November 18th, 2009

Disks: why size means performance

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:41 am

Categories: Disk drives, Solid State Disk

Tags: Hard Drive, Disk, Performance, Solid State Disk, Robin Harris

Big=fast
Most people keep less than 80 GB of data, including the operating system and their applications, on their hard drive. So why should they buy a 500 GB, 1 or even 2 TB hard drive?

One simple reason: speed. That big hard drive will give you this snappiest performance this side of a solid-state disk.

For many applications, even faster than a costly SSD. For a lot less money.

Why?

Big circles, little circles
Data is laid on disks in blocks called sectors. The sectors are laid down in circular tracks.

Disk engineers saw a long time ago that they could put more sectors on the outside of a disk than on the inside. As the head gets closer to the center of the disk, there are fewer sectors - and your data rate slows down.

How much? The innermost track will commonly have only ~45% of the speed of the outermost track.

But that’s not all
Bigger hard drives have another advantage: higher bit density. So for the same RPM, more bits come out.

The difference is substantial. A 3.5″ 500 GB drive might max out at 80 MB/sec, while a 1 TB drive will reach 100 MB/sec. The new 2 TB drives can reach 140 MB/sec.

1 more thing
Not only do big drives deliver more bandwidth, they also deliver more I/Os per second (IOPS). On a half full drive the head will never have to move across the entire platter to access data, cutting seek times - all else being equal - in half.

Big million dollar enterprise RAID arrays stuffed with 15k drives frequently short stroke their already-fast drives to make them even faster. It works on home systems too.

What about SSDs?
Flash-based solid state disks (SSD) excel at random reads - which is why they boot up a system so much faster than a hard drive. But due to the housekeeping needed to make an SSD look like a hard drive their write performance isn’t nearly as stellar.

A state-of-the-consumer-art SSD, the 80 GB Intel X25-M G2, is spec’d (pdf) at 70 MB/sec for sustained sequential writes.

A 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm notebook drive will average almost 80 MB/sec while offering 6x the capacity for a much lower cost.

If you work with large files - photography, music, video - you’ll notice the difference over an SSD.

The Storage Bits take
Installing a big hard drive is, after more RAM, the easiest performance upgrade most of us can make. Even if you don’t need the capacity you’ll appreciate a friskier computer.

Another benefit: after initial break-in, new hard drives tend to be much more reliable than a 3 year old drive. Faster, more reliable and cheaper than an SSD, a hard drive upgrade may be all you need to keep your system happy.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. For more on this topic see Hard disks do get slower with use.

November 5th, 2009

A 4 SSD array: Apricorn pt 2

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:28 pm

Categories: Disk drives, RAID, Solid State Disk

Tags: Card, Apricorn, Intel Corp., Performance Management, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Robin Harris

In part I of this review I measured the bandwidth of a hard drive version of the Apricorn hard card. That’s a PCI express card with 4 2.5″ hard drives mounted on it.

But a good solid state drive (SSD) is faster than a disk - so how fast is the Apricorn card with 4 Intel X25-M drives? I won’t keep you in suspense: darn fast.

Fast enough to handle full 12-bit RGB 4:4:4 at film’s 24 frames-per-second rate. I striped the 4 SSDs with the Mac’s Disk Utility software RAID 0 with the default 32KB block size, which is about the fastest. I used the Blackmagic Designs Disk Speed Test - which is close to X-bench results.

The X25-M uses the slower multi-level cell (MLC) flash, while the X25-E uses faster - and more expensive - single-level cell NAND flash. While both have impressive 260 MB/sec read speeds, M version writes - 70 MB/sec - are slower than an empty 2 TB Seagate hard drive at 117 MB/sec. Of course, the hard drive will slow down as it fills up and the flash drive shouldn’t.

Apricorn tested the card with 4 X25-E drives and reported over 675 MB/sec writes speeds. I didn’t have that config to test, but their other numbers have been similar to my test results.

For Macs Apricorn offers a new version of the driver that they’ve tested with Snow Leopard. I didn’t try it as I’m in the middle of a couple of jobs but I believe them.

The Storage Bits take
I’m currently testing a couple of external arrays, and while they have their advantages, internal system storage is less cluttered with fewer connectors to cause problems as well as much faster read performance - and writes, with the X25-E.

The nearest competitor is Fusion-io’s ioXtreme card. At 80 GB for $895 it offers comparable read performance and faster write performance - at least on Windows and Linux machines - no Mac driver is available.

The Apricorn supports 4 80 GB X25-M drives to achieve similar performance. At roughly $250 each, a fully configured Apricorn costs $1200 for 320 GB. You do the math. For uncompressed video the extra capacity will be helpful.

Comments welcome, of course. I’ll ship the gear Apricorn loaned me back this week. It was fun while it lasted! I’ve also done work for Fusion-io, but have they sent me review copies of anything? No.

September 16th, 2009

Terabit 3-D chips will keep the flash party rolling

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:52 pm

Categories: Solid State Disk

Tags: 3D, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Cell, Chip, Semiconductors, Storage, Network Technology, Hardware, Networking, Robin Harris

Higher flash bit density and lower cost is the major driver of flash’s success in the last five years. But many in the industry, including SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, have predicted that flash will hit a wall: 3 or 4 generations of process shrink before flash became slower - and less reliable - than disk.

But at the 2009 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto, Toshiba and Samsung showed technology that could take NAND flash to 1 Tbit per chip. In five years you could be carrying a 4 TB drive on your keychain.

Let’s get vertical
Ever smaller feature sizes have made NAND flash cheaper and denser. Multi-level (MLC) flash - where a cell stores two or more bits - has further increased density.

But shrinking feature sizes also shrinks the number of electrons that represent a bit of data. Vendors already use sophisticated signal processing to determine if a bit in a cell is a one or zero, but as the number of electrons in a cell shrinks it takes more time to determine a cell’s state. And the number of writes declines as well.

If you can’t get smaller get higher. 3-D cell technology stacks cells one on top of the other.

Cost is the problem
The hard part is adding layers without adding cost. Otherwise flash loses the cost advantage that has made it the industry darling and consumer favorite.

Toshiba, the inventor of flash, demonstrated a 32 Gbit prototype using 3-D cell technology. But Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of flash today, seems to have an early lead in 3-D technology.

Samsung announced something called VG-NAND (Vertical Gate). In this design the electrode and dielectric layers are laid down and then tiny vertical grooves are batch processed into the chip so control gates can be implanted. This gives high density without a lot of extra processing.

Here’s what it looks like:

The Storage Bits take
Flash emerged as an economic competitor to DRAM only three years ago. In that short time it has had a dramatic effect on storage system architecture and cost.

Shrinking feature sizes have driven that success, but semiconductor physics imposes hard limits. 3-D chips and more investment in process technology promise to keep flash marching forward for at least the next five years.

Comments welcome, of course. Back in the early 80s many warned that alpha radiation would flip bits in 1 Mbit DRAM chips and render them useless. The engineers figured it out. More detail on 3-D flash in this report from Nikkei Electronics Asia.

September 10th, 2009

Will flash DIMMs replace disks or DRAM?

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:52 am

Categories: Disk drives, RAM, Solid State Disk

Tags: DRAM, Disk, Sun Microsystems Inc., SO-DIMM, Notebooks, Storage, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Robin Harris

Flash memory is opening a second front in its war on entrenched storage technologies. An unannounced Sun product is going to use 80 48 GB flash SO-DIMMs to create a 4 TB cache appliance.

Isn’t “enhance” a nicer word than “replace?”
Others are already looking at taking these large flash is SO-DIMMs and adding them to notebook computers. The flash DIMMs are accessed as disk drives through a thin driver, which makes them fast. As a disk look-alike they aren’t a direct replacement for random access memory.

The other big difference is capacity. 4 GB notebook SO-DIMMs have just come to market priced at over $100 per gigabyte. How the flash SO-DIMMs will be priced is still a mystery, but since the memory chips typically are over 90% of the cost of a DIMM, a 48 GB SO-DIMM should be less than $200.

Expensive compared to a disk drive, cheap compared to DRAM.

Peaceful coexistence?
Many notebooks offer 2 SO-DIMM slots. Most casual notebook users — reading e-mail and surfing the web — are fine with 2 GB of RAM, leaving the second slot open for a 48 GB flash DIMM.

If the flash DIMM is configured as the boot device users will get most of the advantages of a more expensive SSD in a smaller and cheaper package. For many users 48 GB is all the capacity they need, making a disk optional.

The Storage Bits take
None of the players are standing still. In 12 to 18 months that 48 GB flash DIMM will be 96 GB or more. The current high price for the 4 GB SO-DIMM will drop to reasonable levels. And drive vendors will be offering 1.5 TB 2.5 inch drives.

In 2 years notebook vendors could be offering a scaled-down version of the traditional enterprise tiered storage architecture: high-speed DRAM; fast SO-DIMM for booting, application and scratch storage; and a large capacity hard drive for bulk storage. Faster performance, more capacity, lower power consumption and cooler notebooks. It could be good.

However, as the bootable SD card slot in the new MacBooks shows, there is more than one way to get flash into a system. Some of us would like to be able to easily swap out boot drives on as the cards, but most of us will prefer to have our boot drive inside the notebook where it won’t can’t get lost. SB cards will also continue to have a significant cost advantage over flash SO-DIMMs due to high volume.

Of course, we don’t know how well the new flash DIMMs will perform. Much depends on the quality of their embedded flash controllers, which often isn’t too good in first-generation designs.

Flash DIMMs will take a piece out of both the DRAM and disk markets, but how much of each remains to be seen. What is clear is that we the consumers all benefit by more competition for our storage dollars. And designers have a better set of options for future system designs.

Comments welcome, of course. I worked in Sun’s storage group for 3 years in the mid-90s.

February 5th, 2009

Steve Wozniak: Chief Scientist - of a storage company?

Posted by Robin Harris @ 11:44 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Solid State Disk

Tags: Steve Wozniak, Disk, Apple Inc., Woz, Steve, Fusion-io, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

You’d think after co-founding one of the great success stories of the last 35 years - Apple Computer - Steve Wozniak would be done with startups. And you’d be wrong.

But a storage startup? How sexy is that?

The Woz gets storage
Really, this isn’t a stretch. One of the key differentiators of the Apple ][ was its disk subsystem: a mighty 140 KB 5.25″ floppy disk that cost a mere $800!

It was so cheap because Steve W. is an extremely clever engineer. As Andy Hertzfeld - another Apple legend - put it:

The Apple II disk controller, designed six months after the Apple II itself was complete, was Steve Wozniak’s crowning achievement. His five chip disk controller card out-performed competitive controllers that were four times as expensive by shifting most of the responsibilities from hardware to software.

Steve gets game-changers
Fusion-io isn’t just another flash SSD company. They’ve taken a fundamentally different approach to flash: instead of sticking it behind a SATA disk interface, they’ve put it on the PCIe bus to minimize latency and maximize bandwidth.

A thin driver makes it look like a disk to the OS, but the performance is way higher. This has some very positive effects on server performance.

The Storage Bits take
Don’t be hatin’ on me because I’ve been following - and working with - the Fusion-io folks. Fusion-io has a great architecture that really is an economic game-changer.

And they have more on the way. They aren’t a 1-trick pony.

Comments welcome, of course.

February 3rd, 2009

Quantum holographic storage: it works!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 7:13 am

Categories: Infrastructure, Solid State Disk

Tags: Electron, Hologram, Quantum Corp., Beam, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated quantum holographic storage, shattering long-held assumptions about the information limits of matter. Moving into the sub-atomic realm, they permanently stored 35 bits in the quantum space surrounding a single electron.

Moreover, the technique allows holograms to be “stacked” in 3 dimensions. They demonstrated 2 35-bit storage elements in the same space. Encoding data using mere atoms would be less than half as space efficient.

Holodeck backstory
Traditional holograms - like those nifty green reflection skulls you see in trinket shops - use a laser. The laser is split into a reference beam and an object beam that has been reflected off the 3D surface you are recording.

The 2 beams are recombined and the resulting interference pattern stored in a 2D photographic emulsion. When viewed, the the hologram reproduces the object as it appeared in 3D space so it appears to rotate as it is moved.

A spin-off from Bell Labs has been working on commercial holographic storage for several years.

Quantum holography
The researchers (Christopher R. Moon, Laila S. Mattos, Brian K. Foster, Gabriel Zeltzer and Hari C. Manoharan) an interdisciplinary team from the departments of Physics, Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Stanford, used a gas of 2D surface state electrons held on the face of a copper crystal. Using atomic manipulation the team place individual electrons in closed quantum corrals - a common research tool.

The tricky part was encoding a specific pattern around the electrons. Using simulated annealing, they controlled the amplitude and phase of the electrons to encode the bits.

Since the writing “surface” is a gas, the team was then able to encode holograms in the same space by embedding them volumetrically in 3D. Here’s a picture:

[courtesy of the authors and Nature Nanotechnology]

A scanning tunneling microscope, a standard tool of atomic level research, was used to read the information and create the images.

iPod sub-Nano
The authors conclude:

We have experimentally demonstrated that 35 bits can be permanently encoded into a time-independent fermionic state, and that two such states can be simultaneously prepared in the same area of space. . . . In all experimental attempts, extending down to the subatomic regime, the encoding was successful and the data were retrieved at 100% fidelity. We believe the limitations on bit size are [.025 of a nanometer], but surprisingly the information density can be significantly boosted by using higher-energy electrons and stacking multiple pages holographically. Determining the full theoretical and practical limits of this technique — the trade-offs between information content (the number of pages and bits per page), contrast (the number of measurements required per bit to overcome noise), and the number of atoms in the hologram — will involve further work.

I hope they get the money they need to continue this research.

The Storage Bits take
This is far frontiers research - not something you’ll see in a commercial product in 5 years or even 25 years. But by demonstrating that quantum holography can store massive amounts of data in a very small space, the scientists have pushed out our conception of how much data mankind may eventually be able to process and store.

Comments welcome, of course. The original, highly technical, article is available online from Nature Nanotechnology (pdf).

January 12th, 2009

Best storage at CES 2009

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:19 am

Categories: Disk drives, RAID, Software, Solid State Disk

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Storage, Backups, Hardware, Robin Harris

Data storage is a necessary part of the digital lifestyle. The good news: the hardware is getting more stylish and the software easier to use.

Backup
The best news: Windows backup has improved markedly in the last year. Storage Appliance Corporation’s Clickfree line of Windows and Mac backup is the simplest and easiest to use Windows backup I’ve ever seen.

Simply plug in the Clickfree drive or USB cable and the system automatically starts backing up user files: documents, photos, video, whatever. A single drive will back up as many as 10 Windows machines. Even simpler than BackupKey’s lower-cost 1-click system!

I tried their Mac support on the CES show floor. Other than having to reformat the drive to a Mac HFS plus file system and typing in the volume name it worked as advertised. Not as easy or elegant as the built in Mac Time machine, but if you need to back up multiple Macs it would be more cost effective.

The problem with backing up user files is that restore can be a lengthy process. Not a problem for casual users but if you rely on your system for business use a full bootable system disk backup will get you online again in minutes rather than hours.

That is easy on a Mac with either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!. It hasn’t been so easy on a Windows machine.

That’s why I was pleased to see CMS products introduced BounceBack Pro. This $70 download creates bootable backups to external USB drives so if your system drive fails you can start up with everything just like it was when you last backed up.

Set it to backup nightly in you will never lose more than a day’s work. I hope to have a more complete review when CMS sends me a review copy.

Solid state disks
Third-generation SSD random write performance is reaching acceptable levels. I saw a SanDisk SSD doing 350-400 4k random writes per second. While the power and weight savings are insignificant and the durability still uncertain, at least the awful performance of the first two generations of consumer SSDs appears to be receding into the past.

External hard drives
Backup will never be sexy, but a cool slim external drive doesn’t hurt. Imation was showing several drives with nifty built-in feet so the drive could be used either horizontally or vertically.

Iomega was showing consumer hard drives in attractive colors and with slip on silicon sleeves for better shock resistance. They were all so showing LifeLine software from new corporate parent, the $14 billion EMC, that adds RAID, backup, active directory support, Bluetooth support, browser based management, CIFS, NFS and FTP protocol support, a print server and useful power management.

The biggest surprise is that no one appears to be following Drobo’s lead with a truly easy to use prosumer storage device. CEO Geoff Barrall said they shipped over 40,000 units in 2007, their first full year of operation.

Now that they’ve added FireWire 800 support it is the only external protected storage array I recommend to storage civilians. For most people RAID systems are more trouble than they’re worth.

The Storage Bits take
As the Digital Age permeates every day life, the problems with digital storage become more acute. While digital storage, access and protection is nowhere near as automatic and seamless as it should be, the industry is making solid progress getting appropriate tools and products in place for consumers.

Comments welcome, of course. I actually saw most of these products at Storage Visions, a consumer storage industry show just prior to CES. Recommended for consumer storage professionals and companies.

December 23rd, 2008

2008's best storage products

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:23 pm

Categories: Clusters, Disk drives, Infrastructure, Solid State Disk

Tags: SSD, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

The world of data storage is changing faster than it has since the mid-90’s saw the rise of storage arrays and storage networks. While some of the products - personal SSDs and online storage I’m looking at you - aren’t quite ready for prime time, they are improving fast.

Here’s the Storage Bits take on the top storage products, both consumer and enterprise, of 2008.

10) Personal Solid State Drives - although they didn’t live up to the hype - longer battery life! reliable!! faster!!! - they’ve educated a new generation of interested storage consumers on the issues of storage system architecture. The many problems will get sorted out. As flash prices drop personal SSDs will gain in popularity. But if you want capacity, rotating disks are the only way to go.

9) The 500 GB 2.5″ drive. At only 1/3rd the capacity of the biggest 2.5″ drives, they augur the switch to 2.5″ form factors in desktop and enterprise systems. 3 years ago 2.5″ drives were 1/5th the capacity and even higher in price per GB. The gap is closing fast.

8) Personal online storage services. Few people back up their data, mostly because it is a pain. Online backup services have made it easier to backup and offer small businesses disaster recovery at an affordable price. While none of the services I’ve seen currently merit more than a B- grade, they’ll keep improving and someone will get it right.

7) Corsair’s 16 GB Voyager GT USB drive. I’d become convinced that all USB flash drives were slow - so why bother with high capacity? But this unit is 4x faster than cheap drives. Which makes the capacity 4x more useful. Please Corsair, make a 32 GB model.

6) Oppo Digital’s DV-983H upscaling dvd player. I’ll publish a review next year, but the short version is it upscales ordinary DVDs to near Blu-ray quality. Yes, even better than the upscaling you see on a Blu-ray player. One less reason to pay the Blu-ray tax.

5) The Drobo FireWire array. The original USB-only Drobo had ease-of-use that Apple would envy, but not the performance. With FireWire 800 the new box is usable for video as well as photos. I recommend it to storage-nongeeks who need protected storage: RAID without tears.

4) Western Digital’s 300 GB, 10,000 rpm SATA Velociraptor drive. Western Digital builds excellent drives, and the 10k VR is one of their best. Think Viagra for your desktop: its knocked a third off my boot times and every app load is noticeably snappier. Best effect: virtual memory is painless. I don’t even notice 3 GB of active swap space. Yay!

3) Enterprise SSDs. Consumer SSDs have stringent price limits. But enterprise SSDs cost thousands of dollars for performance that customers want. 2008 is the year that every major vendor introduced or announced SSDs for high-end arrays. These high-end SSDs will displace 15k high-end disks in the next 5 years. Even better, their architectures will filter down to consumer SSDs.

2) Zero-maintenance storage. Xiotech and Atrato introduced storage boxes that guarantee certain levels of capacity, performance and uptime with no maintenance for 5 and 3 years respectively. Eliminating variability is a Very Good Thing. Update: It is Xiotech that provides a 5 year warranty. I had the terms reversed. End update.

1) Fusion-io’s flash-based io-Drive. Rather then make flash look like a disk, Fusion-io has put it close to the CPU on a PCI-e bus for maximum bandwidth and low latency. Solid state disks are convenient because they look like disks. But flash belongs between the CPU and disk layers: that’s where we’ll get the most benefit for the added cost.

0) EMC’s Atmos cloud storage. EMC, the world’s largest independent vendor of storage, introduced the first commercial cloud storage a couple of months ago. Sure, you can rent cloud storage, but until Atmos you couldn’t buy a product designed for cloud storage. But the important thing is that EMC has embraced storage clusters based on commodity hardware and mostly open-source software. That’s what Google did years ago and pretty soon many companies will.

The Storage Bits take
With the global recession coming on fast, storage prices are plunging. There will be great deals on many storage products through Q1/09 until vendors get their production in line with demand.

The best news though is that there are so many great products to buy and many more are on the way. There’s never been a better time to be a storage glutton.

Comments welcome, of course. What are YOUR favorite products? What did I miss?

November 10th, 2008

Where flash belongs

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:44 am

Categories: Disk drives, Solid State Disk

Tags: Disk, Latency, I/O, Disk Latency, Robin Harris

Putting flash into disk packaging, while convenient, is sub-optimal. Disk latency is so great that no one worries about adding a few hundred microseconds to an I/O. But once you’ve got low-latency storage those microseconds start to add up.

But I didn’t really get the underlying advantage to low-latency I/O until I spoke to David Flynn, Fusion-io’s CTO. He explained why reduced latency enhances system performance.

Sure, lower latency means faster I/Os, but the key is that fewer inflight I/Os frees up the CPU to do real work. Inflight I/Os eat up cache and create interrupts that chew up CPU cycles.

The Storage Bits take
In short, this video is about why flash doesn’t belong in disk drive packaging: flash’s latency advantage is diluted for no good reason. Agree or not, if you are interested in the impact of flash on server architecture you will find David’s discussion thought provoking.

Disks for capacity at low cost. Flash - on PCI-e or ExpressCard - for performance. Now if they’d just get a Mac OS version out!!!

Comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: Fusion-io paid me to make the video. My first reaction to their claims was skeptical but as I’ve learned more I’ve become a fan. Sadly, I have no stock in the company.

October 14th, 2008

Apple notebook hits and misses

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:41 pm

Categories: Marketing, Solid State Disk

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Quad-core, Apple MacBook, Battery, Apple Inc., Apple MacBook Pro, Steve, Notebooks, Engineering, Tablets

The Apple product transition mentioned by Apple’s CFO has arrived. Like other industry watchers, Storage Bits looked into its crystal ball to predict what it would look like. Overall, Apple did OK, with some surprising omissions and changes.

Hits:
Product = notebook
In the first post (see Apple’s coming notebook transition) I spent way too much time establishing that notebooks were the focus.

Nailed that one.

Tablet Mac?
Nope, as I predicted (see Why there’s no Mac tablet this quarter).

But that was easy. Apple isn’t going to intro a tablet Mac until someone demonstrates that there is a tablet market. Tablet fans, give it up!

More solid state drives?
Yes. A bigger, 128 GB one on the MacBook Air. And an optional one of the new MacBook Pro.

Oh, and no promises of higher performance with the SSDs - just better durability. Very wise.

LED backlights
Yes-s-s! On the new MacBook as well as the new 15″ MacBook Pro.

Switchable graphics
The MacBook Pro can switch between the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT. The latter cuts battery life by 20%.

Longer battery life - or lighter ‘Books?
How about both? The new MacBook is half a pound lighter and has a half hour longer battery life - with a smaller 45 Wh battery.

The new MacBook Pro is 0.1 of a pound lighter with a 10 Wh decrease in the battery spec with the same battery life. Which means some other components got heavier. The second graphics processor? Something else must be different.

The smaller batteries show that Apple paid much attention to the new ‘Book’s power management, as predicted.

Larger trackpad with multi-touch gestures
Yes! Next up: just put the entire iPhone screen down as the trackpad with context sensitive soft buttons. I expect that in a year.

Misses:
Quad-core?
No quad-core. I expected quad-core processors on the Mac Pro, but no go. Apple’s insistence on thin cases is hurting high-end performance. The 17″ will get them - HD video requires it.

Blu-ray
Nope. Steve’s comment is telling:

The licensing is so complex, we’re waiting until things settle down before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives.

That is a shot across the bow of Sony: fix your licensing or we’ll take our sweet time about incorporating Blu-ray on Macs. Sony is working hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Memory
Predicted greater than 4 GB RAM - but Apple didn’t oblige. 4 GB isn’t enough to run FCS2 and other apps well. Apple is leaving its loyal pro users behind.

WiMax
Not today, Josephine.

The Storage Bits take
Out of 12 predictions, 8 were correct. The other 4 will come in later ‘Books - perhaps even in the next 17″ MacBook Pro.

For me the lack of FireWire on the MacBook means I’ll wait to see what the new 17″ MBP looks like. I need FireWire for video.

That disappoints now that the MacBook has graphics that can handle Motion and Final Cut Pro. But the dual-core 15″ is slow handling HD video. I’m waiting for a quad-core system with more RAM capacity.

A good update, but not the one I was looking for.

Comments welcome, of course.