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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."
Since pirates are depressed people, these will be perfect fit for depressed pirates.
That's a shitload of porn.
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.
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.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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".
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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.
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.
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The numbers the summary cites are Gbits per square inch. Meaning it's already been squared.
HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot!!!11!
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.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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