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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.
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.
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.
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.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/9306/do-i-need-to-defrag-ext-file-systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Disadvantages
There is no online ext3 defragmentation tool that works on the filesystem level.... While ext3 is more resistant to file fragmentation than the FAT filesystem, ext3 can get fragmented over time or for specific usage patterns, like slowly-writing large files.[23][24] Consequently, ext4, the successor to ext3, is planned to eventually include an online filesystem defragmentation
All filesystems running on magnetic media require defragmentation. Those that "do not" are defragging. Fragmentation is a fact of life with any filesystem. And before you start up with the "well ext requires less", so does NTFS: comparisons between ext and "the Windows world" are invariably referring to FAT, not NTFS, which is by all accounts a strong competitor to the ext family.
So a better remark might be "ext3 doesnt support online defrag? How unfortunate."
You have no idea what you are talking about. Your attempt to cite information you clearly don't understand doesn't alter this.
How appropriate for your post.
I buy several hundred drives a year and I've consistently had more problems with all non-Enterprise Western Digital product lines than with I had with Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung models. By rough order of preference, I found WD "Blue" drives least reliable, followed by WD Green, followed by Seagate Eco models, followed by WD Black. The most trouble free drives over the last five years or so? Samsung's F-series and Hitachi DeskStars. Goddammitsomuch.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
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.
Stop - HAMR time. Isn't this basically what was used in Minidisc?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.