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Seagate Hits 1 Terabit Per Square Inch
MrSeb was one of several readers to submit news that drive manufacturer Seagate has announced (and demoed) the first hard drive to squeeze a terabit into each square inch of platter.
"'Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively. To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic 'bit.' These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, 'high density' magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy, are more stubborn when it comes to writing data — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away. With HAMR, Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head; when it wants to write data, the laser turns on. Reading data is still done conventionally, without the laser. In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic sites that are just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range."
Can current motherboards handle that?
Geek Hillbilly
"Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head"
Well, there goes my hopes for an intelligent discussion.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
STOP! It's HAMR time!
They are on ultimately diverging paths which may coexist symbiotically forever unless one beats the other out in either cost, reliability, or functionality.
MPAA says this will cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars every year.
"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."
What is this "inch" you keep going on about? Who's thumb is that, yours, mine or some king or others? How about using some sensible measurements for a change? Fractions of a football pitch should do it, or at a pinch, submultiples of "the size of Wales".
For the past few years, I've seen so many bad drives from all the major manufacturers, I wonder if they'll start looking at reliability over size?
I want a hard drive with some frikin' lasers!!!!!
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
I wonder what the power consumption increase is if you have to strap a heating laser to the write head. Lately the market seem to reward Technology that trends toward less power usage, not more
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Granted most of *us* can find something to fill it but when Dell and other bulk PC makers start including 1TB or 10TB drives in their basic PC's, most of it will still be unused by the general public. With higher MP cameras I can fill mine up with video and pics and a few converted movies/music. But with streaming options and so much available online or stored online for you, I just don't see the need to keep a ton of torrented movies and other files around taking up space and having to manage.
The more space we have, it seems the more we keep. I can see a new show as a spinoff of "Hoarders" showing just what all is in your computers HDD.
I've noticed that the more storage you have, the more junk you fill it with. At my work, we have SANs with several Terabytes of storage, mostly filled with junk. When you have millions of useless files, it becomes a tedious task to search, and backup data. In the early days, there was a lot more cleanup of stored data, and only important files were kept on disks.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Wonder how much does the magnetic bit need to be heated before it can be written upon. When used in a laptop, battery consumption and heat generated by it might be an issue.
I for one am happy to hear this. A lot of people probably thinks this will slow down SSDs move to mainstream computers but I do not. Once SSDs get to a reasonable price (under $1/GB before rebates) I can see them start becoming a common option for computers people buy in places like Bestbuy. Just imagine the "upgrade your hard drive to ultra fast speeds. Load windows faster than ever before for only $50 more" ads.
Don't get me wrong I love my SSD drives, but that tech needs to to start finding some way to move forward at a faster and a better $/GB..I guess its $/TB now :)
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Look forward to 60TB cellphones!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I am wondering what the downsides to such large density are: how fast can the laser be turned on and off? The longer it takes for it to fire the bigger the random write latency. Secondly, how long does such a laser last, can we expect 10 years from it? Thirdly, what does this mean for power consumption? More? Less? Fourth, on machines with write-heavy tasks would the drive heat up even more than they now do?
Sure, 60TB storage sounds a lot, but I have trouble believing this thing is as wonderful as Seagate makes it sound like.
If they can't improve the bit error rates from where they are today, then increasing capacity by a factor of 30x or so is going to make these drives much more susceptible to hard failures.
I think they're going to have to make these HDDs pretty dang smart using things like automatic on-disk redundancy and "failover" in addition to proactive and accurate detection and avoidance of "bad" sectors.
From Wikipedia: "Seagate believes it can produce 300 terabit (37.5 terabyte) Hard disk drives using HAMR technology"
It's obvious that the DragonFly guys are geeked for this.. I mean HAMMER on HAMR is going to rock.
I have a lot of heat coming from my rig. This oughta work fine on it!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
like terabit per cm? Maybe even terabit per cm, as the medium always is having some volume.
I really hope they figure out how to make a faster read write speed. It is already almost a given that if you have a RAID 5 setup with 2TB drives there is bound to be an error during rebuild. There was a report on the chance of failure of an array using large drives failing during rebuild. So instead of RAID6 or are we going to have to go to a 3 parity RAID? They claimed RAID 5 should have failed in 09 and that is sata drives but if you put 60TB on a single drive you are asking for trouble IMO. Granted a nice RAID10 would be nice though. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162
I recently did some calculations off Kryder's Law, and happened to keep the results. We would normally expect (based purely off regular continuous improvement) 6TB hard drives as early as next year, and 60TB hard drives around 2018.
So, while this is undoubtedly an improvement, it's not exactly a revolutionary one. WD et al. are probably at similar stages, either with this technology or with some other technique.
Cool. Instead of using say a half dozen smaller drives and losing some data to drive failure, now you can put it all in one place and lose it all at once!
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
So they are just going to HAMR that data in?
You never know how much HAMRing they had to do to shove it all on there.
Maybe if they HAMR a little easier the drives will be less moody.
How often can we HAMR the drives before they want to leave us?
Is our relationship only going to be a HAMRing?
HAMR Head Sharks can hold two frickin lasers! Take that you great white hater!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
As the density increases, the size of a short-stroked partition will be physically smaller too, making the seek times shorter. :)
As an engineer I am truly impressed by the clever material breakthrough. However, I can't imagine how they can manage the mechanical precision on the positionning on the read/write locations of the HDD. Having a 1 nm wide bit size is not helpful if you are not in the same range for the relative head/disk position? Or I am missing something?
Look up racetrack memory on Wikipedia. If everything goes as planned, it'll actually out-perform SSDs (and even some DRAM) while having density comparable to hard drives.
While I suspect it'll never scale to mass production at consumer prices, maybe I'll be surprised.
The good news is that if the laser fails, the data should still be available to read and copy onto a new hard drive. If the laser was needed for reading as well, I'd be wary of the reliability.
this is somehow related to this: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/12/206224/ibm-shrinks-bit-size-to-12-atoms
As much as I love stories about X company being able to stuff Y capacity into storage device, the last few years have proven instructive.
1) How about doing it and producing it in such a way so that it is cheaper, not more expensive than last year?
2) How about making them at least a little bit reliable. I know you just want us to consume more and more of your drives, but lets get back to 5 year warranty's already. This one year BS is BS.
3) Maybe rather than doing the R&D to find a 60TB HD you do the R&D to find a building lot not on a fscking flood plain?
Thanks,
From everyone that bought a HD in the last year or so...
This seems like a step in the wrong direction. Yes maybe for archival purposes the HAMR process might be just what is needed. But the problem with existing drives is 1. Temperature , 2. Power consumption, 3. Reliability. None of this is solved by making it consume more power.
And much of the problem can be thrown back at the OS vendors who do things like "try to keep as much RAM free by swapping to the hard drive as much as possible." Windows, Linux, that's you. FreeBSD doesn't do this.
What I could see happening is that SLC NAND drives come in 64GB sizes cheaply, and these drives become OS drives, and just sit plugged in to a PCIe3.0 slot and OS's start being designed around it. Then connected drives are always used as data, programs, or swap/tmp depending on their properties when powered up. If the device is SLC NAND (High durability Single cell NAND) it can be used for everything but temp/swap. If it's MLC NAND, it can't be used for the OS but can be used for programs or data, and absolutely not for swap/temp. If it's RAMDRIVE, it can be used for swap, temp, and if battery backed it can also be used for hibernate. If it's a low-power spinning drive, then the OS tries not to put the Swap/temp/Hibernate on it (since it would keep spinning up and down whenever the swap is written) unless there are no other drives. If it's an "always on, high power, high speed" drive, then it avoids temporary and swap files but can be chained together with other drives for redundancy.
The issue I see, is that power isn't even being considered. Vibration and noise probably isn't either. It almost seems like the error rate would increase with smaller bits, and this seems to keep bringing spinning drives closer to the unreliability point that SSD's have.
I know that there are some pretty exotic coatings in use today, but I can't help feeling, considering the number of disks likely to be sold, that this is not going to help conserve the already overstretched usage of noble metals (e.g catalytic converters etc). If Seagate bring this to market at a competitive price, then that will would be another reason to invest in noble metal mining shares (or even metal, if one can stomach the ride).
This will probably get modded all to shit since i dont have a referance, but do you think this technology will actually hit the market?
I remember back in the good old days of CD's, there was a company that created a new type of recording information to CD's using fluorescent lighting. They had a working model they presented at a technology expo, and it was all the rave saying how it will blow CD's and DVD's out of the water with the amount of storage capacity (they were able to get close to a hundred layers on a disc the size of a CD). I can't remember what the exact storage capacity was, and a google search comes up with nothing anymore. I just remember that the company suddenly disappeared (probably bought out and the tech scrapped).
Makes me wonder if the same thing might happen again, although, with a company as well known as seagate, I think it might be harder for them to disappear.
My modern PC will still become completely unresponsive during intense disk operations. Even the UI will not respond. I have 8 cpu cores and 8GB of RAM. Yet the UI fails to respond until the current io process has completed. Why?
First of all, forgive my terminology: I'm quite ignorant on the subject, I just have memories of stuff read over the years.
That said, I guess the lasers included in the Seagate drive are diodes, as I recall they're just better over tubes on the cost side.
But I also remember reading that diodes have a sort of "wear" problem: over time they tend to emit less intense light to the point it gets insufficent to perform the task.
That's one of the reasons why CD/DVD drives "stop working" after a few years: the diode becomes unable to heat the disc's pits enough to perform writings first, and reads later on.
Could this impact those drives aswell? And to what extent?
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Why aren't there any large (500GB+), low performance and relatively cheap (say 2x the cost of a hard drive of equivalent size) SSDs?
I don't need 80,000 IOPs
Sure. Once you've picked up all of the older classic bits of content from Frys or Walmart for a song, then you can pretty much turn your back on the MPAA.
I have so much stuff that I tend to forget the stuff that I have rented via Netflix. Never mind the cinema.
Why watch the remake when the original is available and cheaper than one trip to the movies?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What are the time implications of running FSCK or CHKDISK on 20TB NTFS or EXT4 ?
You cant touch this
Can't wait 'til Fast wRite Technology HAMR emerges...
people will do anything for porn.
Sweet now we can have disks with fricking lasers on their heads.
Time to offend someone
In my mind not at all. I have 2 external 1 TB drives for my music in FLAC. This is more than enough and in my desktop 2x500GB drives of which I run some very hungry programs and I can tell you that is more than plenty for me. SSD drives are good and that is the way I am going in the next few weeks. Therefore does more really mean more, or is that more headaches when it comes around to data recovery?
All cows eat grass!
I do my work from home some days with a VNC connection to work. It runs about 1.2Mbps when I'm busy (6-meg DSL).
I see almost no reason why a home user should want to have a local hard drive, except perhaps to cache media files until the upload is done (in the background, and seamless working through the cache until the upload is done, of course).
Give it a couple years and Google will offer free computers with free Internet connections in exchange for usage tracking. 70% of the population will take them up on that deal. Unless Amazon gets there first.
All that said, there's going to be a huge need for storage on the backend.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If all else fails, use a smaller HAMR?
I'm so confused. I've been doing it wrong all these years, using a BFH to compress all those bits!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Their 1TB drives are crap and have such a bad failure rate. I'll wait this one out and see how this goes.
I still think the answer to both the SSD and Mechanical question is hybrid drives. Seagate has tried them in the past, but they definitely aren't as fast as normal SSDs. If they can improve that tech and attach it to something like this, it's literally the best of both world. Honestly it would just be a much improved drive cache, which Seagate and other drive makers could've improved for years... but somehow never did...
will undoubtedly proove so reliable that disk drive warranties are also shrunk down to at most 1 year and eventually the target 90 days to be in compliance with all other consumer electronics.
Given that transfer rates will increase by the square root of density, a 20x increase in capacity (to 60TB) will only have at most have a 5x increase in transfer rates.
Assuming that the transfer rate makes it to 500MB/s this will take 33 hours to read the contents of the drive - so something like a RAID scrub, or an offsite backup will be almost impractical.
If 10gig etherent doesn't make it to the desktop, a network backup at 1Gb/s will take a week's network bandwidth...
And even RAID will be an issue - with the loner rebuild times even with hot spares chance of a double disk failure is 5x higher than they are now (and they do happen now!)
Since the materials themselves are harder to magnetize, doesn't that mean they will actually hold on to the data longer?
Also, will existing hard drive wiping machines that use strong electromagnets need to be modified as well?
Even if you have it backed up, reconstructing that drive would take days.
Then you are doing it wrong because in all of the backup technologies I use, I would either simply clone the backup drive (hours at most) or restore from a backup like Time Machine, also taking just a few hours...
I mean, if you were still doing incremental backup to tape I suppose. But disks to do direct clones of are cheap and then at most you are losing a week or two of data, not 60TB.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
60 TB ought to be enough for anyone... ...within the next 5 years. I remember my first computer with hard disks (not the first computers I owned that didn't have hard drives), and I knew that 20 MB was not nearly enough. I had floppy disks coming out of my ears. A few years later, people looked at me strangely for buying a 500 MB drive. A few years after that, it seemed very small compared to my 40GB drives. The machine I have now has two 500GB drives (and one 120 GB SSD). I had a third drive in it for a while, but one of the drives died (which I replaced with the SSD), and when I got warranty drive from the manufacturer, I stockpiled it for when the next drive dies. A 500 GB drive won't get obsolete that fast.
You store your DVD collection on top of your mattress?
Like all good IT personnel he does everything in a rack.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
or do, according to preference
For comparison, it's been 60 years since IBM invented disk storage.
Its RAMAC system held 5 million characters in a stack of huge disks.
An 11-minute video of its San Jose site and RAMAC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=USJGui9yIuA
Assuming constant RPM
Why would you assume that, or the same platter size?
When we actually reach 60TB I'm pretty sure both factors will be improved.
You also totally ignored how ONE of the approaches I use is essentially a mirror. It doesn't matter if creating a new backup drive does take days, when you switch to an existing backup drive as the first step and are working in moments. If you have one local and one offsite drive there is no risk in doing that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley