December: Happy Holidays & New Year!

Pulsed Media December

Hope you have been enjoying the holidays as much as we have!
We celebrate Christmas over here, and it’s one festivity filled with ham & chocolate! 🙂 Personally i enjoy reading during the holidays a lot. As for reading material, we should recommend the Elon Musk series over at Wait But Why. There’s so much reading it could be binded and made as a small book! Especially enjoyed the Mars & SpaceX portion of this series. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

The holidays is a good time to sit back, relax and also reflect on the past year. So much has been happening over the past year, so many plans have been put into motion as well!

As usual, you can read & comment this whole newsletter in our blog, at: http://blog.pulsedmedia.com/2015/12/december-happy-holidays-new-year/

What will 2016 hold for Pulsed Media?

Software wise we are looking into options to offer better usability, and more various ways to utilize the service. This is long term progress, some of which can be seen with the addition of OpenVPN, BTSync, Sonarr, Flexget, pyLoad, Megatools etc. We will continue this progress in incremental steps.

Hardware wise we are looking to get more of SSD only servers online, bump magnetic drive capacities all around, and looking for architecture beyond single server setups. Reliability is of a key concern to us, smoother the services operate, the happier users are, that much happier we are as a service provider. Hence, we are looking into feasibility of moving to RAID10 in some of the services, especially on the older plans at first.
We are very keen to get more 8TB HDDs and 1TB/2TB SSD drives online. We also have a decision to make, either target RAID10 or bump up the global limit on bonus disk quota; which is currently roughly 170 TiB and growing every day – Yea, that is about 64 * 3TB disks worth in just raw storage total, in reality more like 90 disks due to per server allocation & raid5.
We would like to hear your take on this, which would you prefer, more disk space – or more performance & reliability?

Last, but perhaps most importantly, we are looking into better quality control methods and putting a lot of effort on quality control all around, from tiny details to larger scale methods. Things which makes services more reliable and smoother to operate.

A look in the past year

It is no secret we had quality issues during 2014 – for large part due to early model ST3000DM001 hard drives with their insanely high failure rates. By end of 2014 we were beginning to solve these disk failure issues with move to RAID5 on all new servers & Toshiba drives, and as such 2015 was started on a very great note! Many small and big successes in the last 2 months of 2014, so we were expecting great things from 2015.

Some of these great things materialized, some did not.

We added a lot of new software options during the year, and even did the much waited for ruTorrent update – which by far is much more complex than it sounds – on the short term it always introduces more problems than it solves, and such was the case this time as well.

Most important is the transition to Toshiba HDDs, which are basically Hitachi (Toshiba bought 3.5″ drive operations of Hitachi). Disk failure rates have plummeted, and almost all failures happen on the existing Seagate drives. Disk failure rate is a fraction of what it used to be. What a relief! Even our vendor were surprised by the big number of failures – Well would you not be, with 40%+ annual failure rate? Toshiba drives currently hover around 1% mark in comparison.

We also managed to slash support response times at Q4 significantly, with faster resolution and first response times than ever before.

Very SSD Holidays!

We got a treat for You! 🙂 Get a taste of how an SSD Seedbox would feel like!

We got 2 options, either 45% off first month (and first month only), or 25% recurring discount, up to a payment term of 6 months.

For 45% Off First Month, use coupon code: 1512-mSSDHolidays45 or click one of the links below:
SSD 600GiB: 31.89€ For First Month!
SSD 200GiB: 8.99€ For First Month!
SSD 40GiB: 3.57€ For First Month!

For 25% Off Recurring, use coupon code: 1512-mSSDHolidays25 or click one of the links below for 3month subscription:
SSD 600GiB: 35.99€ Monthly!
SSD 200GiB: 14.62€ Monthly!
SSD 40GiB: 4.49€ Monthly!

Price updates on the checkout page.

These are limited in quantity and available until 7th of January.

You can also check all the details at: http://pulsedmedia.com/ssd-seedbox.php