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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."
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.
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.
Truecrypt.
That's all I have to say on the matter.
HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot!!!11!
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.