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Posts tagged "drives"

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Windows 11 suffers from a weird bug that messes with SATA SSDs and hard drives
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Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 users are also experiencing an odd bug with SATA hard drives that has already been witnessed plaguing Windows 10 (and indeed Windows 8.1 and 7).

Neowin reports that Microsoft let us know this problem affects Windows 11 via a support document that discusses the glitch, and advises users what can be done about it.

The bug causes an internal SATA drive – this can affect both hard drives and SSDs that are installed inside your PC via a SATA connection – to be detected as removable media in the Windows taskbar, as opposed to a permanently attached drive (which, of course, it very much is).

Microsoft explains: “Whether or not a device is considered removable is determined by your system’s BIOS and how it marks the various SATA ports on the motherboard.

“The inbox driver directly inspects SATA ports and considers devices connected to those ports marked ‘external’ as removable devices. Not all storage drivers do this, which can be a potential cause for corruption or data loss.”

Analysis: A fix is available, fortunately

The good news here is that many modern systems won’t be affected by the bug, as most SSDs these days aren’t SATA – and hard drives are a piece of tech that’s on the way out, and very much doing a vanishing act.

Still, that’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of PCs out there with a SATA drive in them, even if only an old hard drive recruited into the mix for media storage duties, say.

The good news is that Microsoft provides the details of a fix in the support document. As Microsoft advises, the first thing to do is to check for a BIOS update for your motherboard. If you haven’t got the latest version, update it, and keep your fingers crossed that this may solve the issue.

If it doesn’t, or you’re already on the newest BIOS – don’t flirt with installing any beta BIOS, by the way, it’s just not worth the risk – then Microsoft outlines instructions for manually dealing with the problem here.

Note that you will have to enter a lengthy command (which pretty much looks like gobbledegook) so make sure you get this right. It’s a touch fiddly, and involves tinkering with the Registry, so a mistyped mistake could be bad news – just be very careful you type in exactly what Microsoft says in the final step (for Windows 8 or later, which obviously includes Windows 11 users).

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Microsoft is arming intrepid Windows 12 testers with free flash drives
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Some Windows testers are receiving the offer of a free flash drive from Microsoft, although exactly who is being given the chance to pick up a freebie USB stick is slightly confusing.

Windows Latest reports that they received an email from Microsoft regarding the new Canary Channel, which is the channel created for testing the very earliest builds. In other words, next-gen Windows (quite possibly Windows 12, though we don’t know that for sure, although the name has already been leaked by Intel).

That email offered the tech site a free flash drive (with at least 8GB of storage) with the goal of performing a clean installation of Windows, a task that is recommended to be undertaken with a blank flash drive from scratch.

Those getting this offer from Microsoft have to request the drive by filling out a simple form, and the company notes that: “Items are available on a first-come, first-served basis.”

There’s a limited supply, so those USB sticks could quickly run dry by the sound of things.

Analysis: Canary confusion?

What’s slightly confusing here is that we thought only those wanting to stay in the Dev Channel would need to reinstall Windows – and therefore might need a flash drive.

The way Microsoft has implemented this fork of testing channels works like this: the old Dev Channel has effectively become the Canary Channel, and anyway whoever stays in it gets moved to these cutting-edge earliest builds (with the most chance of hitting problems). Those who want to move to the new Dev Channel have to reinstall Windows 11, perform a clean installation of the OS, and then sign up for the new Dev path.

So, it would make sense that the latter are the folks who get a free USB stick if they need it for reinstallation media. That said, Windows Latest makes it clear that Microsoft is offering USB drives to “testers who want to support the road to the platform changes,” which presumably refers to next-gen Windows (Windows 12 possibly). And the screenshot provided as evidence is clearly on the topic of the Canary Channel.

What might be happening, then, is that a limited set of testers on either side of the fence – Canary and Dev – are being offered flash drives, or at least the chance to grab them before the freebie stock runs dry.

Whatever the case, if you get this offer emailed over to you and want to take advantage, we’d advise you act pretty swiftly. Microsoft notes that delivery of the USB stick could take up to 6-8 weeks, but hopefully that’s a seriously pessimistic estimate and the hardware may turn up a good deal quicker.

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Tape could replace hard drives – in some cases – thanks to this breakthrough
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Fujitsu has announced a new technology called Virtual Integrated File System that it says could help magnetic tape storage compete with hard disk drives as a low-cost, large capacity storage alternative.

With the feud between Sony and Fujitsu around LTO resolved late last year, all eyes are now on LTO-9, which is expected to be delivered in 2020. This iteration will deliver capacities up to 26.1TB (uncompressed) and raw throughput of up to 708MB/sec.

That’s a higher capacity than the largest hard drive on the market (currently 20TB) –  also faster and likely cheaper too. Add in on-the-fly compression capabilities and, suddenly, it's all looking rosy for the venerable tape. 

Hacking the file system

Fujitsu's Virtual Integrated File System (VIFS) allows “multiple tape cartridges to be consolidated into one”, which means users can access data without worrying about individual tape cartridges.

It sounds a little like RAID but for tapes, which means that you'll likely need multiple tape drives or a tape library. This limits the product to enterprise and large businesses, where storage demands are usually measured in Petabytes and Exabytes.

The Japanese company claims to have improved the read speeds by more than fourfold in one trial run, while another test yielded a speed improvement of nearly 2X.

“This technology enables high-speed tape access performance, such as random reads and writes of various sizes occurring in archive applications, and is expected to provide a cost-effective data archiving infrastructure for long-term archiving of large volumes of data," Fujitsu added.

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Digital transformation drives public cloud spend in Middle East and North Africa
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The move by large organisations and small- and mid-sized enterprises to transform their businesses digitally is driving public cloud spend in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

Sid Nag, research vice-president at Gartner, said that government initiatives such as Smart Dubai, Smart Abu Dhabi, Bahrain’s Cloud First Policy of 2019 have bolstered cloud adoption among large organisations in the region.

Organisations are also increasingly moving their applications and workloads to the public cloud as concerns around security and governance dissipate further as many global tech companies have opened data centres in the region for data residency regulations.

Big tech companies have shown interest in the UAE to open data centres. Amazon Web Services has a cluster of data centres in Bahrain and the UAE.

Oracle already opened its first data centre in the UAE last year in Abu Dhabi and plans to open one more in Dubai this year, and two in Saudi Arabia this year, one had already opened in Jeddah, while Microsoft opened its data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi last year.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has already invested in one data centre in the UAE while SAP opened its data centres in UAE and Saudi Arabia last year.

IBM opened two data centres – one each in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – this year.

Big cloud providers need to have local data centres to cater to governments, financial and banking sectors for data residency regulations.

Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Group Lead at Microsoft UAE, that the cloud adoption was strong in the UAE but the challenge was finance and government industries because of data redundancy and latency was also another challenge for other industries as well.

After the opening of data centres in the UAE, he said there is a strong adoption of cloud services across industries and it has also unlocked all the problems of the governments.

“Governments and financial sectors are moving mission-critical apps onto the cloud and many customers in retail, construction, airlines, and small- and medium-sized companies are migrating,” he said.

Arun Khehar, senior vice-president for East-Central Europe, Middle East, Africa and India at Oracle, said that that the data centre is a huge catalyst for on-premises customers to move to the cloud as they can expand beyond their geographies and it can be done only through the internet and cloud.

“Government sector is not an issue as we have been selling to them three years back. The issue is with the sensitive part of the government such as the department of finance. This happened because of the Abu Dhabi data centre. Data sovereignty is a key issue. HR and payroll are crucial and sensitive in this part of the world,” he said.

Security and privacy issues have been taken care of because of the local data centre, he said and added that the cost of running a cloud is cheaper as there is no infrastructure cost, skills are not needed as Oracle own the skills and upgrades.

Growth drivers: CRM and ERP

Khehar said that business issues have become critical and digital transformation has become a much bigger issue than where the data is going to reside.

Nag said that the collective economic goal of the region to become more technology- and data-centric has been a cornerstone to this rapid acceptance of both the private and public cloud.

The regional market is expected to increase 21% year on year to $ 3b this year compared to $ 2.5b a year ago and this figure is expected to increase to $ 3.6b in 2021.

Nag said that SMEs in the region are focusing their investments in cloud deployments that will enable faster business analytics and artificial intelligence, both of which are key growth drivers for public cloud in the region.

In the public cloud space, software as a service (SaaS) is expected to account for 53% of the total public cloud service revenue to $ 1.6b this year compared to $ 1.3b a year ago.

“SaaS products are typically sold via subscription, allowing companies to avoid large up-front licensing fees and capital costs. The cost-effectiveness of SaaS is one of the motivations for organisations to increase their spending in the segment,” Nag said.

Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) remain the top two segments driving the growth of SaaS and will continue to go up as businesses keep enhancing their customer experience.

Nag said that ERP will accounts for 12% of the overall public cloud service revenue forecast this year and this is because most independent software vendors have converted their ERP applications from on-premises, license-based offerings to cloud-based SaaS offerings.

While business intelligence (BI) applications are currently low in the region, he said that it is the fastest-growing segment among SaaS offerings and on pace to total $ 29 million in 2020, an increase of 37% from 2019.

“BI revenue is expected to achieve 30% growth over the next three years as local businesses leverage BI-based analytics to make smarter decisions and optimize their business operations,” he said.

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