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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
Well, if it doesn't work, just use a bigger HAMR...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Data centers spend millions (literally) on storage. Try pricing a few hundred terabyte solutions, and you'll see.
Besides, if you could store all of music/movies/images that where -ever- created on your home drive (not just those copies of libraries of congress), why not? I'd certainly wouldn't mind having all that storage---cheaply.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Two words... p0rn and piracy...
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
Kilobyte = 1000 bytes
Megabyte = 1000 kilobytes
Gigabyte = 1000 megabytes
Terabyte = 1000 gigabytes
Kibibyte = 1024 bytes
Mebibyte = 1024 kibibytes
Gibibyte = 1024 mebibytes
Tebibyte = 1024 gibibytes
^_^
It's HAMR not HARM. Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. Here's the relevant Wikipedia article: HAMR.
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.