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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.
People will just blame Windows for the sluggishness.
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.
Yeah. Buy storage in 256G chunks.
That makes as much sense as someone getting giddy over how large of an array they can make out of 10 year old hard drives. It will be unnecessarily complex and resemble some sort of Rube Goldberg machine.
Large drives are hardly a "niche" use case.
On the other hand, there is a very wide gap between what expensive SSD can reasonably deliver and what much cheaper spinning rust can manage. Spinning rust can manage a wide range of use cases.
It's SSD that represents the niche: small data for very casual users that don't do much of anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
512GB hits the use case for probably 95% of consumers (based anecdotally on backup sizes and harddrive capacities for ~3-400 friends, customers, family, etc).
There was once a "bigfoot" brand of HDDs that did just that. It was a disaster. It's unlikely anyone will try that again. You can just put 2 3.5" drive in about the same volume in your case, so why not do that?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As I understand it, one of the big reasons for moving away from 5.25" toward 3.5" and smaller is because of the need for faster and faster seek and read/write times. They had already made the bus path from head to CPU pretty fast, after that, the low hanging fruit for further gains was to simply make the disk(s) spin faster. After all, you can't possibly send bits on the wire faster than they spin past the read head. Problem is, spinning the larger 5.25" platters faster a) sucks back a lot more power than their smaller brethren. b) more power means more heat==shorter MTBF c) increased vibration increases read/write errors. (a problem exacerbated by ever-smaller magnetic domains)
Another reason of course is that the smaller package just makes so much sense at the end user level as well. Smaller portable consumer devices, more drives per rack etc
Finally; selling 5.25" drives in a world of 3.5" and smaller has been tried. "Quantum Bigfoot"
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?