60TB Disk Drives Could Be a Reality In 2016

CWmike writes "The maximum areal densities of hard disk drives are expected to more than double by 2016, according to IHS iSuppli. Hard drive company Seagate has also predicted a doubling of drive density, and now IHS iSuppli is confirming what the vendor community already knew. Leading the way for greater disk density will be technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which Seagate patented in 2006. Seagate has already said it will be able to produce a 60TB 3.5-in. hard drive by 2016. Laptop drives could reach 10TB to 20TB in the same time frame, IHS iSuppli stated. It said areal densities are projected to climb to a maximum 1,800 Gbits per square inch per platter by 2016, up from 744 Gbits per square inch in 2011. Areal density equals bit density, or bits of information per inch of a track, multiplied by tracks per inch on a drive platter. This year, hard drive areal densities are estimated to reach 780Gbits per square inch per platter, and then rise to 900Gbits per square inch next year."

Comments

For depressed people

[SadBob]

Since pirates are depressed people, these will be perfect fit for depressed pirates.

Re:For depressed people

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be buying four :-(

Re:For depressed people

[wanzeo]

Associating large drives with pirates is just the sort of thinking that will lead to a blank media tax, or even requiring buyers to register.

Re:For depressed people

[mccalli]

Associating them with depression however leads to them being available on medical prescription...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:For depressed people

[Anonymous Coward]

Fyi, lots of countries already have a blank media tax.

Re:For depressed people

[Anonymous Coward]

Associating large drives with pirates is just the sort of thinking that will lead to a blank media tax, or even requiring buyers to register.

Which is why we're trying to push for an anti-depressants tax instead.

Re:For depressed people

[jd]

That only helps in Britain, as prescription charges are fixed. In the US, all the insurance companies need to say is that data storage requirements are a pre-existing condition.

WOW

[__aaeihw9960]

That's a shitload of porn.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

no. it's about the same amount of higher density porn.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

no. it's about the same amount of higher definition porn.

FTFY

Re:WOW

[Hentes]

Or 3D.

Re:WOW

[Nyder]

That's a shitload of porn.

I must be a nerd, because my digital comic collection is bigger then my porn collection.

Re:WOW

[AngryDeuce]

Or 4D even!!!!!!!

Re:WOW

[AngryDeuce]

I stopped keeping porn a long time ago. It's just too easy to stream the shit now, no need to take up valuable hard drive space or leave files around to be found by spouses and children.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be a nerd, because my digital comic collection is bigger then my porn collection.

For some people, those would be one and the same.

Re:WOW

[xQx]

Truecrypt.

That's all I have to say on the matter.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do not associate shit with my porn.
Thank you.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

No, nerds tend to use proper English. You just have low libido.

Re:WOW

[MightyYar]

I use Spousal Truecrypt. It's an unencrypted folder titled "Sports".

Re:WOW

[NaughtyNimitz]

Until your smart wife discovers your loot when she types "creampie" or "cup" in spotlight (or similar windows search engine)

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why you don't index that subdirectory. Just like with my backup directory.

Re:WOW

[Jafafa Hots]

Don't assume like that. There are people into ANY kind of porn, whether high definition or high density.

Re:WOW

[MightyYar]

Well, I was joking. I do have a directory called "porn" for that special sentimental stuff, but mostly I just browse xvideos.com. My wife doesn't care (or at least doesn't admit to caring).

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a female roomie that was so fucking stupid she would put all her home-made porn into the recycle bin and then never empty the shit. You guys are probably thinking "fucking HAWT", but I assure you, it wasn't...her and her boyfriend were both easily 300 pounds (and I'm betting boyfriend was closer to 400 than 300).

It was a real pain in the ass to masturbate to, that's for sure...

Re:WOW

[zlives]

no only 3d images are allowed

Re:WOW

[Alter_3d]

I use Spousal Truecrypt. It's an unencrypted folder titled "Sports".

A friend of mine kept his porn folder on plain view. The folder title was "Uninstall Windows". The wife never looked inside.

Re:WOW

[rubycodez]

just have to change the file names using sports-related code words, e.g.

double play == DP
shot on goal = bukkake
field goal == tittie fuck to completion
play ball == tea bag

Re:WOW

[jamstar7]

Dude, that's the stuff you SELL.

Re:WOW

[mug funky]

love how this got a +5 insightful :)

Re:WOW

[mug funky]

she probably fapped just as hard to it and never said a word...

Re:WOW

[FrootLoops]

"valuable" hard drive space? You probably stopped keeping porn a few years ago when space was harder to come by. Today, all my files are under 1 TB and around 0.5% (6 GB) of that is porn. The article is talking about 60 TB disk drives in 4 years--at some point enough is enough, and for me that point has already passed.

That said, maybe it's easier to stream high-quality straight porn (I assume you're straight). Streamed gay porn is often low quality or amateurish, which is often fine, but it's not always to my taste, hence part of my "stash". (The other part being pictures I particularly liked.)

Finally, and I freely admit I have no spouse, hiding porn from your spouse sounds like a terrible plan. You should be honest enough with your spouse to admit porn use, and they should be understanding enough to accept it. Children, though, I understand.

Re:WOW

[dbIII]

It's just too easy to stream the shit now

It's been a few years but Tubgirl just won't go away.

Re:WOW

[Tarlus]

Smell-o-vision?

Re:WOW

[jones_supa]

in spotlight (or similar windows search engine)

We use a yellow dog.

Re:WOW

[Neil Boekend]

Time.

Re:WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Watersports?

Re:WOW

[operagost]

If that part of the anatomy was hurting, you probably bought the wrong kind of device.

Re:WOW

[jd]

Since density is mass per unit volume, the only two ways to increase density are to either replace the atoms in the models' bodies with heavier, highly unstable ones, or push them into a compacter. The first might cause problems due to the cameras suffering radiation damage. The latter would cut into the celebrities they have at those adult expos.

I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

If 4TB is the biggest drive you can get today, wouldn't densities have to increase by 15x to get to 60TB drives by 2016, not just "more than double"

Re:I don't get it.

[dgatwood]

No, you'e thinking too linearly. The density increases in two dimensions, so the capacity increases by the square of the density (approximately). You would need just shy of a 4x increase in capacity without increasing the number of platters. If you can find a way to decrease the spacing between platters, you could get a 15x capacity increase with an even smaller density increase.

Re:I don't get it.

[atrain728]

The numbers the summary cites are Gbits per square inch. Meaning it's already been squared.

Re:I don't get it.

[dgatwood]

In that case, yes, it would have to increase by a factor of 15.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two dimensions. That means that the density is quadrupled, because it's squared parallel to the platter, and also squared perpendicular.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should make a new platter standard, one the size of an ATX motherboard. That way, we could hook a large, thin single platter drive into the ATX holes, then affix the the motherboard to the hard drive. We could call it a Bernoulli standard, or something.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the total storage increases linearly with the density (though yes, geometrically with the size).

Example: I have ten cubic feet of bunnies. Bunnies have a density of, say, five pounds per cubic foot. That gives me fifty pounds of bunny. If I double the bunny-density to ten pounds per cubic foot, I now have a hundred pounds of bunny. Doubling the density doubled the weight.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

15x is more than double.

Re:I don't get it.

[MickyTheIdiot]

HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot!!!11!

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot!!!11!

why did they stop selling those? doesn't everyone need a 5.25" half hight format hd? or 4?

Re:I don't get it.

[jsm300]

No, the article is quoting aureal density which is expressed in gigabits or terabits per square inch. The problem with the article is that it is combining data from various sources and misreading/misinterpreting the data (so what's new, this is Slashdot after all).

First, the summary above says that Seagate will produce a 60 Tb drive by 2016. That is not true. Seagate has said they will produce a drive with "up to" 60 Tb of capacity (30-60 TB) by the end of the decade. This is based on the theoretical limits of HAMR technology, which are projected to be in the 5-10 Tbits/sq. inch. range. Current 4TB drives are made with platters that have a density of around 650 Gbits/sq. in., so the math works (10Tb/.65Tb is approximately 15x).

The other part of the article is talking about what the maximum density is likely to be over the timeframe from now to 2016 using PMR technology and transitioning to something new like HAMR. PMR technology will top out at about 1Tbit/sq. inch, so anything over that will require something new like HAMR. that underlying article quotes 1.8 Tbit/sq. in in 2016, which may not be out of line with 5-10 Tbit/sq. in. by 2020 as a new technology like HAMR comes online.

The two articles that I am basing the above on are:
Seagate/HAMR article
IHS/ISuppli article

Re:I don't get it.

[iamhassi]

If 4TB is the biggest drive you can get today, wouldn't densities have to increase by 15x to get to 60TB drives by 2016, not just "more than double"

Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. 4tb came out Oct 2011. Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale. And for anyone wondering the answer is yes, the 4tb drives already use five platters, 800gb each, so they can't shove more platters in there to double capacity currently, they have to significantly increase areal density.

But while storage continues to increase, the types of media we store is not increasing in size. HD Video is probably the most common space hog on any personal computer at 25 to 40 mbit per second of video, about 11 to 18gb per hour, but once we have hundreds of terabytes what do we need more space for? For higher high definition video? At some point even video quality will surpass what the human eye can distinguish, especially from across the room.

And once we have hundreds of terabytes how do we fill the drive? Most of the content on my PC is downloaded, but internet speeds have not increased drastically over the years, I'm still at the same speed now as I was in 2000 and paying about the same amount.

They're putting the cart before the horse, they're offering us storage for something we don't have to store and that we can't even obtain through current technology.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot!!!11!

Bring it back? My file server still boots off one. Scary, but true.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 6000SUX of hard drives.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two dimensions make a plane. 3 non-linear points also make a plane. Just thought you might want to know.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You’re forgetting the time it would take for the heads to move that far. There’s a reason we have multiple smaller platters.

Re:I don't get it.

[Wescotte]

I don't know if this is the real reason they quit making them but I worked at a local computer builder (had about 25 satellite stores at the time) and they by far had the worst failure rate of any hard drive I've ever seen.

Re:I don't get it.

[Hal_Porter]

If a storage medium is dense but a bit slow, it just means it has a place lower in the storage hierarchy

Rather like if a slashdot poster is dense and a bit slow, he has a place lower in the slashdot hierarchy

Re:I don't get it.

[Gr8Apes]

You were already at 5, so thank you for concisely correcting the summary. Essentially we can realistically expect 8-10 TB drives by 2016, until something like HAMR comes along which may get us to 60TB. Even 8TB drives will be close to the sweet spot for a mass store drive for me, I'd only need a couple on line plus enough for a couple of backup copies. Just think how long the backup process would be with a 60TB drive!

Re:I don't get it.

[Kjella]

And once we have hundreds of terabytes how do we fill the drive? Most of the content on my PC is downloaded, but internet speeds have not increased drastically over the years, I'm still at the same speed now as I was in 2000 and paying about the same amount.

Speak for yourself, in 2000 I was on 64 kbps ISDN and now I'm on 60/60 Mbit fiber. That's almost three orders of magnitude and it's cheaper before even adjusting for inflation. Even the national statistics here in Norway show a >10x increase in both the average and mean since 2004 and that doesn't cover the revolution going from PSTN/ISDN to DSL in the years around y2k so I'd go as far as saying 100x is typical since 2000. Currently the mean is 6.7 Mbit/s and with the rollout of fiber, VDSL and DOCSIS 3.0 I don't see any reason why it should slow down.

I actually know one person that is pretty much like you though, he lives in a very rural area just on the border of ADSL services. Over his copper line it's probably not ever going to go faster, and the chances of an upgrade is slim. But he's the one exception to everyone else...

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. [techdigest.tv] 4tb came out Oct 2011. [storagereview.com] Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale.

You're making the flawed assumption that current PRM technology can continue at that pace and that HAMR will not be a disruptive technology resulting in a "bump" in the density.

HAMR will be a bump in density just like PRM was a bump in density over the older recording methods.

Re:I don't get it.

[Coren22]

I somehow had in my collection, a Full-Height 36GB SCSI disk, up until one of the caps fell off and I junked it rather than fix. I can't imagine how many platters you could fit in a full height slot.

Re:I don't get it.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

That's absurd, we bought a couple thousand for our new product to use back in 1997/1998. Out of every ten drives only 9 failed.

Re:I don't get it.

[iamhassi]

I actually know one person that is pretty much like you though, he lives in a very rural area just on the border of ADSL services. Over his copper line it's probably not ever going to go faster, and the chances of an upgrade is slim. But he's the one exception to everyone else...

I'm sorry I should have said I'm in the US, in a city of 5+ million. It's very common in the US to have "slow" internet speeds (10-15mbps), probably because the country is so large and urban sprawl. They do offer 3x faster speeds but the cost is also 3x more than what I'm currently paying, and like I said I'm paying the same amount now as I was 10 yrs ago and my speeds have not increased at all in 10 years despite the significant drop in bandwidth costs during that period.

Re:I don't get it.

[Cid Highwind]

It's very common in the US to have "slow" internet speeds (10-15mbps), probably because the country is so large and urban sprawl.

No, it's very common to have "slow" internet speeds here because of telco/government collusion at the local level, and toothless regulation at the federal level.

Stop believing the density myth. Our infrastructure sucks because we have a cheap, paranoid, rabidly anti-government, and very loud segment of the populace that opposes all taxation and any spending that might benefit other people, and a handful of modern-day robber barons whose enormous profits depend on keeping them that way.

Re:I don't get it.

[iamhassi]

Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. [techdigest.tv] 4tb came out Oct 2011. [storagereview.com] Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale. You're making the flawed assumption that current PRM technology can continue at that pace and that HAMR will not be a disruptive technology resulting in a "bump" in the density. HAMR will be a bump in density just like PRM was only a bump in density over the older recording methods.

You're exactly right: perpendicular recording (PRM) was a bump in recording methods. Before perpendicular recording the largest hard drive was 400gb and perpendicular recording did exactly what slashdot predicted, offer 10x the storage, with 4tb hard drives now available only 7 years after PRM came out in 2005.

But it took 10 full years to reach that 10x prediction, and hard drive capacity has been increasing at the same exponential growth for 30 years. What they're calling for is a huge leap, 15x the storage in 4 years, from 4tb to 60tb, and that's just not going to happen.

I would predict 10-20tb, but I'm not sure anyone will care since we'll all be using multiple terabyte SSDs by 2016 anyway, they're increasing at a much faster growth rate than hard drives and who wants to wait milliseconds to transfer date at mBps when you can wait nanoseconds to transfer at gBps? Hard drives will be almost as useful in 2016 as tape drives are in 2012.

For example take microSD cards, they're at 64gb now. 100 of those would be 55mm by 15mm by 20mm = 16,500 mm3, much smaller than a 3.5" hard drive at 101.6 mm × 25.4 mm × 146 mm = 368,650 mm3, yet a hundred 64gb microSD cards would provide 6.4tb of storage, far more than any hard drive and it could fit in a cellphone and weigh only 50grams (0.1 lbs) compared to the 1.5 lbs a hard drive weighs. Of course at $87 each that would be almost $9,000, but flash memory prices are dropping faster than any other technology related item so I have no doubt that $9k will be ~$200 within a few years.

Re:I don't get it.

[toddestan]

A modern version of that drive would be appealing. With current data density you could probably pack something like 15TB into that form factor easily. It would still be slow but for what I would use it for I really wouldn't care.

Re:I don't get it.

[jd]

Yes, but the platters are round, not square.

More capacity, but what about I/O?

[mlts]

One thing we have had issues with is that even now, the issue with drives is how fast we can get data in and out of it.

Even the high end SAN makers know this and tell people to always use RAID 6 on the backend, just because the window of time that it takes to rebuild a drive is so long these days that it can easily allow for a second drive failure to happen with no protection.

What I really will dread seeing is an external 60TB drive that is stuck with a USB 3 interface as its only I/O. USB 3 (for lowest denominator compatibility), a SATA descendant, and Thunderbolt, would be ideal, but with how cheap some drives end up, it might just be a sole USB port for in/out.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[jedidiah]

No. The dreadful part is not being stuck with USB3.

The dreadful part is realizing that attaching an over hyped external interface to it will likely not matter.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Sancho]

Even the high end SAN makers know this and tell people to always use RAID 6 on the backend, just because the window of time that it takes to rebuild a drive is so long these days that it can easily allow for a second drive failure to happen with no protection.

It's not just another drive failing--it's unrecoverable read errors (UREs). You might not know that a sector is unreadable until it's too late--if you discover it during a resliver of a RAID5, you are seriously out of luck. With very high data densities per disk, the chances of a URE are high.

So you're right--I/O speed is important. Also important is resiliency. If these don't scale along with the sizes, I think these will be considerably less useful than most people hope.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Conception]

It's not the interface, it's the drives themselves. They aren't really faster than they were when ATA-133 came out. Doesn't matter what interface you stick on there, hard-drives aren't getting faster (thank god for SSD). At 60TB also, the BER rate approaches something like 600% chance over the whole of the drive, or something like that, if they are using the same reliability numbers that current drives use. Terrifying.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Tynin]

You just have to make your platform able to handle file replications to N + 1 nodes (or any of the other plethora of ways you can slice it). Then go with a RAID 5 or whatever strategy you want, to give individual nodes the likelihood of higher availability. If you need to handle higher IOPS you can go with a distributed filesystem that can handle metadata/journalling on discrete nodes and load it up with SSD's / Fusion IO, whatever fits your bill. Then you can have banks of slow disks without much concern of the general IO as the metadata/journal nodes will have blazing IO and will act like a buffer to disk.

On the USB 3 front, I suspect that will be the case as almost everyone has a USB port. Additionally, the bandwidth available for USB 3 far exceeds the transfer rates of any spinning disk, so I don't think it is really much of a concern.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[unixisc]

Wouldn't such a density be limited to just SATA, and not available as an USB3? Incidentally, what's the top density that NTFS can handle?

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[PAjamian]

It's not as bad as it may seem. With disk speeds up to 15,000 rpm and higher areal densities means that data can be pulled off pretty fast. If HDD manufacturers were to implement technologies such as multi-track disk heads then IO speed could increase a lot more and would be limited mainly by seek times. What a lot of companies are doing nowadays is using 2" (laptop) drives in their servers, packing a lot more drives into the space, which means more smaller disks and therefore less to rebuild in the event of a failure as well as a lot more disk heads to increase IO even further (and help a lot with those nasty seek speeds when trying to access data in 200 different files at once). What we're really left with as the limiting factor is the electronics and if all else fails that can be dealt with by multiple parallel channels (first we had PATA, now SATA, anyone for PSATA?).

So yeah, Disk IO is a bit of a problem now but there really is quite a lot that can be done to eliminate that issue.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[sexconker]

RAID 10 is better than RAID 6.
Rebuild time is nothing, your performance doesn't degrade to shit, and you're more than likely going to survive a second failure during rebuilding.

If you're paranoid you can run multiple mirrors.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[AshtangiMan]

Agreed. I recently was reading that in a Raid 5 array with 2TB disks it is likely that you will lose data in the event of a single disk failure because of UREs. I have been thinking that setting up various raid 10 spindles is the best way to archive and protect data. One spindle for use, and another for backup, all with 1TB drives (2TB of space with 4 1TB drives). It strikes me that HDD is a terribly inefficient way to back up data securely, but surely it is better than optical disks.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Hatta]

It's not just another drive failing--it's unrecoverable read errors (UREs).

A URE is a type of drive failure.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Sancho]

The old wisdom is that "RAID is not a backup." So RAID5, RAID6..doesn't matter, you should be backing up regardless.

Tape is still probably the cheapest medium for backups, though you have to invest in the drives as well (and those can be in the thousands of dollars.)

I use online backups to a remote host along with a large drive which is offline most of the time and rotated with a few others. I'm just getting into ZFS and snapshots, with which I can more easily take frequent backups. Unfortunately, I don't think that helps with the UREs since snapshots still only store the data once. ZFS itself should help with UREs if scrubbed regularly.

The problem with optical is that the density ratios are so poor and the media is very fragile. Bluray discs can get up to about 50GB now, which means you need 20 to back up 1TB. With more discs, the likelihood of at least one of them failing increases, not to mention you need to store them.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just another drive failing--it's unrecoverable read errors (UREs). You might not know that a sector is unreadable until it's too late--if you discover it during a resliver of a RAID5, you are seriously out of luck. With very high data densities per disk, the chances of a URE are high.

Checksums.

ZFS has this already, and Btrfs is coming along with it as well. Any new file system that's designed to be used on spinning rust that does not have this should probably be shunned going forward.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[AshtangiMan]

I agree that RAID is not a backup, but that doesn't mean that my backup can't be a RAID . . .

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Sancho]

It's not what most people mean when they say, "Drive failure," and the URE could have happened before the RAID was ever put into degraded mode (it could have been the first failure, just no one noticed it.)

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Sancho]

Absolutely true.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[PAjamian]

Which is why it's very important to monitor your disks using the tools and the SMART data on the disks themselves.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

Actually as areal density increases drives are getting faster, both it terms of streaming reads and average transfer time, it's only worst case performance that is not getting any better. Also the drive manufacturers aren't stupid, as physical density increases logical density isn't increasing as quickly because they are using a larger percentage of the physical bits for error correction meaning the logic BER should at worst remain constant.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[mcrbids]

I've been hearing about the end of hard disks for a long, LONG time now. RAID1 was supposed to be dead a decade ago, RAID5 a few years back.

Strangely, rumors of their deaths have been repeatedly found to be greatly exaggerated. Speeds have improved, (though not kept pace with the sizes of drives), and so has reliability-per-bit.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

The best way to help rebuild times is to get away from dedicated hotspares and move towards distributed guard space. That way in a large pool of disks you have say the 7 remaining members of a RAID-5 7+1 set rebuilding to the other hundred spindles in the pool. This has the side effect of avoiding a relatively common problem where a spare drive that's been sitting idle dies when it's suddenly stressed during a rebuild event. HP EVA, IBM XIV and I believe Compellent use this strategy already and I think it's definitely the way forward (though I still use RAID6 on my EVA as it's worth the small penalty in performance and capacity for our application).

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

Without parity you're going to miss certain types of corruption so RAID6 is actually superior from a data reliability standpoint.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

with the shit quality coming from hard drive manufacturers these days.... a 60 TB drive would fail long before one had a chance to fill it up.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[DigiShaman]

At least with Dell PERC controllers, the likelihood of UREs these days have been mitigated with the use of background patrol reading which proactively checks the disk in idle periods or low priority disk access. UREs are also detected and corrected on the fly while accessing data.

You might want to check the documentation as to what features your RAID controller supports. If it supports background patrol reading, most likely it's enabled by default. If not, I suggest upgrading the controller if possible.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[GLMDesigns]

Couldn't agree more. One solution, as HD space increases, will be to have automatic backup into other portions of the drive. And how soon until we have 10PB flash drives?

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the seek times that are the problem. throughput speeds are fine for the most part.

200 I/O per sec for a top of the line spinner (not raided) vs 30,000 I/O per second for a middle of the pack SSD

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[DigiShaman]

Some controllers will let you kick off an online consistency check. It will at least halve your disk I/O until the process completes. But essentially the process will walk the entire raid container and check/correct any errors it finds. I usually do this four times a year for my servers. It's extremely rare for volumes that already have background patrol reading enabled, but the fact of it happening is still within the realm of possibility. Better safe than sorry.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[DigiShaman]

That's not true! Areal density = more bits flying under the read/write heads per unit of time for the same given RPM speed.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great you can store multiple copies of everything in the Library of Congress on the same 3.5 inch drive. When is the industry going to get around to addressing failure instead of capacity?

I'd much rather pay a premium for a drive that would last a lifetime than be assured that I'll be required to start over in a few years, even it if is with more capacity...

As every woman out there will you, bigger ain't necessarily better.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Sloppy]

IMHO RAID1 came back from the grave, and is the true successor to RAID5. :-) The question is: how many mirrors?

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[aztracker1]

Finally got my new NAS box up this past weekend... 12x 3TB drives.. 10 of them in RAID-Z2 (FreeNAS) with the other 2 has hot spares. 22.5TB of raw storage, and hopefully should be enough space for the next 4-5 years.. I've been aquiring/using about 1-2TB/year for the past few years. Though 60TB drives would be cool.. the replication time would suck.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[jedidiah]

Are you kidding?

Nothing last forever in tech. If nothing else, your device will become obsolete. You WILL have to transfer your data to another device or piece of media. That is inevitable. THAT transfer needs to be fast enough to be usable.

Current disk speeds make transferring the contets of a consumer class arrays bothersome already.

However, it's a poor reason to spend 5x or 10x more on faster when it really doesn't matter most of the time.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the interface, it's the drives themselves. They aren't really faster than they were when ATA-133 came out. Doesn't matter what interface you stick on there, hard-drives aren't getting faster (thank god for SSD). At 60TB also, the BER rate approaches something like 600% chance over the whole of the drive, or something like that, if they are using the same reliability numbers that current drives use. Terrifying.

Newer, higher capacities HDDs offer a tremendously greater performance than of those 10 years ago on ATA-133. My 2TB EARS can do a sustained 120 MB/s read AND write. Other brands of 2TB and 3TB drives can do even greater sustained reads and writes. The thing that mostly holds HDDs back is the latency. For a single user, a modern HDD provides enough IOPS for 90% of the consumer market.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

...the BER rate approaches something like 600% chance...

Clearly statistics is not your strong suit.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[rcw-home]

It also means that there's more data tracks on the same platter, requiring proportionally more revolutions to read or write the whole thing. I doubt rotational speed will increase any further than the 15krpm we have now, unless platter sizes shrink much further (and SSDs have already taken over that part of the market).

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHHAHAHAHA.

Whatever. DELL PERCs are watered down LSI RAID controllers. Your best protection is D2D2T2T. Yes, that is Disk, snapshotted to other disk, which in turn is archived to two tape copies, which are every few years, migrated to new tape technology. That is the only way to prevent data loss. Ideally you are geographically dispersing this data.

Now, when the business sees the bill for such a solution, they have a heart-attack. Still, I'd rather trust a business that took care of its data in such a fashion than one that skimped and after a flood, disappears.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[bill_mcgonigle]

IMHO RAID1 came back from the grave, and is the true successor to RAID5. :-) The question is: how many mirrors?

RAID-Z. :) copies=n where n is a function of your paranoia level.

(I do use RAID-1 for workstations though)

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[fnj]

I like RAID 666 - a RAID 6 array of RAID 6 arrays of RAID 6 arrays.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

Running a business in inherently risky! News at 11. You make due within the budge you're given.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

But on the whole transfer rates only increase at the square root of density.

It will take you 5x as long to read a disk with a 25x increase in density (assuming that the density increase is uniform.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[rgbrenner]

SMART will not tell you if your drive has failed in over 1/3rd of cases.

From Google: Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no
count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely
scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and
probational count. In other words, models based only
on those signals can never predict more than half of the
failed drives. Figure 14 shows that even when we add
all remaining SMART parameters (except temperature)
we still find that over 36% of all failed drives had zero
counts on all variables.

It is difficult to add temperature to this analysis since
despite it being reported as part of SMART there are no
crisp thresholds that directly indicate errors. However,
if we arbitrarily assume that spending more than 50%
of the observed time above 40C is an indication of possible
problem, and add those drives to the set of predictable
failures, we still are left with about 36% of all
drives with no failure signals at all.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

Daquq?? Have you never heard of scrubbing and SMART??
Seriously, I hope you never have anything to do with any of my servers.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[citizenr]

Couldn't agree more. One solution, as HD space increases, will be to have automatic backup into other portions of the drive. And how soon until we have 10PB flash drives?

flash? never

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID-Z. :) copies=n where n is a function of your paranoia level.

Z for zombie apocalypse? No amount of mirrors will be good against that.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[jones_supa]

So, how's the life in Soviet Russia?

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if troll or just illiterate

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[wvmarle]

Most end-users don't have datasets big enough to warrant a tape drive for backups. For them a few 1 TB drives is more than enough.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

Nah, if you're really paranoid you need parity information so RAID6 or RAIDZ, for Windows folks RAID5 + REFS might be good enough (if they can make performance not suck).

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

A BER of 600%? So you 6x as many bits out of them but they're all wrong?

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

Meh, we replicate to DR, backup to disk pool, and duplicate to tape and we're investigating replicating the disk pool to DR (or backing up the DR replica to disk) since recovery from tape is so damn slow when you've got 14TB of data with millions upon millions of files. Nothing even remotely heart attack inducing about the cost either, backup is small potatoes next to software licensing, HA systems, or the cost of reproducing the data.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Magic5Ball]

...Assuming that the DAC/ADCs between the magnetic and digital signals can keep up, and also that whatever process prods the magnetic domains can do transitions sufficiently rapidly.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must work for the government. You stupid fuck!

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Gr8Apes]

a RAID 10 setup, with snapshotted backups, and tape, runs into peanuts these days for businesses, unless they're such penny pinchers that they'll balk at the $1 extra cost per GB of name brand memory.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[WuphonsReach]

Without parity you're going to miss certain types of corruption so RAID6 is actually superior from a data reliability standpoint.

You're confusing parity with ECC or actual checksumming.

When you read a sector from a RAID-6 array, all you get back is that sector, it doesn't poll multiple disks and calculate whether the parity is good or not.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Coren22]

According to Wikipedia, 16TB, but that is for NTFS on XP, not sure what the modern one is, but I thought it was PBs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Limitations

According to Microsoft, as of 2011, the size limit is 256TB-64KB

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc773268(v=ws.10).aspx

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[lsatenstein]

One thing we have had issues with is that even now, the issue with drives is how fast we can get data in and out of it.

Even the high end SAN makers know this and tell people to always use RAID 6 on the backend, just because the window of time that it takes to rebuild a drive is so long these days that it can easily allow for a second drive failure to happen with no protection.

What I really will dread seeing is an external 60TB drive that is stuck with a USB 3 interface as its only I/O. USB 3 (for lowest denominator compatibility), a SATA descendant, and Thunderbolt, would be ideal, but with how cheap some drives end up, it might just be a sole USB port for in/out.

With 60 terrabyte drives will come a reversal of moving to the cloud for computing. Cloud computing is cheaper today, because the computer room is too small for many organizations. With 60tb drives, we could see 2-4 tb drives for day to day stuff, and pairs of 60's used for backups and backup archiving.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[lsatenstein]

It's not the interface, it's the drives themselves. They aren't really faster than they were when ATA-133 came out. Doesn't matter what interface you stick on there, hard-drives aren't getting faster (thank god for SSD). At 60TB also, the BER rate approaches something like 600% chance over the whole of the drive, or something like that, if they are using the same reliability numbers that current drives use. Terrifying.

In 1970 we had drives that had special technology, known as RPS. (Rotational Positional Sensing). The drive electronics knew the angle of the disk from the index marker home position. Blocks could be read or written with based on where the disk was in it's rotation from a home position. I would suspect that today, if we add track to track position and rps together, larger blocks (8k or 16k blocks), and moderate drive cache memory, we could still get 4 or 5 millisecond sustained access. I would even say that the disk I/0 system should be as it was in the old mainframe days, a separate I/O processor with responsibility all disk operations, including error recovery. The disk controllers of 1980 allowed for shared Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD) (two computers able to do read/write to the same disks),

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[sexconker]

Nope, you're wrong.
Parity is calculated and written. It is not used for verifying normal reads. You're not going to recover anything via parity until shit breaks.
It's not a CRC.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[cthulhu11]

This was a lot more feasible before Oracle killed Sun. Ohhhhhhh how I miss ZFS. HBA RAID and the pitiful Linux MD/LVM systems are like a trip back in time.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

No, on any decent array background scrubbing does full stripe verifies which will in fact catch bit-rot. Parity might not be calculated on a standard read but that doesn't mean that RAID5/6 has no value with respect to data integrity.

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with hot spares when you could use them for extra redundancy? Serious question.

What's the useful limit?

[neokushan]

Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?
I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill. At one point maybe it would have been to store music and films, but that's going to the cloud rather than local storage. Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.
In the same way that RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do, I wonder how Hard drives will fare?

Now as for myself, I could definitely fill 60Tb of space with stuff I'd like to keep - sign me up, but with the price of SSD's seemingly halving over the last couple of months, it's only a matter of time before average joe customer starts to realise that for the same price of a 60Tb HDD, they could probably have a 1Tb SSD that's a lot faster.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Crosshair84]

HD video, music, photos. ETC. Even grandma can fill a 1TB hard drive with HD video without even trying.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[jedidiah]

If "Average Joe" has any awareness of speed, then the Cloud will quickly get kicked to the curb and greater local storage densities will matter.

"Average Joe" will likely never realize that there is a technical reason to seek out an SSD. Some marketing hype might push them in that direction. Genuine "geeky" technical understanding will not.

Joe is willing to tolerate the cloud but wants the speed of an SSD? That's a clear an obvious contradiction.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[vlm]

I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill.

video editing. 1TB is about one of my wife's typical projects. What the "creative" types don't realize is if you record 10,20,30 times as much "stuff" as makes it into the final product, to edit you've got to store all that junk somewhere.

There are batching strategies where you can edit a three hour long interview down to 5 minutes of actual usable clips, repeat until everything is "clipped", then merge up all the clips and edit those. Some video editing software is very unhappy with terabyte scale projects so you have to do this anyway.

You can't edit and dispose of interview #4 because someone might have a cool story to run against it in interview #35.

This is not crazy stuff either, family history stuff

Re:What's the useful limit?

[QuantumRiff]

Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.

Mostly, because it takes up too much room on a drive, and too slow to download from the internet :)

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

But people's ability to create massive amounts of content is increasing rapidly as well. With the ubiquity of mobile computing and the shift from fixed PC platforms to mobile devices, it's easily within the ability of most people to generate a staggering amount of HD video content, for example.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[mpetch]

640TB

Re:What's the useful limit?

[6ULDV8]

I've found that a larger hard drive just increases the likelihood of me storing redundant data on the same media. I get lazy about housekeeping. I recently pulled the 500G drive from my laptop and replaced it with a 120G SSD. Instead of carrying everything I own, I only carry tools I need. Now I can actually manage a daily backup to a NAS and not have to wait while it completes. If I'd had the extra cash, I would have likely purchased a larger SSD and still be carrying all the cruft that I haven't touched for weeks or months. The only thing I miss is my music archive, but with less music on hand, at least now I know all the words to the songs.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[NemoinSpace]

They can have both. And will.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe is willing to tolerate the cloud but wants the speed of an SSD? That's a clear an obvious contradiction.

To Average Joe, "The Cloud" has the advantage of ubiquity that SSDs and conventional hard drives lack. That's not a contradiction, that's a tradeoff.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Korin43]

Hopefully this will also lower $/GB and decrease cloud storage prices as well. That's what I'm excited about.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think it makes sense. Videos and music take up a lot of space, but speed does not really matter for them. That is, streaming full quality HD is reasonable for an internet connection (especially if we are talking about the future). On the other hand, SSDs are useful for fast boot times and fast loading of programs, which does not require many terabytes of space. All you need to do to sell someone on an SSD is to show them two computers side-by-side with and without an SSD. The speed difference is pretty noticeable.

That's why in my current setup, my videos and music are on HDDs while everything else fits onto my much smaller SSD. I wouldn't move the HDD content into the cloud, but I can certainly see why it would give perfectly usable performance. The problem for me is in availability (ex. I can't watch NetFlix on an airplane).

Re:What's the useful limit?

[jedidiah]

This is just sad. You can't even carry your music collection with you and you are trying to make up sad and pathetic rationalizations as to why it's actually a good thing.

Tech should adapt to you rather than the other way around.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know there is no such thing as "The Cloud", right? That the term "cloud" just refers to a bunch of computers, which have things like hard drives in them? Hard drives just like these ones!

Re:What's the useful limit?

[jedidiah]

Joe is simply not that engaged. He's not going to see the sales pitch. He isn't a tech geek that gets a boner over minesweeper loading a little faster.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Hentes]

It varies from person to person. I have 700GB storage and don't even use all of it.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[neokushan]

Well of course, but you're one of the many who could make use of such space - I'm talking about average only-does-email-and-facebook joe kind of person.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

42

Re:What's the useful limit?

[__aardcx5948]

I've noticed that when friends get faster internet access (100/10 or even 100/100) they tend to download less and less, and just stream the shows/movies they want to watch. For them loads of storage is not really necessary.
Of course you still have the odd one who wants to download everything in 1080p x/h264 rips at 8-20 GB a piece.

So, for people with slower speeds I can see they'd want to have more storage, as streaming is not an option. (no one rents discs anymore, there's a reason the shops are closing)

Also, for the technical side, how do you back up 10TB (or more)? I suppose it would be necessary to have 2 HDDs in RAID1 with ZFS on top or something, to prevent the effects bit rot etc.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[neokushan]

When I said "the cloud", I'm talking about streaming services such as netflix. Why should someone clutter up their hard drive with films when they can just steam what they want?

Re:What's the useful limit?

[mlts]

If a drive has capacity enough to back up completely at least one of my machines, that would be considered adequate by me. Having the 1TB SSD is nice, but so is having a pair of drives that data is copied to on a nightly basis so if the SSD gets lost or erased, it is still present (without having to waste the time and bandwidth costs to recover from a cloud provider.)

Maybe we will see disks with more options for interfaces. For example, it would be nice if an external drive could be configured to show up as a virtual tape library for example. This would allow backup software to back data up, without the fear of just one goof from the OS (or perhaps malware) completely trashing the backup drive's filesystem. Other options might be a UDF drive presented so files can be copied in a write once, read-many fashion, and so on. Of course, we have drives that work as NAS servers, but with how software is able to be improved, why not have a standalone external USB or Thunderbolt drive start sporting some SAN-like features? For example:

1: Use USB for the "control" connection, then use either iSCSI, or Thunderbolt for the presenting of LUNs to the machine. This would allow for separation of data and filesystems, so a trashed filesystem in one user's home directory wouldn't mean a complete restore.

2: Have the ability to take snapshots and have an antivirus utility running on another machine with the LUNs presented read-only look for them. If this is done with a Windows box running off the drive, this can catch rootkits that might be able to hide from the main machine's OS.

3: Snapshots in general would be useful, either as a way of doing quick and dirty backups, or other items.

4: Combine snapshot backups with a cloud backup service, and this would result in no CPU needed on the host machines for backups. Encryption can be done on the drive as well.

5: Obtain two similar drives and give them Internet ability, then one can enable replication (with end to end encryption) on the block level, so someone can just ask a friend to allow their HDD to just passively sit on the network, and it does everything else.

6: No real need for a file server at home. Just present a LUN as a CIFS share.

7: Some redirector service similar to dyndns, so someone can access their drive from anywhere securely.

There is a ton of stuff that can be done with disk controllers. A VTL might have been an expensive, ardious task years ago, but that is "just" programming to make a disk drive or a drive array appear as a library of tapes. It would be useful at home because it would provide a means of storing data that is resistant to malware (no "list all drives, format all drives" logic bombs at least.)

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Blaskowicz]

I can't store 1TB of movies and music on the cloud, this would be a very high recurring fee and I would upload data at 120KB/s. a one-time fee for the HDD and another one for the backup HDD is cheaper. I still get to access files from my cheap ass NAS with VIA CPU, even though at 120KB/s from outside but when I get fiber it will be more like 10MB/s.

I do want to get a 4TB HDD for it, RAID is not so good as you still have to buy one or more backup drives so there aren't any savings. maybe put the OS on a SD card so that when the drive fails, my server willl still work. also I could host backups for a few friends on my huge disk - asking them to pay a bit for it.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Aeros]

Imagine backing 60TB up to Carbonite. It takes forever just to backup 1TB now.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[cpu6502]

Precisely. When my dh0: drive got full, I thought about copying it over to usb0: but when I looked at what was there, I realized I didn't need "Beauty and the Geek" or "Transformers 2" or "Billboard's Hot 1000 songs of the 1960s" so I erased them. I freed-up about 100 GB of junk I never should have kept in the first place.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Nerdfest]

Tech should adapt to you rather than the other way around.

The opposite is actually working pretty well for Apple these days. You just have to market it correctly.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

My home-taken wedding videos are around 60GB and they're poor quality video from 2004. There's no way I'm going to store my stuff on the cloud and that's too complicated for the average person who can't rip their media.

RAM hasn't hit a peak. OS min memory requirements keep going up. Programs keep grabbing more and more memory too. 4GB is at the limit of most 32bit systems, so RAM usage will hover there for a few years then continue to increase as before.

With the larger HDDs, I think we'll see more and more systems using snapshotting and an increase in automated backups. My backups are limited by sapce and the time to make them. If I could easily store full backups every week I would do so. Why bother with incremental backups if you have enough space for full ones.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[HornWumpus]

Your music collection fits on a 500G? Your aren't even trying.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[cpu6502]

>>>Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.

No but they might download a pirate rip of a BRD. :-)

>>>RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do

It's not the average Joe who is carelessly consuming RAM. It's the programmers. I remember when I bought my PC in 2002 and it had half-a-gig of space. That was almost 10 times more than the minimum recommended by Microsoft XP. It ran superfast! But NOW the Flash has grown, the browser has grown, and even the office tools have grown.

I'm not doing anything differently (still watching VHS-quality videos and typing documents), but the programs are gobbling more & more space so my "superfast" PC now runs like a snail (especially with flash). In a few years the programmers will make even 3GB feel claustrophobic. In fact I'd say it's already starting.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[neokushan]

OS RAM usage hasn't gone up in a while. From XP to Vista, there was a jump from about 128Min/1Gb recommended to 1GbMin/2Gb Recommended. Windows 7 has the same requirements as Vista (And tends to run better on the same hardware). Windows 8 is slated to have the same requirements again and Microsoft has actually reduced memory usage by the OS. This means that there's a very real chance that OS RAM requirements won't have changed in a decade.

Yes, I'm aware that I neglected to mention other OS's but we're talking about mr average here, who will likely be running a Windows machine. He may be running Mac OS, but he sure as hell isn't running Linux.

Can't argue with program requirements though, those are steadily rising but once again Mr Average doesn't run that many programs side by side. They'll have a web browser, possibly email and/or IM clients and perhaps a media player. They won't be running VM's and will only occasionally be doing any kind of video editing, if at all.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[cpu6502]

>>>I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon

P.S. If I wanted to be really anal, I could argue that my Commodore 64 played music with only 0.00006 GB of memory, and my Amiga did videos with only 0.00025 GB of memory. In consoles, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis only used ~.004 gigabyte cartridges. Why on earth would anybody need more than that? Answer: Media grows in size and needs more storage space.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

GP here. Yeah, you're right. But that's all the more reason to expect Average Joe to be using the cloud and not 60TB disk drives. Err, actually, Average Joe will probably have a 60TB disk drive with 20GB used, but that's a different issue. ;-)

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Pentium100]

Don't you need to pay a monthly fee for NetFlix? Also, are you certain, that NetFlix (or a similar service) will be available 10, 20, 30 years later? I know that my record and audio tape collection, VHS tapes, DVDs and data tapes will still be there, they do not depend on some company staying in business and I do not need to pay a monthly fee to keep them.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[AngryDeuce]

Personally, I've got my entire music collection available to me via Google Music. It took me ages to upload the 18k or so tracks (a week of overnights with upload maxed out), but now that it's all there, I've got it on anything running a web browser as well as my phone.

Now, I would never in a million years dump the files stored locally, but I sure as shit don't bother loading GBs of music onto an MP3 player or my phone when I go on trips anymore, nor waste time burning CD's for the car or any of that crap. To me, that is the only real benefit of the cloud...I would never trust it as a true backup, but it's handy when getting at the data isn't a matter of life and death. If Google Music went down while I was traveling, I would turn on the radio and deal with it.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Pentium100]

While I download less and less, it is because I archive everything and so I have less stuff to download. I like 1080p rips, but do not hunt for them, 720p or even SD can be good enough (though I will download the higher resolution version if I get the option to).

Streaming depends on other people, the data I have only depends on me. I may choose to stream instead of grabbing the tape, but I want the tape to be there, in case I cannot stream (internet connection goes down, the streaming provider goes down or something else).

Re:What's the useful limit?

[firex726]

Yea, I make a few movies and I'll have to record like 40 min for about 5-10 min of final footage.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Sponge Bath]

...there is no such thing as "The Cloud"

Yahweh Himself was present in the cloud (Ex 19:9; 24:16; 34:5) and His glory filled the places where the cloud was (Ex 16:10; 40:38; Nu 10:34);

There you have it: The power of the Lord compels you to use Dropbox.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't know a single person who uses a pc only for email and facebook. if that was the case someone would have suckered them into an ipad or another craplet. most say thats all they use it for, until you ask them to really think about it. then you find out they do all kinds of shit just forgot a pc was a tool in the process. and average joe's don't buy new pc's every 2 years so this actually good for them as the next substantial pc purchase will equip them for a mediocre machine for the next 6 years.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

why save your movies when you can just stream them from "service that was shut down"

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anubis IV]

Bingo. That's exactly what I was thinking too, and by 2016 you may very well have cameras in smart phones that are recording at well beyond 1080p. That's a lot of bits to store.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[gman003]

It depends on a number of other things.

Network speed is a big one. A 60TB hard drive would literally take three centuries to fill on a dial-up connection, 9 months on my current home fiber link, and about a week to fill on a full gigabit link. As most people consume far more data than they produce, that's one bound on useful disk space. If you consider "sneakernet" data links, the capacity of a single floppy, tape or optical disk can also be taken into account.

Another bound is display resolution. Videos are about the most data-dense thing on most computers have. The main bounds on those are screen resolution (no sense storing 4K videos when your screen is still 1024x768), framerate, and compression. Framerate hasn't really increased for mainstream video in decades, and display resolutions are only now beginning to rise again. And compression naturally keeps getting better. Display resolution also affects consumer images (while the pros edit at 20 megapixels or whatever, they still scale it down to what Joe User will be able to render), as well as all the little UI icons and junk that's probably just noise in the data, but might get significant if we ever see 16000x10000 pixel displays being common.

Those are probably the main factors in "how much space will the average user need". RAM, CPU power, all that generally shouldn't have much effect on disk usage.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[ColdWetDog]

The power of the Lord compels you to use Dropbox.

May Saint Steven smite you dead with a Thunderbolt from the iCloud.

Clueless heathens....

Re:What's the useful limit?

[6ULDV8]

I'm still carrying over 300 songs. I don't listen to music all day anyway and I can still get to my collection via ftp or a nfs mount if I really want something. My home archive is replicated to the data center where I work. It isn't much of a problem.

I also drive a Jeep most of the time even though I have a pickup because I don't need the hauling capacity on a daily basis.

I don't find it sad or pathetic at all.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Shadow99_1]

Because my internet connection tends to hiccup when streaming in HD, but local playback is nice and smooth?

Re:What's the useful limit?

[6ULDV8]

Yeah, the whole archive is closer to 90G. It's amazing how small a collection can be when you actually buy it all. I've been collecting since the late 70's, but slowed down as my kids grew up. I tend to play what I can ... play, and sing along with. The young guys just steer clear of me during the day and I get lots of work done without interruption. I'm getting old and don't feel like collecting as much as I did when I was younger. I've been thinking of getting some Astroturf to put under my desk so I can tell office visitors to get off my lawn. If they persist, I'll pull out the Dean Martin.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[misexistentialist]

4k movie files will be hundreds of gigabytes...

Re:What's the useful limit?

[HornWumpus]

You bought it all? Like I said, you aren't even trying. IIRC I bought some music back in the 90s. Never again, except at shows, from roadies.

I'm at 1.5T and climbing.

I'll send you a copy of 'Manilow sings Sinatra'. It's even better then Shatner's 'Transformed Man' for clearing out a room. I've got to doubt the priorities of the people who ripped some of these disks (Truth is I ripped the Shatner, the online versions were at 128k).

Which reminds me. I've got to get a new HD and send my kid brother a new copy.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[jedidiah]

Inferior quality. Inferior playback features. Inferior availability.

Netflix has to depend on your ISP who also happens to be a competing monopoly. That's even assuming that Netflix has what you want to watch to begin with.

This very minute I am ripping something that proved to be a not entirely satisfying experience when streamed through Netflix.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[jedidiah]

Average Joe may also choose to keep copies of all of those shows he bought through iTunes. That sort of thing can add up to quite a bit over a few years.

Retaining control of something that you view as "your stuff" is a very common idea.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[jedidiah]

Except the Cloud is hardly ubiquitous.

It's just a silly fantasy pushed by people who can't manage to deal with the present.

Ubiqutious? Megaupload.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?
I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill. At one point maybe it would have been to store music and films, but that's going to the cloud rather than local storage. Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.
In the same way that RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do, I wonder how Hard drives will fare?

Now as for myself, I could definitely fill 60Tb of space with stuff I'd like to keep - sign me up, but with the price of SSD's seemingly halving over the last couple of months, it's only a matter of time before average joe customer starts to realise that for the same price of a 60Tb HDD, they could probably have a 1Tb SSD that's a lot faster.

I think average Joe deserves to have a 128 GB SSD installed in their laptop rather than a useless 320 GB or 500 GB harddrive like most consumer laptops out there are featuring. If a user needs more space, they naturally resort to external harddrives.

I think if manufacturer started bundling 128 GB SSDs in all laptops instead of 320 GB or 500 GB harddrives, there would be a widespread psychological and social impact on society and the world. People don't need a lot of diskspace, and they could definitely benefit from the extra battery runtime.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't insightful, this represents a complete lack of understanding of the process. Creative people aren't idiots, they don't record 10, 20 or 30 times as much stuff as they need, they edit it down to the final product. It's not fun recording all that extra footage, but it's what you do if you want to ensure that you have have you need.

And you store the extra because you might get sued or you may need it later, it's something that people who do that sort of work know about and typically plan for.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

I regularly prune mine
it is a kind of mru cache based on albums...

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind

Assuming that limit exists, it's so far above and beyond piddly 100TB drives that it's not worth thinking about this decade.

There are lots of things Joe Consumer doesn't do (e.g. constantly recording fucktons of video from fuckloads of cameras) due the economic infeasibility, that we currently sadly think of them as being not-Joe-Consumer applications.

In a sense, these limits (though I think network bandwidth limits, especially going up, are worse than HD limits right now), are practically the reason we're having this lame and disempowering "cloud" fad.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Sloppy]

I'm talking about average only-does-email-and-facebook joe kind of person.

Oh, Linux users, that Joe Average. ;-)

But seriously, what Joe Average is into, kind of depends on what Joe Average can easily and cheaply do. I remember when email was considered kind of weird by a lot of people. But things changed, because people all got autodial smartmodems -- err I mean -- they all got ISPs and web browsers. Make large storage cheaply available and maybe everyone will want to edit video.

Edit video.. you know, just like how all those Joe Average guys (and they all just happen to run Linux) currently use their computers to edit text.

vidgrep -v mistakes < yesterday_kitten_recording.mkv | vsed 's/kitten/slightly_cuter_kitten/' | mkvawk -f "BEGIN { vid_overlay_print "Check out what my kitten did!" }" > fixed_kitten_recording.mkv

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Z34107]

It's not "sad and pathetic." Replacing spinning rust with an SSD is almost better than buying an entire new computer.

Besides, a 120GB drive can easily hold ~55 hours of high-bitrate music. It's like calling someone's new sports car "sad and pathetic" because they can no longer tow all of their boats at the same time.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Z34107]

You're kidding, right? By my reckoning, that's 25 years of high bitrate MP3s.

Now, ripping to FLAC I can understand... But, if you don't have a hojillion dollar speaker system, I can also understand not ripping to FLAC.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[6ULDV8]

The last dozen CDs I've purchased were from young kids hawking their own music in Manhattan. I enjoy the conversations. Not so much the music, but it's still fun to help them out.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[darkshadow88]

You're kidding, right? By my reckoning, that's 25 years of high bitrate MP3s.

Now, ripping to FLAC I can understand... But, if you don't have a hojillion dollar speaker system, I can also understand not ripping to FLAC.

Your reckoning is way off. 500GB would be about 145 days of 320kbps MP3s.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Moridineas]

You're missing the point completely (and have a lot of angry-sounding posts on this article!).

Pros and cons / price and utility.

The utility of a platter disk is a lot of space. The cost is low.

The utility of a SSD is a lot of speed (heat/noise/droppability also in the list). The cost is high.

For me, it sounds like the GP, and many others, the pros and cons are solidly on the side of the SSD. I too ended up deleting some stored videos and images on my laptop. Like the GP, I sometimes miss some of the extra data that is now on a different computer, but it's totally worth it. Getting an SSD was the best upgrade I've done in the past 10 years. I would make the same decision again any time.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Z34107]

You're absolutely right. That's what I get for doing dimensional analysis in calc.exe.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[chrismcb]

Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it? I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill.

I'm not married, and I don't have a kid. But if I did I bet I could easily fill up that much space with home movies and pics. I'm close to 1TB of pictures just from my vacations. HD cameras, and digital cameras use up more and more space.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[chrismcb]

What average joe doesn't take pictures, or home movies?

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Custard Horse]

You probably don't suffer from 'choice paralysis' as a result. I find that with a vast choice of music I end up listening to the last few albums I purchased.

The phenomenon has been observed in advertising where a customer is more likely to purchase an item where the range has been limited to 3 or 4 items rather than a full range of, say, 10 or 20.

I stopped carting around all of my music collection in favour of an 8Gb MP3 player with a few albums and some podcasts.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[AmiMoJo]

Using raw WAV files an average album will be about 500MB, artwork included. To fill a 500GB HDD you would need to own about 900 CDs (accounting for HDD kilobyte = 1000 bytes math and filesystem overhead), so not beyond the realms of possibility.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[AmiMoJo]

Virtual machines use a lot of RAM, and some editions of Windows 7 come with one built in (XP Mode). I use them for testing various stuff out (mostly installing stuff I suspect to be crapware, just to find out how much damage it does before putting it on the main OS).

Mac users must have the same needs when using Parallels and the like. VMs are starting to become mainstream.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Rockoon]

on't you need to pay a monthly fee for NetFlix?

Don't drives need to be replaced?

Also, are you certain, that NetFlix (or a similar service) will be available 10, 20, 30 years later?

I have a VHS collection. I don't have a VCR. Even if I did, the quality of the media is not what it used to be.

When discussing your philosophy, you seem to be blind to its negatives. Are you just dishonest with us, or are you also dishonest with yourself?

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Cid Highwind]

"The Cloud" is also somewhere in "The Internet", which Joe just knows is full of unsavory people. He may be past the hysterical there's-a-pedo-behind-every-keyboard phase, but he still isn't ready to trust it with sole custody of any files more important than kitten videos.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[thoth]

I use about 1 TB of storage, for all my ripped DVDs, pictures, music, documents, etc. Currently my file server has 2 TB storage (two 2 TB drives that are mirrored), plus I have various other backups on USB drives, other computers, etc.

Anyway, with a 60 TB drive available, I'd run a replicated file system. Something like Hadoop but with multiple copies of everything on the same disk. Basically some modern FS that just kept multiple copies of stuff.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[ewok85]

Technically I think its the other way around (use ZFS and have the drives mirrored in your pool - fairly standard practice already with 1~3TB drives)

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Pentium100]

Don't drives need to be replaced?

Yes, but they are cheaper than the subscription. AFAIK NetFlix costs $17/month, so $204/year. Hard drives usually last longer than a year.

I have a VHS collection. I don't have a VCR. Even if I did, the quality of the media is not what it used to be.

I have a VHS collection and three working VCRs. The quality is not that much worse than broadcast analog TV, even for relatively old tapes. While VHS tapes degrade over time, they do not need to be replaced often (a tape will last longer than a hard drive stored in some box).

Basically, I dislike paying money continuously to keep something static (like the access to some movie), I'd rather pay money once (even if it's more expensive up front) so I don't need to pay again later. Just like with audio tapes or records - I bought it it's mine forever unless I damage or destroy it by being not careful.

This is why I archive things to data or audio tapes. I know that audio tapes last long (I have one recorded in 1951, still works) and I read somewhere that data tapes also are good for archiving (but have not used them long enough to say for certain).

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

(here is JOrgePeixoto)

You just foed me. Why?

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Z34107]

For bitching about moderation, posting a bunch of off-topic bullshit, making sock-puppet accounts, and evading post-limits.

All of these things shit up the board (even more than my knee-jerk someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong! posting history), and nuking entire threads of bullshit takes modpoints I'd rather spend on up-modding.

Since this is also off-topic, I'm not going to reply further. Mods should down-vote my post.

It'll take 20 years to download 60TB from Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuff said.

Good, it makes my 5.x TB NAS look modest finally.

[BMOC]

I've been waiting for this day.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I want faster, not bigger :( I just know there's a Freudian slip in there somewhere...

Re:So what?

[Pentium100]

I want bigger though. I wish the disk manufacturers were making 5.25" full height drives (even if they were spinning at 5400 or 3600 RPM), we could have 20TB or even bigger drives now. Add a 5-10GB SSD as cache and it would probably be quite fast too, though I would just use a 2TB HDD drive for "fast" needs and the big drive for archiving etc.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you could get 24 TB on a half-height 5.25" drives (eg same size as regular DVD-players) with today's density. Current 3.5" drives have up to 1.33GB per platter (4 TB on 3 platters), a 5.25" platter can contain 2.25 times as much data per platter ( (5.25/2)× / (3.5/2)× ), and you can easily fit 8 platters in a half-height drive (1 5/8" v.s. 1" with 5 platters), which gives 1.33×2.25×8 = 24 TB. As some of the dive height is taken by constant overhead, I would not be surprised if 10 platters drives were possible, giving us 1.33×2.25×10 = 30 TB.

I would buy 4 and put in a raid6 the day they were available for sale...

I'm going to make a bet or three

[CAIMLAS]

I'm going to make several bets here which will also hold true:

* sequential performance will improve at a rate congruent with storage capacity
* random performance will remain roughly the same as it has for the past 10 years (ie, poor, though it will likely improve slightly unless we go back to double-thick drives like we had 10-15 years ago)
* resiliency will not improve for single disks and will likely be worse for in terms of longevity.
* none of this will matter for the consumer market, because by that time, everyone will be using SSDs almost exclusively. You can still fit a lot of data on a 500GB drive, and those are commonly available for laptops and desktops already.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[jedidiah]

A 500G SSD costs more than the laptop or desktop you would want to connect it to.

You seem to be pining for something that you have no real awareness of.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[Anonymous Coward]

"You seem to be pining for something that you have no real awareness of."

The Fjords?

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[sexconker]

A 500G SSD costs more than the laptop or desktop you would want to connect it to.

You seem to be pining for something that you have no real awareness of.

Wrong. About a year ago I bought two high-end 256 GB SSDs for less than $500.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[rgbrenner]

512GB SSD for $500

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[jedidiah]

> I bought two high-end 256 GB SSDs for less than $500.

Like I said. The cost of a PC.

PCs have been cheap like that for a very long time now.

Most people outside of the Cult of Jobs will view spending that much on your hard drive as bat shit crazy.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[Spodi]

And I bought 2x 2TB HDDs for less than half that. Your point? Why do some people have such a hard time understanding that not everyone cares about speed for all of their drives. My primary drive, sure, make that baby as fast as possible. But all I need there is 200 GB (85 GB at this time) since that just holds the OS and all programs I use. The rest - the multiple TBs of backups and media (music, movies, pictures), who cares how fast that is. Even the slowest HDDs are going to be able to play 1080p just fine. For the very rare occasions those drives bottleneck, I don't mind waiting. I'd rather spend the money upgrading everything else that bottlenecks far more often.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[bill_mcgonigle]

512GB SSD for $500 [newegg.com]

Yay, 18 months away from me going SSD on my laptop.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[fnj]

Like the guy said, that's probably more then, or at the very least close to, the median price of a plain consumer laptop. Pretty sure it's even more true for the median price of a plain consumer desktop. Counting the drive that's already in the laptop or desktop.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[CAIMLAS]

And how is that a problem?

You can get a $100 SSD which is more than sufficient as the primary drive in a medium-high end desktop or laptop. A $500 SSD is a different ball park entirely at this point - it's a 'high end' item. I've been not only quite happy, but overly satisfied with the 64GB Kingston SSD I've been using as a system disk on my home workstation for the past year and a half.

Yes, I've got multiple RAID arrays and 500GB-3TB disks sitting around and in systems, as well. But the SSD is by all means preferable as a primary system disk, even if I've got to manage my space more carefully. With 128GB, I'd not worry about a rotating disk in the same system. At 256GB, you're talking twice the storage the average person needs (or even wants) for all of their data.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[lsatenstein]

I'm going to make several bets here which will also hold true:

* sequential performance will improve at a rate congruent with storage capacity
* random performance will remain roughly the same as it has for the past 10 years (ie, poor, though it will likely improve slightly unless we go back to double-thick drives like we had 10-15 years ago)
* resiliency will not improve for single disks and will likely be worse for in terms of longevity.
* none of this will matter for the consumer market, because by that time, everyone will be using SSDs almost exclusively. You can still fit a lot of data on a 500GB drive, and those are commonly available for laptops and desktops already.

I recall when we strung ferrite cores together and made shift registers, and many logic circuits based on core technology. I would not close the door on an idea of a very large shift register being used as a ring buffer. Will it be cores, or some other construct, it is hard to say, Imagine you could excite a ferrite device with signals at one end, and read out the shifted bits from the far end. -- NO moving parts, magnetic storage, and I expect, high reliability.

I dream about different things we should be evaluating, perhaps some of the old technology will come back in a different form.

I see that with very large storage capacity, there is a negative aspect to going to the cloud for storage or ERP operations.

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[sexconker]

If you're buying a $500 laptop (with a HDD) then you're buying a turd and you don't care about performance.
If you're buying a laptop with an SSD, then you care about performance, and you won't be paying just $500 for the rest of the laptop.

And if you actually care about performance and usability, you stick with a desktop.

225 gigabytes per square inch?

[cpu6502]

Wow.
That's amazing.
And it would be six terabytes if you could squeeze the same density on a floppy.

Just Say No

[sycodon]

If windows ever asks if you want it to check out the disk, just say no or be prepared to walk away for a week.

Re:Just Say No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and don't bother telling people to remove viruses by formatting unless you want to make their computer hang for a month.
Actually, I'm totally fine with that as I have never had to format to kill a virus...if all the easy methods fail, I just attach Cheat Engine to the virus and make it crash so it can't protect itself from deletion anymore :)

Re:Just Say No

[afidel]

That's what REFS is for, no more whole disk checkdisk, only needs to check dirty blocks and that chunk of the btree.

Am I an anomoly?

[mark-t]

I've had 4 terabytes of storage now for quite a few years and my actual total usage seems to have peaked at around 2 terabytes about a year ago. It hasn't changed much since.

Re:Am I an anomoly?

[Nerdfest]

Interesting, but probably not a valid statistical sample size, unless you're very, very large. Also, I may have my units mixed up.

Re:Am I an anomoly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think my entire life's work as a sound engineer and studio owner would fit into about 30TB. That's twenty years of full multitrack recordings and stereo masters.

Re:Am I an anomoly?

[lance_of_the_apes]

I would rather see access speeds improved. When they can deliver a 2 or 4 TB solid state drive at a reasonable price, then they can work on increasing sizes.

Re:Am I an anomoly?

[RightSaidFred99]

You're not. I don't give a flying shit about bigger disks _at home_. I've got about 5TB of redundant disk space spread about, and I don't use half of it.

I'll be the not first to say it - this is pointless and the HD vendors are pissing in the wind. I don't and will never need a 30TB mechanical drive.

Now, come up with a 30TB SSD drive and then maybe you're talking, I'm sure business/corporations would love those in data centers.

Call me Bill Gates Jr. all you want, 5TB drives ought to be enough for anyone with regards to mechanical drives. They're a dead end.

Different Strokes, yada yada

[rsborg]

Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?

Thing is, there are multiple "average joe users". Just from my knowledge I could state about 4-6 profiles which have different processing, portability, storage and interface needs. My dad is chugging along fine with his MB Air, but despite that sweet chassis, I need more local storage and more RAM.

To apocryphally quote a famous person, 64.0GB is enough for most people... and I'm sure both you and I are not "most people".

Re:Different Strokes, yada yada

[jamstar7]

I have my home directory on a 100 gb partition, and it's 75% full already. The more space you have, the more space you'll use.

Shock and vibration

[detritus.]

So does this mean I have to bar morbidly obese people from my house? A head crash by someone walking in the vicinity of my computer is likely to take out terabytes of data!

Yeah f'ing right

[rgbrenner]

2016 is in 4 years. Let's see...

In 2008, Seagate announced the world's first 1.5TB drive.

And in 2012, Hitachi announced the first 4TB drive.

And in 2016, this will magically become 60TB?!

If you said 10TB, I would believe it. I'll even go along with 15TB.

But 60TB? don't believe it for a second.

Re:Yeah f'ing right

[rgbrenner]

Also... 1800gbits/sqin by 2016?

That 4TB hitachi drive is 446gbit/sqin http://www.storagereview.com/hitachi_ultrastar_7k4000_4tb_enterprise_hard_drive_announced

So if that increases to 1800.. we'll have 16TB drives NOT 60TB.

Re:Yeah f'ing right

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Its HAMR time!

Re:Yeah f'ing right

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they meant 60 1TB drives, which is already possible, you just need a really big case.

Re:Yeah f'ing right

[shiftless]

60 terabyte flying down the SATA wire
Seeking so hard my platter's on fire
Up and down and across the tracks
RAID striping what?
Your data's gone. Never gettin it back.

You can't touch this

You can't touch this

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[jedidiah]

30 - 50 disk array?

I have about 2000 and they are all stored "online" iTunes style.

It's very handy and allows for a number of convenience features you can't really get any other way. Really big drives greatly simplify storage on the media server and eliminate the need for more expensive array hardware and aftermarket controllers.

I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

how long the rebuild time would be for a 60TB drive that's failed as part of a RAID group. Some 3TB SATA drives we have can take a day (obviously it depends how much the RAID group is getting used while it's rebuilding).

Re:I wonder

[RightSaidFred99]

Forever. a 60TB drive is a stupid idea unless it's an SSD.

Re:I wonder

[jedidiah]

It's a manageable amount of time. You just wouldn't want to do anything but mirroring.

I can imagine that future......

[Anonymous Coward]

By that time,

- Windows UNG (Ultra Next Generation) will come in 1 Deep-X-ray disc...200 TB. There will be 18 versions, each one for a different segment, and the activation key will be the user thumbprint. (big smuggling of fingers)
- The boot time for a PC (will not be called PC any more....but something that DA ...meaning Digital Addendum) will be the same 2 mins as today.
- No more BSOD...but an holographic 3D fancy shmancy error message with a female voice.
- HD will be obsolete...xDR (extra dynamic resolution) will be the new standard. All HD technology will be scrapped.
- Everything will be USB 8 (except Apple products). USB will be a serial version of the parallel version from the serial version of PCI3e + USB 7.
- We will be able to generate electricity VERY cheap using LENR....but electrical companies will sue anybody trying to use a LENR device and not paying their extortive fees.
- Everybody will have at least 2 electrical vehicles....but because of that, the electrical network had to be upgraded to a super network, and the costs spread among "customers", increasing their monthly bills much more than the twice the price of gas they have been paying when they used their "old" combustion engines. And...btw, a lot of electricity plants will run on gas, duplicating the released CO to the atmosphere...

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[spire3661]

HD surveillance. Several years worth of OTA Tivo recorded shows. (yes you can LEGALLY transfer shows from a Tivo to a computer for long term storage.)

Heh

[Intrepid imaginaut]

What internet are you surfing.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[HornWumpus]

Who cares what a bunch of god damn law abiders are going to do with their computers. Fuck them right in the ear.

Re:Good, it makes my 5.x TB NAS look modest finall

[rgbrenner]

If your NAS fits on 2 hard drives, it is already modest.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

legal reason to have that disk space?

You're argument ends right there. The legal reason would be that they can afford it. That's all there is to it, if something exists and you can purchase it, that's all the reason you need. You do not need a use for it, just the money to buy it.
I mean, what legal reason would someone have to own every "super" car invented in the past 40 years? Just that they can afford it.
Your argument is not only pedantic but slightly retarded.

Depressed People Surf the Web Indifferently

[Gimbal]

(FTFY)

Woah. Wrong link. Whoops

[Gimbal]

I'd meant that in reply to this other article, but it seems I had clicked the wrong link for that. My mistake.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[laffer1]

It's useful for backups. Raid 1 these things and write every computer and tablet in the house backups to it. Of course that assumes the cloud won't take off. Here's a hint, it won't. The problem with cloud computing is comcast and AT&T. The caps limit the usefulness of the cloud.

I haven't counted, but I would bet I have at least 20TB of storage online in my home now. Most of the used space is for open source project work (packages, iso mirrors, cvs backups, etc) and video. I've got 1TB of iTunes content and it's actually legal too. One could actually back up their DVDs with this and view them with set top boxes. It would be great for a TIVO or other DVR type device. I'm sure there are other uses.

It's more useful for business. Everyone uses hard drives for backup now. I'd love 60TB at work (or even 1/3 of that) for backup. Think about NOSQL nodes for example. High def images and video. Storing every math journal ever made (that's a use case at work).

Even more important is that if they get this to actually work quick enough to read, they could make smaller disks that are actually fast enough to feed a modern Intel CPU. I'm almost always disk bound. SSDs can help, but they are so freaking small. Imagine a carefully designed ZFS pool on these things. It would rock.

6000 HD movies

[mrops]

For the HD crowd
h.264 1080p video at 9kbps+1500kbps DTS channel is like 13634.8168 hours of video.

For the pirate people, thats like 6000 movies or so.

Sweet, at 3TB Raid at home, I'm already struggling to store videos from my HD cam. Fortunately I bought the MiniDV type so I always have tape backups.

Re:6000 HD movies

[mug funky]

for post production people, that's just under 2 movies in 4k.

FTW? Score:4, Informative? The answer is WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

See: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2867661&cid=40081313

FTW! The answer is wrong in the context of the "article". Unless we now get to make up our own contexts at Slashdot.com, mod down, or change the site url and name to Stupidsnot.com

Beware The Weasel Words

[Crypto Gnome]

The "60TB" is actually an "up to" number.

HAMR has a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch, enough to enable 30TB to 60TB 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch drives

From previous article about this tech from Seagate.

In reality do not be surprised to see 10TB and maybe 20TB 3.5 inch desktop drives in this timframe, but I for one WOULD BE surprised to see 40TB let alone the "in theory" 60TB.

Having said that, I'd be extremely happy with a 10TB desktop drive.

bits per square inch?

[Anonymous Coward]

1800 GBits per square inch....sorry, what is that in GBits per square furlong?

Nice mouth. You eat with that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Swear all you want - wrong is wrong.

Now FOAD.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[jsm300]

This seems to be a reasonable situation to define limits to what a law abiding person needs for personal use.

Seriously? I hope you are the last one to say it. Reading between the lines of your quote above, it would appear that you think it might be reasonable to outlaw access to this technology, solely because you can't think of a legal use for it.

As others have posted, there are certainly legal usages. I can think of others, but that is besides the point. The whole idea of limiting something because it might be used for illegal purposes is ridiculous.

Regardless of the "legal" ideas proposed, sometimes new technology leads to new ideas, i.e. as storage costs go down and capacities go up, new ways of using storage may evolve. One (possibly half-baked) idea I can think of is crowd sourced, highly redundant, "free" backup storage.

Useless!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's ever going to need that much space? Just pop in two ST-506's or ST-410's if you can afford it; if you're running a BBS you can even consider the ST-412's with the revolutionary RLL encoding and seek times well under 100ms! (reliability might be an issue there though, MFM has proven itself in practice over and over).

Re:It'll take 20 years to download 60TB from Comca

[reub2000]

God forbid someone owns a camera and wishes to create their own content.!

I dont really need bigger I want FASTER!

[Osgeld]

SSD's can be nice and fast but shit they are still pricy, and they have their issues ... coming from someone who still uses a old 80 meg scsi drive frequently on his vintage computers, I really dont want something thats going to kill itself in less than a decade

mechanical drives are peaked right now in terms of speed, and on my main computer, with a ton of games on it, 3 OS and more personal files on it than I would ever use (projects and whatnot) am only using about 150GB (out of 500)

great you can eventually slam 60T on a drive, maybe by then my 4T NAS would be full from me and the family, that is if all of our computers didnt have a half T in them already (8T if I combined it all into one resource)

I dont store every single thing I have ever consumed for life on these things, and its going to be much longer than 2016 before I have a NEED for them, though at some point its futile to find a small drive for a reasonable price so they got us on demand ... I just want faster mechanical disks, something that can actually peak out a simple SATA1 Interface

we get bigger, we get awesome interfaces but nothing to put on them other than overpriced, large ... for like 7 years ago, flash memory that slowly eats its own brain

surely we can do better than just increasing space

Re:I dont really need bigger I want FASTER!

[Anonymous Coward]

The bigger it is, the faster it is for linear access as long as the interface can keep up...but for any spinning media, random access is determined by seek time and thus by rotation rate, which not only hasn't increased in years, but is still less on consumer hardware (typically 7200 rpm) than has been used on servers for quite some time (10k rpm).

Seagate

[suss]

Too bad it's a Seagate drive and will probably die if you looked at it funny, just like my last 4 Seagates...

Re:Seagate

[jedidiah]

The more recent Seagates seem to be a lot better. They had a bad run for awhile certainly. However, it doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as some people like to let on.

The hysteria around this stuff tends to last longer than the actual problem.

Call it the Sheldon grudge effect.

Re:Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same thing with two 1.5TB Seagates, almost immediately upon using them, but the RMA replacements have been fine, so far. My Western Digital *EADS* drives succumbed as well, a couple before warranty (before WD shortened their warranty period). Personally, I question whether either are capable of making drives that last more than a couple of years, now. Great for turnover and profit, crap for customers. Maybe flash storage will force them to build something a little more resilient.
What we need is a really, really great compression algorithm. Then, I could use that still functional, jet-engine-loud, 1994 Quantum 500MB IDE drive...

Finally

[hduff]

Finally, a big enough drive for my Tivo!

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[MF4218]

Extending this argument, guns should be illegal, because nobody should really have a use for them. Only criminals or people planning on committing a crime would have a use for such weaponry. A baseball bat can defend a home, why be excessive?

Ideal mesh backup AKA CrashPlan

[axjdo]

Even half this space would yeld sufficient space for a 'mesh' backup network AKA crashplan software for a good size organization, with a solid gigabit or 10 gigabit switch on your network, a full cross backup could be completed overnight even for a org that produces a lot of multi media content. One exiting option would to do a full then differential snapshot backups for all pc overnight to a central server with a box of these drives. Any major problem with a pc and you can just re-image yesterdays snapshot.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[jedidiah]

Clearly you need to get out more and realize that the world is just a little bit bigger than your mother's basement.

Pricefixing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who else thinks that the HDD manufacturers are releasing the new technology in an artificially slow manner to increase profits?

Re:Pricefixing?

[enoz]

I'd be almost certain that HDD manufacturers are "holding back" on new technologies to milk their current product line as long as possible, but this is not pricefixing nor is it abnormal behaviour unless the different manufactures are colluding.

Ripping blu-ray

[gumpish]

Suddenly the fact that Linux can only playback Blu-Ray content that's been ripped to the HDD doesn't sound like such a bummer.

STOP. HAMR TIME.

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

I doubt it...

[patniemeyer]

We had to wait about three years to get the last doubling from 2TB to 4TB for commercially available internal disks. I seriously doubt we'll get *four* more doublings in the next four years.

Re:I doubt it...

[shiftless]

Logic error reading Bullshit_Argument. Abort, retry, fail? _

And the downside is

[Walt Dismal]

And the best part of this is, when your disk with 6000 movies goes bad suddenly with no warning, the data recovery fee will be less than $4 billion.

Well yeah, with these disks eventually becoming cheap, backup onto another will be easy and fast. Er, semi fast. Well, kinda fast. Okay okay. Damn that's taking a long time, and why is the disk glowing red and what's that grinding sound on the backup disk?

Oops!

[hyades1]

A 60TB hard drive? This raises the bar on the amount of damage caused by an unfortunate case of "hangover-assisted butterfingers" to undreamed-of heights!

Please Explain to me why...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't get why they don't make giant full height drives with multiple platters in them. Why are we stuck with 3.5" drives? Why not make a behemoth external 1EB disk or something?

Re:Please Explain to me why...

[jones_supa]

I would also be interested to know the reason. I'm not sure I'd want an external drive the size of a pizza, but many tower cases have 5.25" slots available and could use something à la Quantum Bigfoot.

Huge man-eating Mayan monster...

[Sigg3.net]

... could be a reality in 2016.

Or NEXT MONTH

Cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we can store centuries of surveillance camera videos without running out of disk-space. (Maybe ~30-50 years per disk, possibly more with low frame rate and with eventless parts deleted)

Nothing will be forgotten. Ever.

Usage taxes

[AliasMarlowe]

It's depressing to think how much the "usage taxes" will be for such drives, if used as external devices. At present, we pay euro18 for 1TB to 3TB USB disks to the so-called rights groups. This would rise proportionately to at least euro360 for 60TB. This fee allows us to lawfully make copies of published works (music, movies, TV) in Finland. However, it probably does not allow uploading of such works, or copying internationally; one should have access to licensed media, even if from the library or from broadcast TV.

We have about 30TB of storage on-line at home, of which 6TB is internal disks in the media server and 12TB is external disks for its backups (all are only about half full). Similarly, the web server and PCs have about 5TB of internal disks and 7TB of backup and archive storage in external disks. It's irritating to pay such fees when one is the creator of much of the data going onto these 19TB of external disks (including photos and home movies on the media server), and license fees have been paid for the remainder (source CDs, DVDs). It will likely become even more irritating when the fees are scaled up.

Re:Usage taxes

[Luckyo]

You don't pay these fees. You order from foreign webshops instead.

Re:Usage taxes

[AliasMarlowe]

You don't pay these fees. You order from foreign webshops instead.

Almost every country in the EU has these fees, the exceptions being Luxemburg, UK, Ireland, and Cyprus, none of which is cheaper than buying the fee-paid price in Finland. Buying from outside the EU involves additional issues, such as hassles and paperwork to clear customs, and paying VAT on the shipping costs (which are always a lot higher per unit for small shipments to individuals than for bulk shipments to businesses).

In short, it's cheaper to buy a 2TB USB drive here (€90) including all taxes, than to buy one in the UK (£98). Shipping costs are lower within Finland than from the UK as well.

Re:Usage taxes

[operagost]

Is there anything stopping you from buying empty enclosures and installing a bare disk?

Re:Usage taxes

[Luckyo]

Right and wrong. The current system in most countries is for media devices. Not hard drives.

That's what folks in verkkokauppa.com said when they argued against, and what they saw after the payment scheme was implemented. Their sales of external HDs crashed, essentially overnight and they don't even advertise them much anymore (they used to have one for sale almost every week).

At the same time many foreign sellers sell them for same prices.

Also the lack of price difference is most likely explained by model of your choice in the comparison. I have the drive in quesiton, and it's no longer manufactured, and hasn't been for a while (it's over a year old model). That's likely why hintaseuranta.fi has only found one copy of the drive and that's in a shop that has very bad reputation for keeping site info up to date in terms of availability and amazon lists as "2 remaining in stock" for 3rd party seller.

Here is the current generation that is actually available from retailers. Price difference is very noticeable (and unlike your comparison which lists two different models, I'm listing the same model: STAC2000200

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Goflex-Desk-3-5-inch-External/dp/B005ORY2SK/ref=pd_cp_computers_0 (89 GPB)
http://hintaseuranta.fi/tuote.aspx/427574 (cheapest at 161 EUR)

P.S. Pricerunner link is here but as usual pricerunner is out of date http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/pl/36-2632328/Hard-Drives/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Desk-2TB-Compare-Prices

60 TB is bigger than most filesystems allow

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, ext3 is 32TB max....so, if you have a 60 TB drive...you HAVE TO partition it.,,because it is bigger than the max size of your filesystem...thud ;-)

Feelies

[AliasMarlowe]

Looking forward to the feelies, where 4D is utterly insufficient...

Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording?

[cadu]

Is this UMD all over again!?

Area is king!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> The maximum areal densities of hard disk drives...

I need to maximize areal densities on my hard disk drives because I've maximized areolar densities on my hard disk drives.

Same old same old

[LeadSongDog]

Back in 2007 we breathlessly foresaw 4TB in 2011: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/10/17/2023258/beyond-nobel-hard-drives-get-smart
It's just Kryder's Law at work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryder's_Law

my PDP-11 disk drive was 10MB

[peter303]

And the size of washing machine and $30,000. Like every other disk drive, it filled up in about a week. A million times more storage for 5% of the cost (2% inflation corrected). 24 doublings in 36 years.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[oracleofbargth]

Extending this arguement, baseball bats should be illegal, because nobody should really have a use for them. Only criminals, or people planning on committing a crime would have use for such weaponry. A chihuahua can defend a home, why be excessive?

Re:It'll take 20 years to download 60TB from Comca

[shiftless]

Why get God involved?

Legislators are cheap.

Re:Who has a leal use for this.

[MF4218]

Baseball bats have an alternate use. Hard drive arrays have plenty of uses. Guns are just low-skill high-efficiency weapons. Show me examples of guns used for non-weapon purposes. I'm pretty sure a chihuahua can't defend a home against someone wearing boots.