Storage Specialist Starline Interviewed on Business HDDs

Choosing the right storage products is imperative for successful businesses. We interviewed the German storage specialist Starline on the state of business hard drives in the light of reliability, capacity, performance and cost. We had the opportunity to interview Starline's CEO Carsten Wilde, in which we learned about what matters for business storage in between SAS and SSDs.

Tom’s Hardware: How would you characterize a typical Starline customer and which types of storage solutions are currently most requested by your business customers?

Starline: There is no typical customer, as our portfolio includes anything in between individual storage controllers and maximum availability, virtualized storage solutions. Customers can come to us whether they simply need products to store data reliably, or if they're looking for a complex solution based on virtual or distributed storage.

However, there are increased requirements that I would characterize as typical for all customers. Storage has to perform adequately, it has to offer lots of features and people expect solutions to be flexible and to scale up nicely. Eventually, cost-effectiveness and sustainable investments are in high demand.

Tom’s Hardware: SSDs are increasingly popular in desktop and mobile applications and it sometimes appear as if these would be taking over the storage world soon. How do your customers accept SSDs in comparison to hard drives?

Starline: There is a segment where solid state drives represent a very attractive alternative to hard drives. Yet I can tell you that only a very small part of all storage products are actually equipped with SSDs today. This is mostly because of insufficient capacities and insecurities when it comes to durability and long-term reliability. Customers want to be able to deploy various drive types, so they can adjust their storage solutions to specific applications.

Tom’s Hardware: Where is the sweet spot for business hard drives today?

Starline: We're currently seeing an ideal ratio between capacity and performance as well as power consumption on 2.5" drives that spin at 10,000 RPM. Customers typically look at higher capacities in this segment [ed: in an effort to maximize storage density].

Tom’s Hardware: Can you comment on the proportion of sold 10,000 RPM drives in contrast to those working at 10,000 RPM? How important is the 15,000 RPM spindle speed today?

Starline: 3.5" hard drives at 15,000 RPM still are the most important drive category for performance applications, but we can see that the focus is not only shifting from 3.5" to 2.5", but specifically to 2.5" at 10,000 RPM. The smaller physical dimension facilitate deploying more drives, which increases I/O density and capacity. We've had quite good feedback on Toshiba's MBF260LRC drive, which is a 2.5" drive that is shipped in a proper 3.5" frame. Our customers consider these suitable for a seamless transition to 2.5".