MANY COMPANIES ARE starting to weigh up the merits of using hard disk-based storage systems for data archiving, an area traditionally dominated by older, slower and more cumbersome tape-based solutions.
Hitachi Data Systems senior director of storage applications Claus Mikkelsen said it was a new phenomenon but one that was gaining ground as the cost of storing data on hard disk had fallen significantly.
Driving the decline in hard disk storage cost is the introduction of Serial ATA drives. Conventional enterprise storage systems are built with SCSI drives, which cost about 5 US cents per megabyte, but new systems built with cheaper Serial ATA disks cost as little as 0.5 US cent per megabyte.
'[Disk based storage] is also very reliable, so it becomes a very attractive archiving medium,' Mr Mikkelsen said.
Consequently, the amount of data being stored on disk is growing, especially as it offers much faster access to data than tape.
To access a file stored on tape the correct tape needs to be found and mounted into the storage system. This is known as the connect time.