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Seagate's Shingled Magnetic Recording Tech Boosts HDD Capacities to 5TB and Up
crookedvulture writes "Seagate has begun shipping hard drives based on a new technology dubbed Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR, as it's called, preserves the perpendicular bit orientation of current HDDs but changes the way that tracks are organized. Instead of laying out the tracks individually, SMR stacks them on top of each other in a staggered fashion that resembles the shingles on a roof. Although this overlap enables higher bit densities, it comes with a penalty. Rewrites compromise the data on the following track, which must be read and rewritten, which in turn compromises the data on the following track, and so on. SMR distributes the layered tracks in narrow bands to mitigate the performance penalty associated with rewrites. The makeup of those bands will vary based on the drive's intended application. We should see the first examples of SMR next year, when Seagate intends to introduce a 5TB drive with 1.25TB per platter. Traditional hard drives top out at 4TB and 1TB per platter right now."
... for a significant reduction in speed?
No thanks.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
rewriting data compromises data on the next track, which needs to be read/written, which compromises...
So you need to rewrite the whole damn 5TB disk?
"higher bit densities come with a penalty"
That sounds like an understatement.
A road map from WD has them putting 5tb drives on the market around ~nov-dec this year http://image.torrent-invites.com/view.php?filename=997wdred2013.jpg http://image.torrent-invites.com/view.php?filename=935wdgreen2013.jpg
People will just blame Windows for the sluggishness.
Sometimes I wonder if they already have the technology to make 50 or 100 tb drives and they are just trying to keep their profit margins up by incrementally increasing storage at a fixed rate every year.
I switched to SSD technology and I'm never going back. Yeah ok there are no 5TB drives yet. And 1TB is still insane. But 512GB is almost affordable, 256GB certainly is. If I need more storage, I'll just keep buying more. And eventually the price on the large drives will also come down. Sorry Seagate, the game is already over except for very specialized, very niche storage roles.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I can only imagine how long it would take to use a defrag program to degrag that drive. And dont get me started on using something like spin-rite to do a hard drive diagnosis where it needs to read and write to the heads many times trying to pull data off an iffy platter!
Yep, they've had it since 2004, when all twelve of the drive manufacturers agreed to just sit on it while Western Digital kicked their butt in the marketplace. Nine of them went out of business rather than reveal their secret.
I have to seriously question the retention reliability of a device that requires re-writing multiple tracks at one time.
The performance impact is obvious as well.
I think I'll avoid these like the plague until they're proven to be as reliable as older technology.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
DO NOT WANT
Except for some corner cases ? Given that Samsung also learned how to stack their NAND flash and CrossBar technology is almost there ? Traditional disks are almost dead at this point. Relatively high price of SSDs is the only thing that keeps them alive and price is going down fast. 4TB 3.5" SSD drives are already available and 2GB 2.5" drives are certainly possible (if SSD controllers are capable of handling such capacities). Any significant breakthrough in sold state storage technology (vNAND, CrossBar, anyone ?) makes SSD advantages only bigger and there seems to be a lot of room for improvement in this pretty much like in HDD technologies 15 years ago. My bet is that SSDs will take over traditional HDDs in all aspects (including price) in less than 5 yars.
A question: how can I find out the number of platters in a particular hard drive model? Seagate still lists areal density on its web site, but I was unable to find this information for WD. Naturally, Amazon and Newegg never tell you these things. So where can those of us who'd much rather have a single-platter drive find out which ones those are?
For some workloads these things will create nothing but problems. And all that for a 20% density increase? Sounds quite stupid to me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Last time they indroduced new technology for increasing areal density we got a cool cartoon ....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II
All for the low low price of losing your files even harder than before.
THANKS SEAGATE. Get fuuuucked.
Friends don't let friends buy Seagate hard drives. Ever.
Worst drives ever. Never had any brand fail as hard as they do. I have drives hitting 15 years old and still work fine, Seagate drives, every one of them, failed in 2.
OH BUT SURE, CHEAP DRIVES, AWESOME. Never again. Never again.
Dont buy drives that have alot of space. Cramming these bits in make the HDD work harder and hotter, therefore they break quicker.
Example, my new 1TB lasted 1 year and half, my 500GB has last about 7 years now....
Seagate idea sounds retarded from the top down.
Given Seagate's track record with forays into fancy new hard disk technologies, let me be the first to say NO WAY IN HELL AM I GOING TO TRY THIS... until at least a second or third gen has the bugs worked out.
I was fool enough to try their terabyte drives with their nifty vertically-oriented bit techniques. Went through six brand new hard drives in one month. SIX! Two drives RMAed three times. Finally told Seagate that I'm not going to be their guinea pig anymore, and that I'm going to shelve the drives and to call me when they iron the bugs out. That was over 2 years ago and I haven't heard a peep.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
>Seagate has begun shipping hard drives based on a new technology dubbed Shingled Magnetic Recording....We should see the first examples of SMR next year, when Seagate intends to introduce a 5TB drive with 1.25TB per platter.
These two things don't match.
The read-modify-write penalty for overwriting existing data in-place is huge (even with attempts to minimize it with smart block mapping) and not worth the very minor increase in areal density. It's a bad sign that the storage industry was forced to adopt this because it means better encoding technologies are further off in the future than originally anticipated. Brick wall.
I'm glad to see that unlike some other well-known technical blogs, Slashdot has pushed aside new revelations about our Police State to pass along important product roll-out press releases from the biggest tech companies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In reply to all the "do not want" and "not until it's proven" comments, I'm just worried about them backporting the technology to existing (smaller capacity) drives to reduce the number of different fabrication techniques in use before fully exploring it's use in the field. I might be a limited early adopter on this technology but I'm not comfortable switching to it outright.
The read-modify-write penalty for overwriting existing data in-place is huge (even with attempts to minimize it with smart block mapping) and not worth the very minor increase in areal density. It's a bad sign that the storage industry was forced to adopt this because it means better encoding technologies are further off in the future than originally anticipated. Brick wall.
If it means that rotating media no longer has a write performance advantage over flash, then it is a very poor compromise indeed.
If it means that rotating media no longer has a write performance advantage over flash, then it is a very poor compromise indeed.
What is this, 2008?
Rotating media hasnt been competitive in write performance for quite awhile now.
"His name was James Damore."
But if you edit a single point in the first layers of the hard drive, you have to re-write your entire hard drive down? What happens when the power goes out before you're done writing? Does it rewrite entire tracks or just the magnetic domains that are compromised? How does it even know certain tracks have valid data or will it require a proprietary driver to make it work?
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I may not want this because I see TV commercials all the time that say that I can get Shingles already if I've had the Chicken Pox. Supposedly there's a med that I can use to get rid of it or prevent it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This is all well and good, but couldn't just one manufacturer afford to set aside one measly manufacturing line for making 5 1/4 inch Hard Drives again?
Here me out. Now that they are up to 1TB per platter with current tech on 3.5 inch drives just imagine what they could fit into a 5 1/4 inch drive now!!
I know I wouldn't be the only one willing to shell out bux for one of those, providing they used all that space intelligently: With Data Spaces that large it would pretty much be a requirement to include built in internal Mirroring RAID of some sort between the platters, or at least provide the option, for data integrity and protection and longevity of the unit.
I've been salivating over that dream for years now.
Might as well call it what it is, the Seagate Random Number Generator v1.0.
You mean like the bargain-bin SSDs that have almost 500MB/s of write performance.
What happens if you suddenly lose power?
yes, 500MB/s write performance when you're writing a large string of 0s.
Not all makers give you correct write speeds on the SSDs. Figure anything that claims over 400 is really about half of the claim.
4TB, I believe. AC's conspiracy theory is that all the drive companies have had 50TB drives they've been hiding. Since most of them have been driven out of the hard drive business, I guess they were so committed to the conspiracy that they'd rather fold than get rich selling huge drives.
Such is the logic of the left-wing nutjob conspiracy theorists. Damn the NSA for making them right about something. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
... until they run out of pre-erased blocks and drop an order of magnitude.
They made perfectly good 5.25" Hard Drives for quite a few years before they went with the 3.5" and now the 2.5" format. The size of the platters isn't really the problem at the lower data densities that drives had back then. When you move to higher densities and "smaller bits" on the media, the bigger platters tend to vary in exact placement a bit more, both due to the distance they could have from the spindle and the basic fact that almost all solid materials expand as they get warmer. This means that you can't get spindle speeds as high with big drives, or you have to invest in a lot of technology and materials to keep the whole thing stable. That would make the drives too expensive, resulting in a price/performance trade-off that put the bigfoots at the wrong side of the curve. Also, because you can't counter all of the effects completely, data density would still be lower on the bigger platters than on the small ones. You could by some really crappy hard drives in the era of the bigfoots, but their capacity got superseded by reliable 3.5" drives in less than 12 months at the same price point, so Quantum figured it was no use investing in the product line pretty fast after they introduced them.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
So I guess HAMR is still in the labs.
You are ofcourse correct in that current methods of manufacturing is geared towards miniturization. But think outside the box for a minute, or rather, think INSIDE the box. Given the size available in a 5 1/4", you can easily fit say, 6-8 2,5" drives. Give a little room for some NAND chips and a raidcontroller, and you can actually have a pretty decent piece of storage tech available in a single 5 1/4" unit.
IMO, I think the reason for NOT doing this is the fact that the market for this type of technology is too small. Desktop sales are at an all time low, and tablets are all flash memory. External drives are usually 3,5", and laptops exclusively 2,5". High end servers and businesses are using SAN, which makes your identifiable market small servers and high end home PCs. The first is dying due to virtualization, and the second is probably not large enough to warrant a new development.
As your last paragraph pretty much points out, the technology just doesnt have sufficient lifespan to warrant production.
And given that same knowledge, that size will increase regardless of this new SMR technology, I predict this technology wont live long.....
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Many can now sustain 400MB/s+ for several GB, even when near capacity and in a used state, and with no compression.
Unless this is only a test and Seagate plans to create 100TB drives with this technology, it's completely worthless to be used as a normal hard drive. It sounds like you can only use it to back up data since the rest of the tracks have to be rewritten after a write operation is done. That would be fine for backup if the capacity was HUGE. But for barely being larger than the 4TB traditional HDD, this invention is just stupid!
I'm seeing Netflix not caring about write performance much on their movie servers, they only need to write the data once, and then reading a few hundred thousand times. Likewise, other databases where data is never overwritten, simply appended to (Facebook, gmail, etc.).
For home users, the only thing I can think of is if they are made into a hybrid drive. The flash write cache might well overwhelm the spinning write speed penalty. You will end up using more Watts, since there will be more spinning, but the noticeable performance for normal use cases could be kept close to the SSD level. Heavy duty writes will overwhelm the cache, but then they might write to whole 'shingle sectors' or whatever they are called and not incur the penalty, thus keeping it two HDD levels.
Obviously, this isn't the most obvious way of making drives bigger, but sometimes you have to just do what you can.
Because "those evil business people are hiding the good stuff" is a left-wing belief. Not necessarily wing I guess, did you notice in the campaign Obama motivated the center-left by saying "corporations" every sixth word.
Right wing nutjobs believe entirely different nonsense.