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Thursday, August 4th, 2016
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Security is improved greatly in the new platform, and we’re also rolling out SSL as an additional security measure
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Development in XenForo is more active and is based on a modern framework
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The learning curve for our users is tiny, as XenForo was built by the previous developers of vBulletin
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Extra built-in features like spam prevention that are stricter and more effective
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Easier and more intuitive platform for both new and veteran users
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The add-on ecosystem for new features and functionality is larger
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Significant increase in site speed and load times
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Responsive design that scales with resolution and mobile-friendly interface
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| 8:00a | Seagate Re-Enters Enterprise SATA SSD Market with Nytro XF1230
It's hard for any new SATA SSD to be big news. Aside from instances where new NAND flash enables higher capacities or a big price drop, almost everything we see is an incremental improvement where performance in particular doesn't increase much from one generation to the next. The new Seagate Nytro XF1230 enterprise SATA SSD is notable not for its technical specifications, but for who's selling it. Seagate has been absent from the SATA SSD market for quite a while since the 600 and 600 Pro SSDs were discontinued, but now they're getting back in the game. The Seagate Nytro XF1230 is intended for use with read-intensive workloads but its use of eMLC NAND flash also gives it decent write performance and endurance. Seagate isn't disclosing who their partners are for the NAND or the SSD controller, but the combination of Micron NAND and Marvell controllers has been working well for Seagate lately in the PCIe space.
The drive writes per day ratings are about twice the usual for read-oriented SSDs, which broadens its scope of appeal slightly. The steady-state random write performance is not record-breaking but is reasonable for this kind of product. As with virtually all enterprise SSDs, the XF1230 includes full power loss protection, but encryption support is not advertised. The Seagate Nytro XF1230 is in mass production now and is sampling to Seagate partners. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 6:00p | Western Digital Adds Helium-Filled WD Gold 10 TB HDD to Lineup
Western Digital has this week introduced its new 10TB datacenter-class helium-filled WD Gold hard drive. This drive, according to WD, boasts higher performance compared to its predecessor combined with lower power consumption. The new WD Gold 10 TB will be Western Digital’s flagship HDD for data-centers and will compete against hard drives of similar capacity from Seagate and HGST. The WD Gold 10 TB drive (WD101KRYZ) shares the hermetically-sealed 3.5” platform with the WD Gold 8 TB, which was introduced earlier this year. The new drive is based on multiple PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) platters, features a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a double-size 256 MB DRAM cache and is based on the SATA 6 Gbps interface (right now, WD does not offer Gold HDDs with SAS interface). Just like the other WD Gold HDDs, the new 10 TB model was designed for a variety of server applications, including small to medium-scale machines, as well as rack-mount data center servers and storage enclosures. The drive is promoted as being optimized for RAID environments and supports enhanced RAFF technology that protects against vibration (by monitoring linear and rotational vibration in real time) as well as head positioning system with two actuators, which increases positional accuracy. In addition, the WD Gold 10 TB also supports time-limited error recovery technology (TLER), which prevents drive fallout caused by extended HDD error recovery processes.
The WD Gold 8 TB model released earlier this year already featured a number of performance and energy efficiency optimizations and the WD Gold 10 TB hard drive is designed to improve even further. The 10 TB drive offers a 249 MB/s sustained sequential transfer rate (up from 205 MB/s in the case of the 8 TB model). Moreover, maximum power consumption of the WD Gold 10 TB is 7.1 W (down from 7.4 W for the 8 TB model, and significantly less than 8.6 W consumed by HGST’s Ultrastar He10). Western Digital does not reveal many details about how it managed to improve performance and energy efficiency, but it is logical to assume that increased areal density, an enlarged cache, and further tweaks of electronics are responsible. As for reliability, just like other WD Gold series HDDs, the new one is rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and comes with a 550TB of writes per year rated workload, which at the rated write speed gives 100 minutes of full sequential writes per day. Western Digital’s Gold 10 TB hard drives are currently available at select U.S. distributors, resellers and will shortly be sold in the company’s online store. The HDD costs $847.99 when bought from CDW. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 10:30p | This Weekend's AnandTech Forums Upgrade
Taking a break from our usual technology news, we have a bit of site news to discuss this evening. For the past couple of months we have been preparing a much-needed forums upgrade behind the scenes, one that will upgrade our circa 2009 vBulletin based forums with a newer platform based on XenForo. Among other improvements, this allows us to offer full HTTPS encryption for all connections (and better backend security), better spam control, and like the main AnandTech site itself, a single responsive design that adjusts to both desktops and mobile devices (but fear not, we’re also continuing Taptalk support). With the bulk of the behind the scenes work having wrapped up, we’re finally ready to complete the upgrade and transfer everything over to the new forums. To do this we’ll be taking the AnandTech forums offline this Friday at 6pm ET (22:00 UTC). This will allow us to minimize the disruption and allow the bulk of the transfer to take place overnight, with the new forums set to come online on Saturday.
The full announcement from Purch’s community team is posted below. Further information can be found in the respective threads linked below, and, of course, our comment system will not be impacted by this change. Greetings AnandTech members! In the interest of substantially improving the user experience and security for all members in our community, we’re migrating the forum software from vBulletin to XenForo. We’re undertaking this important move for a number of reasons: We’ll be taking the forum offline for a number of hours over this coming weekend to complete the migration. Upon return from the downtime, all of your content and profile information will be present, and you’ll be able to login as normal. Our goal with this transition is to provide a stable base platform, so we’ve endeavored to keep any major, customized changes apart from the platform to a minimum. The theme itself is simpler and cleaner to allow members to acclimate. We’re holding off on any massive thematic or extraneous feature changes (keeping them to a small number), and going as vanilla as possible to make the move a smooth one, as switching to a new platform is a major undertaking and we’re resolved to keep your content safe above all else. We know that jumping platforms can be disruptive to your routine; familiarity and comfort of habits are as important in online communities as they are in real life. We are making this change to safeguard the continued growth of AnandTech, with both eyes towards a very bright future for the community. During the transition, please bear with us patiently as we work diligently to bring the forum over to the new platform. To read over some of the big changes and how they might affect you, check out our handy guide to transitioning from vBulletin to XenForo here: If you encounter a bug with the new platform, please let us know in this thread: Thank you for your attention, and we’ll see you on the forums! Warm Regards,
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