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Seagate Plans 37.5TB HDD Within Matter of Years
Ralph_19 writes "Wired visited Seagate's R&D labs and learned we can expect 3.5-inch 300-terabit hard drives within a matter of years. Currently Seagate is using perpendicular recording but in the next decade we can expect heat-assisted magnetic recording (HARM), which will boost storage densities to as much as 50 terabits per square inch. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum." In the meantime, Hitachi is shipping a 1 TB HDD sometime this year. It is expected to retail for $399.
It's bad enough that hard drive manufacturers are dead set on confusing people with 1,000,000,000-byte GBs. Do they really need to start throwing around figures in Terabits? Seriously, enough is enough...
I want to see the tape drive for that thing, Bitches.
That's a great amount of storage and a great price, but what about some REAL information: Speed, heat, power consumption. If for the same price I can run 4 250gb drives and save on heat and increase speed, this doesn't make sense to do. If I can run 6 and RAID them, and gain security, it really doesn't make sense.
The largest drive in the world isn't any use to me if it's slower than a 3.5" floppy or I can use it to replace my space heater.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Although amusing, HARM is not an acronym for "Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording." Looks like Zonk didn't even read the summary again, much less the article...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Well, if it doesn't work, just use a bigger HAMR...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
How does the capacity of a drive have anything to do with its seek time? Seek time is a function of how quickly the read arm can cross the radius of the platter, and to a smaller degree how fast the platter spins. The article claims they will be increasing storage density using this HARM thing so that more bits can be stored on the same amount of surface area. Seek time should not change significantly unless they make the platters larger, or spin the drive at lower RPM.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
37.5TB = 300Tb. TB is a "rounder" unit and as such is more suitable to a headline, although it's still a bit confusing.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these? In my experience, PC hard disks are already way too big. A friend of mine uses his 100 gig drive for some emailing, websurfing, playing a few games, and music playback. Last time I checked his PC it was over 85% empty. And most of the space that was consumed was the O/S.
All a bigger drive gives joe average is a longer defrag time, and longer search time. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of current domestic end-user drive space is currently empty.
Sure, many slashdotters will have filled their disks with all manner of stuff. I'm a developer, and the obj files alone for games stretching back 10 years certainly take a up a huge chunk of my disk, but we aren't average joes.
I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:
Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK)
Seek Time
Cost
Why innovate on capacity? it's the one major metric that most people have stopped caring about. I'm not being a luddite, for a long time disk capacity *was* a major issue, and we regularly ran out of space. I think that time is over.
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Gigantic hard drives are great and all, but I'm especially wary of anything Seagate releases that's new.
My first large hard drive was a Seagate 120GB 7200.7 that still works to this day. It's one of my favorite drives and has never let me down.
I needed more space so I buy the then top-of-the-line Seagate 300GB 7200.8. I believe this was the first to use Perpendicular Recording Technology. I backed up all of my precious data on there and went about my business, only to realize that after 8 short months, the drive had completely crashed and took with it all of my data. Slaving the drive did not work, no program I used to recover lost files could detect the hard drive... it simply disappeared from Windows and was never seen again.
There are lots of similar stories if you just do some online searching. Since this isn't just a localized case, I'm justifiably wary of any new technology that Seagate releases. Everytime Seagate implements a new technology in their hard drives, I make sure to wait a few generations before buying it. This way, the price is lower, bugs are fixed, and hopefully I'll be able to keep my data for longer than a few months.
This drive will not be 1TB. It's another scam. Rather than actually be a 1GB drive, as in 1,099,511,627,776 bytes it's a 931.32~ GB drive as in 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yep, 69GB short of a Terabyte. It's just falsely advertised as a 1TB drive.
Hard drive makers:
Kilobyte = 1024 bytes
Megabyte = 1024 kilobytes
Gigabyte = 1024 megabytes
Terabyte = 1024 gigabytes
Label your fscking drives accurately.
All BS aside: you do bring up an excellent point. I'm a guy who has to do backup/recovery, and I've found that even a fully compressed LTO-3 will barely --just barely-- hold up to 1.2TB if you rig it right (by combining hardware/software compression, and the love that Bacula gives it (though admittedly sparse file handling most likely has inflated the reported amount of stuff).
Anyrate, that boils down to --maybe-- two full HDD's if the two are 500GB SATAs.
The good news is, after you pare down the crap you really don't need to backup, it usually isn't all that much for most companies. You can safely exclude out most of the OS itself for starters... w/ kickstart on RHEL and a .ks file that replicates what you've got on a given server (partitions, packages, etc), you can cut a LOT out.
Even more good news - if you get up a monster RAID array of similar drives (full SAN kitting or just attached to a big ol' server, no biggie), you can use it instead of tapes for most of your day-to-day backup. Then latch your tape drive or autoloader onto it and only commit to tape the reallly vital stuff that requires a long retention period. Most backup software suites (even Bacula) support writing to file as well as tape, so this shouldn't be too big of a problem for a sysadmin if s/he knows what s/he's doing.
Adaptation and all that.
But then, most of the servers in my care consist of a pile of RAID5'ed SCSI drives that range 36-140GB in size... and I doubt that most of them will get much bigger before it's time to replace the servers themselves. Just because you can get monster capacity on a single drive, doesn't mean that you need to or even want to.
Now if I already had a monster robotic multi-drive tape library running 24/7 now, and the boss wants to up the HDD capacity on a given pile of servers because he pretty much has to? Yeah. That would require a lot more thought and planning, and at that stage of the game a disk backup solution similar to what's been outlined above would be big and ugly, but would pretty much be what you're stuck with having to do.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The cost, longevity, performance, and capacity is completely inferior to making backups of disks onto other disks, and has been for quite some time. I have no idea why people ever stick with tape at all these days other than for nostalgia. Does it feel good to have a cartridge using a remarkably old fashion approach to data storage or are people just ill-informed?
Why bother.
Here is a Capacity over time chart.
Just eyeballing the straight line, this chart shows capacity doubling every 21-22 months or so. Lately things have sped up a bit.
I don't think someone would announce a drive that was 9 years away. It looks like things are moving at a faster clip, faster even than the 18-month "Moores law" that applies to transistors.
Here is the important question on everyone's mind:
Which is doubling faster:
Drive size or the yearly porn production rate?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You can keep your HAMRs away from my HDD as well.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
It's HAMR not HARM. Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. Here's the relevant Wikipedia article: HAMR.
I think the market is right around the corner: high-definition TV.
The PVR market has been crippled in recent years because of market confusion, and compatibility problems (will my TiVO work with my cable box, etc.), plus competition for consumers' money by HDTVs themselves.
Once people get done buying their HDTV and paying off their credit cards, they're going to start looking at PVRs. I think that's a market that's probably going to explode in the next 5-10 years, even more than it has already. I also think you're going to see PVR functionality being built into the 'standard' cableco boxes, rather than as an upgrade. (Not that it will be free, they'll just charge everyone for it.)
High-def TV takes up a lot of space. That means if you want to have significant PVR functionality, you need to have a lot of local storage. 37.5TB, or 300Tb (aka 300,000,000Mb, if we use the 'marketing department' definitions) would be about 4,340 hours (180 days) of 19.2Mb/s HDTV. While that seems impossibly huge, I could imagine a future PVR using it as local cache: constantly downloading and storing programming based on your preferences. Add in a big HD movie library (say the contents of your local Blockbuster) and you can give the customer the impression of many simultaneous channels, even if they only have a relatively narrow pipe. (Narrow being 1 HD channel at a time, or a 20Mb pipe -- fat by today's standards, granted.)
Content always expands out to fill the available capacity. I remember when I first heard about the development of DVDs, back in the early 1990s. They seemed pretty ridiculously big then, too. Now I have stuff that I can't back up to DVDs, because it would be impractical to split it among so many discs as would be required. (Apple's Aperture doesn't even try to have a backup-to-DVD option, it's designed strictly to work with removable hard discs as backup 'Vaults.')
There was a time when people thought 20MB removable media was more than a single person would ever need, though we might look back and laugh. There's going to be a time in the future when 40TB looks the same way.
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For "ms" read "milliseconds" not "minutes".
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
When I asked why, he said that although he didnt want to buy another drive, he understood the importance of having a backup for his data.
Well, obviously he's not going to be protected from a failure of the drive mechanism. But his strategy isn't totally useless. By copying to a seperate partition he's protected himself from accidental erasure, and corruption of the data (though software that either corrupts it, or from a power failure).
It's really a poor mans archival mechanism. I'd argue that data corruption or unwanted erasure happens more often than drive failure.. though I do agree the guy shouldn't have chinced out and just bought 2 drives, RAID-1 them, and then figure out some proper archival method like tape, or even a removable drive.
AccountKiller
FYI, 300 / 8 = 37.5
Sweet jesus, do you people not even read the summary anymore??
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Your anecdotal experience runs contrary to most of the anecdotes I've read, most of which say that Seagate has good reliability (I've always found it to be so, at least, in the post-ST-506 era) and that hitachi drives are all big pieces of crap.
Proof, of course, that anecdotal information is worth every penny spent on the study that produced it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real problem is that Windows is reporting drive and file sizes in GiB (while making the mistake of labelling it GB of course). Solution: Insert an option in Explorer (and any other file managers that do this, not sure off the top of my head what does and doesn't for other OSes) to toggle between GiB and "true" GB. Hard drive vendors should then use both units to avoid confusion. When I go on newegg or wherever, I should see drives labelled as 80 GB (74 GiB) Seagate SATA blah blah blah.
Me, I'd rather have the 5-year warrantee. All data should be backed up. If your drive fails, buying a new one sucks. 500G * 5 years = 2.5T/yrs. 500G * 2 years = 1T/yrs. I'd rather get 2.5 times my storage-over-time. Especially after all the WD drives that crashed. (My last harddrive purchases, in reverse chrono order, by gigabytes: Seagates:750,500,500,400,300,250,200, WDs:120,120,120,120,80,80,80,60,40,25,17,4). Out of all of those, WDs have generally not lasted as long (crashed: 4g, 60g, 80g, 120g), and the warrantee has been the deciding factor of whether I need to spend ~$300 for a new drive or not.
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Do you want to HARM your data or do you want to HAMR it?
Frankly, neither one sounds very appealing to me.
As others have pointed out, the hard drive manufacturers are following the proper convention, and in fact (if you look into the history), HD manufacturers have been using the "factor of 1000" convention since the very beginning (since the first magnetic platters, really).
I still have a 20MB hard drive that holds 20,9xx,xxx bytes on it. The switchover happened back in the 80's, and was a deliberate move by the harddrive manufacturers to deceive people. You can rattle on about standards all you want, but it all started because of a scummy marketing move.
Besides, they are still only one of the few playing that game. When was the last time you saw either a 528MB or a 512MiB memory module for sale?