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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."
Once size is sufficient, you can solve reliability through redundency.
Not with RAID you can't. If you don't decrease the unrecoverable error rate as you increase the size of the volume, eventually you get to the point where you're almost certain to hit an unrecoverable error while rebuilding your volume. So the real question is, how is the read error rate on these tightly packed data domains?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Let's bring back hogsheads and firkins!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
The media heats and cools in 100-200 picoseconds; the laser turns on and off much faster than that. No addition to latency. Laser lifetime and reliability will be an engineering hurdle, but not a showstopper by the time a production drive is approved for release. The spot size of the laser on the media is much less than 100 x 100 nm (probably less than 50 x 50 nm) so the total heat added to the drive from the laser light itself is quite small. More heat will be added from the electronics, so thermal management of the drive environment my be more critical. However, caveats to all of these statements are that this is an early demo, not a production-ready drive, and in fact is likely not actually a real HDD like you would put in your PC. These demos are done in a lab environment with lab electronics, and lab mechanical systems to stay on-track. Still, this is a very significant step in showing that HAMR is on track for product plans later this decade.
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. :)
You're absolutely right!!! Why didn't they measure it in meters??? Then I'd have some scale being able to compare it to the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second! I mean, everyone has some idea what that is...
Don't listen to those pointy-headed physicists and their ivory-tower propaganda! The One True Metre is a piece of Platinum/Iridium bar-stock painstakingly stored by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures and roughly the same length as 1/10,000,000th of an incorrect estimate of 1/4 of a terrestrial meridian!
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.
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...
but do you ask for a 8.89 or 6.35 cm harddrive?
Also note that drive bays were named after the size of the disks that went in the drives that went in the bays. Not after the size of the bays themselves.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You spread your data chunks across whole clusters of storage systems (i.e. Nimbus.io, Amazon's S3). The important data you really than need are the SHA hashes of the data.
Sure, you lose a ton of data on a drive here or there. You immediately invalidate the drive and the data on it, replication has already brought the number of good chunks of data back to the minimum replica requirement (because, you're smart, and you're keeping 3-5 copies of the same data across your storage platform), and you stream new data to the drive.
What are the time implications of running FSCK or CHKDISK on 20TB NTFS or EXT4 ?
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)
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...