage of the AllFrame technology is possible only with the host controller support. It goes without saying that the appliance vendor must be in the compatibility list provided by WD in order to take advantage of the surveillance-specific features in the Purple drives.

Similar to the Red drives, these come with the IntelliPower feature (rotational speed of 5400 rpm) and TLER enabled. IntelliPower enables WD to provide best-in-class power consumption numbers with the Purple drives. There is no RAFF support on-board, though, as these are meant for table-top appliances with 1 to 8-bays. The drives are rated for workloads up to 60 TB/yr. For reference, recording 4 x 1080p30 streams for 365 days requires 200 TB of storage. SD streams come with lower storage cost. In any case, putting the WD Purples in RAID with multiple drives should easily keep workloads for each drive under 60 TB/yr. For SMB / SME surveillance setups requiring up to 64 cameras, WD suggests the use of Se drives, while mission-critical applications are advised to utilize the more powerful Re drives.

The 3.5" Purple drives come in 1, 2, 3 and 4 TB capacities. WD has a number of launch partners including, but not limited to, PELCO, HikVision, Synology and QNAP.

In other news, Seagate also announced the Surveillance HDD yesterday, targeting the surveillance market. Unfortunately, we weren't briefed extensively about it, but the specs seem similar to that of the Purple lineup (except for the addition of RV - rotational vibration - sensors for operating in multi-drive environments, which seems similar to RAFF technology).

Intel SSD 730 (480GB) Review: Bringing Enterprise to the Consumers

The days of Intel being the dominant player in the client SSD business are long gone. A few years ago Intel shifted its focus from the client SSDs to the more profitable and hence alluring enterprise market. As a result of the move to SandForce silicon, Intel's client SSD lineup became more generic and lost the Intel vibe of the X-25M series. While Intel still did its own thorough validation to ensure the same quality as with its fully in-house designed drives, the second generation SandForce platform didn't allow much OEM customization, which is why the SSD 520 and other SandForce based Intel SSDs turned out to be very similar to the dozens of other SandForce driven SSDs in the market.

The SSD market has matured since the X-25M days and a part of the maturing process involves giving up profits. Back in 2007-2008 the SSD market (both client and enterprise) was a niche with low volume and high profits, so it made sense for Intel to invest in custom client-oriented silicon. There wasn't much competition and given Intel's resources and know-how, they were able to build a drive that was significantly better than the other offerings.

The high profits, however, attracted many other manufacturers as well and in the next few years Intel faced a situation it didn't like: profit margins were going down, yet bigger and bigger investments had to be made in order to stay competitive in the client market. OCZ in particular was heavily undercutting Intel's pricing and big companies with technological and scale advantage like Intel tend not to like the bargain game because at the end of the day it's not as profitable for them. The enterprise market is a bit different in this regard because price is not usually the commanding factor; instead the focus is on reliability, features and performance, which made it an easy choice for Intel to concentrate its resources on covering that market instead.

For the majority of consumers this change in focus was negligible since the likes of Micron and Samsung had started paying attention to the retail consumer SSD market and Intel was no longer the only good option available. However, enthusiasts were left yearning for an Intel SATA 6Gbps design as many had built brand loyalty for Intel with the X-25M. In late 2012 the wishes materialized but to their disappointment only in the form of an enterprise SSD: the DC S3700

. Adopting the platform from the DC S3500/S3700, the SSD 730 is Intel's first fully in-house designed client drive since the SSD 320. The SSD 730 is not just a rebranded enterprise drive, though, as both the controller and NAND interface are running at higher frequencies for increased peak performance. While the branding suggests that this is an enterprise drive like the SSD 710, Intel is marketing the SSD 730 directly to consumers and the DC S3xxx along with the 900 series remain as Intel's enterprise lineups. And in a nod to enthusiasts, the SSD 730 adopts the Skulltrail logo to further emphasize that we are dealing with some serious hardware here.

Capacity	240GB	480GB
Controller	Intel 3rd Generation (SATA 6Gbps)
NAND	Intel 20nm MLC
Sequential Read	550MB/s	550MB/s
Sequential Write	270MB/s	470MB/s
4K Random Read	86K IOPS	89K IOPS
4K Random Write	56K IOPS	74K IO
Power (idle/load)	1.5W / 3.8W	1.5W / 5.5W
Endurance	50GB/day (91TB total)	70GB/day (128TB total)
Warranty	Five years
Availability	Pre-orders February 27th - Shipping March 18th

Intel is serious about the SSD 730 being an enterprise-class drive for the client market as even the NAND is pulled from the same batch as Intel's MLC-HET NAND used in the S3700 and the endurance rating is based on JEDEC's enterprise workload. JEDEC's SSD spec, however, requires that client SSDs must have a data retention time of one year minimum whereas enterprise drives must be rated at only three months, which gives the S3500/S3700 a higher endurance. MLC-HET also trades performance for endurance by using lower programming voltages, resulting in less stress on the silicon oxide.

	Intel SSD 730	Intel SSD 530	Intel SSD DC S3500	Intel SSD DC S3700
Capacities (GB)	240, 480	80, 120, 180, 240, 360, 480	80, 120, 160, 240, 300, 400, 480, 600, 800	100, 200, 400, 800
NAND	20nm MLC	20nm MLC	20nm MLC	25nm MLC-HET
Max Sequential Performance (Reads/Writes)	550 / 470 MBps	540 / 490 MBps	500 / 450 MBps	500 / 460 MBps
Max Random Performance (Reads/Writes)	89K / 75K IOPS	48K / 80K IOPS	75K / 11.5K IOPS	76K / 36K IOPS
Endurance (TBW)	91TB (240GB) 128TB (480GB)	36.5TB	140TB (200GB) 275TB (480GB)	3.65PB (200GB) 7.3PB (400GB)
Encryption	-	AES-256	AES-256	AES-256
Power-loss Protection	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Continuing with the enterprise features, there is full power-loss protection similar to what's in the S3500/S3700. I'm surprised that we've seen so few client SSDs with power-loss protection. Given the recent studies of power-loss bricking SSDs, power-loss protection should make a good feature at least in the high-end SSDs.

With an enterprise platform comes its pros and cons. As the platform was originally designed for 24/7 running, there isn't any form of low-power state support. Hence even idle power consumption is a tremendous 1.5W and under load the power consumption can increase to over 5W. In fact, the SSD 730 needs so much power that it draws current from the 12V rail, which is usually only used by 3.5" hard drives. While our tests don't include temperature testing, the chassis also gets very hot and uncomfortable to touch under load. It's clear that the SSD 730 is not suited for mobile use and Intel is well aware of that. The target markets for the SSD 730 are enthusiasts and professionals who truly need the best-in-the-class IO performance.

 

Interestingly, the SSD 730 is available for pre-order from selected retailers today, which is something Intel has not done in ages. Shipments are scheduled to start on March 18th.

The controller is the same 8-channel design as in the S3500/S3700 but runs at 600MHz instead of the 400MHz of the S3500/S3700. It's coupled with sixteen 32GB (2x16GB) NAND packages with one of the dies designated for redundancy that protects against block and die level failures (similar to SandForce's RAISE and Micron's RAIN). This is still 64Gbit per die ONFI 2.1 NAND but compared to Intel's previous NAND, the NAND interface runs at 100MHz instead of 83MHz. As a result the bandwidth in each channel increases from 166MB/s to a maximum of 200MB/s (ONFI 2.x is a synchronous double-data-rate design), which may help in some corner cases. With an 8-channel controller the NAND interface doesn't usually play a major role because the SATA interface acts as a bottleneck and in the end we are still limited by the actual NAND performance.

 

Update: The SSD 730 actually uses 128Gbit NAND, which also expains the slow-ish write performance of the 240GB model.

 

As Intel switched to a flat indirection table design in the S3700, the SSD 730 needs way more cache than the old X-25Ms did and there are two 512MB DDR3-1600 packages to do the job. Furthermore, power-loss protection is provided by two 47 microfarad 3.5V capacitors.

 

Test System

CPU	Intel Core i5-2500K running at 3.3GHz (Turbo and EIST enabled)
Motherboard	AsRock Z68 Pro3
Chipset	Intel Z68
Chipset Drivers	Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2
Memory	G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600 4 x 8GB (9-9-9-24)
Video Card	Palit GeForce GTX 770 JetStream 2GB GDDR5 (1150MHz core clock; 3505MHz GDDR5 effective)
Video Drivers	NVIDIA GeForce 332.21 WHQL
Desktop Resolution	1920 x 1080
OS	Windows 7 x64

Kingston Wi-Drive and Seagate GoFlex Satellite

Hypothetical situation here: let’s say you bought an iPhone or iPad, but cheaped out and got a 16GB model. You’ve got around 10GB worth of music, a few gigs in photos and applications, and you lose the rest to formatting and the OS itself. Basically, you’re maxed on capacity. Day-to-day, this isn’t a huge issue, but let’s say you’re going on vacation and want to have some movies to watch so that you can avoid the customary in-flight chick flick [or replace with whatever type of movies you dislike]. HD movies aren’t storage friendly, they take a solid chunk of storage space, and you don’t want gut your portable music library for the sake of watching a couple of decent movies on the plane. So what do you do?

Fret not, there is now a solution to that dilemma by way of Kingston and Seagate, among others. Both have recently launched wireless storage devices, streaming your media files to up to three mobile devices via WiFi. Now, both of these are non-ideal solutions to a relatively marginal problem, but that’s to be expected in any newly conceived market. With the shift to cloud-based data and media streaming for mobile devices, there is going to be a gradual de-emphasizing of device storage. We’re already seeing that in a big way with Google’s Cloud OS and Apple’s iCloud service, so wireless storage technologies are going to play an important role in handling media streaming for the future. The two devices we’re looking at today are pricey and aren’t perfect by any means, but they point the way to what the future of local media storage might look like.

Device Hardware

Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite builds off the storage giant’s expertise in hard drives by creating a wireless media streamer based on a portable hard drive. It looks like a larger version of the company’s GoFlex hard drives, albeit with a power switch and an AC adapter input port, and ships in a 500GB configuration with a 5400RPM 2.5" drive inside. Compared to the standard 500GB GoFlex drive, the Satellite is 50% thicker and adds about a half inch to the length and a quarter inch to the width. Interestingly, we noticed a 10mm difference between the listed length dimension and what I measured (130mm versus the 120mm figure quoted in the specsheet). Either way, it’s bigger than the typical 2.5” external drive, but the Satellite shares the same enclosure as the as the 1TB and 1.5TB GoFlex drives, which have thicker hard drives than their lower-capacity brethren.

The additional space goes towards the wireless card, a small web server, and a 2800 mAh battery, definitely a worthwhile trade-off for the minor loss in portability. The main processor is an embedded TI Sitara microprocessor, part of the AM37xx line. It’s the general-purpose computing version of the OMAP 35xx SoCs we got very familiar with on the smartphone side. This particular one is the AM3703, based around a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 core and the NEON SIMD co-processor. Unlike the OMAP 3s and the higher end AM3s, the AM3703 doesn’t have an image/video/audio accelerator or 2D/3D graphics acceleration onboard. However, since the device doesn’t have a display it doesn’t need graphics acceleration. In addition to the TI MPU, there’s 128MB of Samsung Mobile DDR and a WLAN module made by AzureWave. The AW-NH630 in the GoFlex Satellite is a chip targeted towards mobile devices and PMPs, and supports 802.11b/g/n at 2.4GHz frequencies.

The top of the drive is finished in a shiny piano black, with just a Seagate logo and status LEDs for power and wireless connection interrupting the clean casing. At some point, somebody will realize that piano black shows fingerprints like, well, a piano, and then they’ll start making devices out of matte finish plastic again. Until that day comes, I will continue harping on about devices that double as fingerprint magnets. The main body of the device is made up of a matte silver plastic band, with the power button and AC input on the right and left sides respectively. The bottom is matte black, with FCC stickers and four small rubberized feet, underneath which live the screws holding the entire thing together. The back of the drive has an exposed SATA connection, to which a USB 2.0/3.0 adapter is fitted. It adds another half inch to the length to the entire setup. (If you’re playing along at home, we’re up to 5.28” in total, not including the USB cable itself.) The adapter is interesting in that it can be used to plug any SATA drive into a USB port, which is nice to have if you don’t have any SATA-to-USB bridges floating around.

Compared to the Seagate, Kingston’s Wi-Drive looks impossibly svelte. Kingston’s expertise, in contrast to Seagate, lies in memory products. As such, the Wi-Drive is a flash-based wireless storage device offered in 16GB and 32GB flavours. Regardless of how much NAND you spring for, you get a very sleek and stylish package that almost looks like a repurposed iPhone 3G.

I’m serious about that, actually. The organic G2 and G3 curvatures are all there, similar to the previous-generation iPhone body, rendered in the same glossy black plastic with a very familiar looking silver band going around the edge. Set face down, it’s not hard to confuse the two—replace the Apple with the Kingston logo and the iPhone text at the bottom with “Wi-Drive” and you’re basically in the same place. Even the dimensions read similarly: 121.5mm x 61.8mm x 9.8mm for the Wi-Drive, 115.5mm x 62.1mm x 12.3mm for the iPhone 3G/S. It’s actually kind of awesome how well the design language fits with Apple’s last generation devices. (Granted, Apple’s current industrial design represents a clean break from the 3G and 3GS days, but still.)

Both front and back are glossy black plastic and feature curved surfaces, joined by a matte silver band around the center. The band contains the mini-USB port at the top and the tiny green LED power button on the right side. Other than that, there’s an LED wireless status indicator on the front, the FCC sticker on the bottom, and that’s literally all there is to it. It’s about as clean, simple, and elegant as you could make a device like this. My complaint about glossy plastic notwithstanding (seriously guys...come on), I really like the Wi-Drive hardware. It’s basically thin and light enough to be tossed anywhere—jacket, jeans pocket, CD compartment in a backpack, etc.—without any problem at all. It weighs in at a hair under 3 ounces, which is basically nothing. If you want nitpicks, the only one concern I have is with the mini-USB port—a micro-USB port would have been lower profile, so there wouldn’t have needed to be as large of a bump to accommodate it. Also, this is the only handheld device I’ve had come with a mini-USB connection in years, so it was a weird throwback to see anything other than micro-USB. But that’s about the only thing I’d change with the hardware. Well, that and potentially more storage would be useful, as even 32GB may not be enough for certain people.

Internally, we find Realtek’s RTL8188RE single-chip PCI-E WLAN controller, with support for single band wireless connectivity, essentially a bunch of words that says it supports 802.11b/g/n at 2.4GHz. Also on the board is the RTL8196C, a wireless gateway controller with an embedded Lexra 32-bit RISC CPU. Based on the block diagram submitted to the FCC, it looks like the RTL8196C acts as the main microprocessor, with the WLAN chip, NAND modules, and port interfaces all connected to it. Paired together, the RTL8196C and RTL8188RE are a 150Mbps wireless access point/router with a built-in 5-port switch and dynamic power-saving and power-down modes, so idle power consumption should be extremely low when there is no network traffic. 

The Kingston’s flash-based storage makes it a significantly more portable choice than the Seagate, but the Seagate has significantly more storage capacity and more versatility when it comes to playback options. While the Kingston is limited to iOS devices at present, Seagate has apps out for both iOS and Android in addition to in-browser streaming to anything that has a WiFi connection. But the real question is this: how well does any of this actually work?

The Samsung SSD 830 Review

Samsung is a dangerous competitor in the SSD space. Not only does it make its own controller, DRAM and NAND, but it also has an incredible track record in terms of reliability. Samsung SSDs were among the first I reviewed and while they weren't anywhere near the fastest back then, every last one of those drives is still working without issue in my lab today. It's also worth pointing out that Samsung SSDs are also one of the two options Apple rebrands and delivers in its Mac lineup. To continue to hold on to Apple's business for this long is an impressive feat on Samsung's part.
In the early days Samsung actually sold reference designs to companies like Corsair and OCZ. Its partners could then rebrand and resell the drives, which they did. Samsung was still learning the market and after being overshadowed by Indilinx in the performance segment, Samsung retreated. Returning last year to the consumer market Samsung had a new strategy in mind: go directly after the channel. Seeing no point in reselling its designs to third parties, Samsung made its SSD 470 available to both OEMs and consumers alike. OEMs were free to obscure the Samsung name but consumers were told upfront what they were getting. Samsung even spent a good amount on packaging for their drive just to develop its brand.

Although the 470 was a downright decent 3Gbps drive, it was competing in a world dominated by 6Gbps alternatives. Crucial's m4, Intel's SSD 510 and OCZ's Vertex 3 all offered better performance, at a similar price point. The only leg Samsung had to stand on was reliability, which believe it or not can sometimes take second place to performance depending on the target market. What Samsung needed was a faster drive that didn't sacrifice reliability and didn't move price points up. That's exactly what the Samsung SSD 830 is designed to do.
As we've already mentioned, the 830 is an evolution of the 470 design. It still employs a page-mapped architecture to deliver high random and sequential performance, but as a result requires quite a bit of on-board memory. Samsung has no qualms about storing user data in DRAM temporarily so it outfits the SSD 830 with a massive 256MB DDR2 cache. While this cache was spread over two chips in the 470, it is contained in a single package in the 830.
On the interface side Samsung gave the 830 a much needed upgrade to 6Gbps SATA. With a higher speed interface to the host controller and some tweaks on the firmware side Samsung is able to deliver much higher performance than the outgoing 470. Samsung manufactures and uses its own 2x-nm Toggle-mode DDR NAND which is fairly similar in performance to the ONFi 2.x NAND used by Intel and Crucial (133Mbps data rates per interface).

Little is known about the 830's controller other than it is a multi-core ARM design. Samsung claims the controller has three cores however we don't have any information on the design of each core nor the type of work each one does. As SandForce has claimed in the past, SSDs are rarely limited by processing power. Instead it's the firmware, algorithms and internal chip memories that ultimately determine performance. Samsung has claimed in the past its multi-core design yields better performance under multitasking workloads but I'm guessing that's more marketing than substantive.
The enterprise version of the 830 enables full-disk encryption (AES-256) however Samsung's product literature doesn't clarify whether or not the same is true for the consumer version.

The Drive

The SSD 830 is the consumer version of Samsung's recently announced PM830. The two drives use identical hardware but they do differ in initial firmware revisions. Samsung will provide firmware updates (Windows only) via its Magician Software. Users are also able to configure the amount of spare area on the drive using the Magician toolbox. By default spare area is set at a standard ~7% (just what you get from the GB to GiB conversion), putting the 830 on par with Intel and Crucial in that regard.
The Samsung SSD 830 will be available to consumers starting in mid October. Although Samsung isn't announcing pricing at this time, I've been told to expect the drive to be priced around where the SSD 470 is today. I popped over to Newegg to do a quick price check on the 470 and came away relatively pleased:

Newegg Price Comparison
	256GB	128GB	64GB
Samsung SSD 470	$384.99	$214.99	$114.99
Crucial m4	$379.99	$196.99	$94.99
Intel SSD 510	$569.49	$279.99
OCZ Vertex 3	$439.99	$209.99	$134.99

For the most part the SSD 470 is priced competitively with the Crucial m4 and OCZ Vertex 3. Crucial is a bit cheaper across the board but the gap is at most $20. If Samsung can keep its 830 pricing on par with where the 470 is today, I'll have absolutely no complaints.
The 830 will be available in four capacities, each of which will be available in three different versions: bare drive, laptop installation kit and desktop installation kit. The bare drive will be the cheapest option while the laptop kit gives you Norton Ghost + a SATA to USB cable and the desktop kit gives you Norton Ghost + a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (with SATA cable).

Samsung SSD 830 Lineup
	512GB	256GB	128GB	64GB
NAND Type	2x-nm Toggle MLC	2x-nm Toggle MLC	2x-nm Toggle MLC	2x-nm Toggle MLC
NAND	512GB	256GB	128GB	64GB
User Capacity	476GiB	238GiB	119GiB	59GiB
Random Read Performance	Up to 80K IOPS	Up to 80K IOPS	Up to 80K IOPS	Up to 75K IOPS
Random Write Performance	Up to 36K IOPS	Up to 36K IOPS	Up to 30K IOPS	Up to 16K IOPS
Sequential Read Performance	Up to 520 MB/s	Up to 520 MB/s	Up to 520 MB/s	Up to 520 MB/s
Sequential Write Performance	Up to 400 MB/s	Up to 400 MB/s	Up to 320 MB/s	Up to 160 MB/s

Samsung sent us a 512GB drive, however as you can see from the table above the performance should be identical to the 256GB version. We are trying to get our hands on lower capacity versions as well to see how they perform.

The 830 is a very pretty drive, something Samsung is quite proud of. The 7mm chassis is all plastic save for the aluminum top plate. The bare drive doesn't ship with an adaptor for 9.5mm bays. If your notebook requires a 9.5mm drive you'll need a carrier of some sort to make the drive fit. There are no screws on the 830, the top plate just snaps on/off:

Inside the 512GB drive are only 8 NAND packages occupying one side of the PCB. These are octal-die packages with 64GB of total NAND per package. Each die is obviously 8GB in capacity.

The Test

CPU	Intel Core i7 2600K running at 3.4GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) - for AT SB 2011, AS SSD & ATTO
Motherboard:	Intel DH67BL Motherboard
Chipset:	Intel H67
Chipset Drivers:	Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2
Memory:	Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1333 2 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)
Video Card:	eVGA GeForce GTX 285
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit
Desktop Resolution:	1920 x 1200
OS:	Windows 7 x64