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Consortium Roadmap Shows 100TB Hard Drives Possible By 2025

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-future dept.

Lucas123 writes An industry consortium made up by leading hard disk drive manufacturers shows they expect the areal density of platters to reach 10 terabits per square inch by 2025, which is more than 10 times what it is today. At that density, hard disk drives could conceivably hold up to 100TB of data. Key to achieving greater bit density is Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Bit Patterned Media Recording (BPMR). While both HAMR and BPMR will increase density, the combination of both technologies in 2021 will drive it to the 10Tbpsi level, according to the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC).

9 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But what about by houstonbofh · · Score: 3, Informative

    Doesn't matter. It is ten years out. This prediction won't even be on Archive.org anymore by that time...

  2. How about transfer rate and reliability? by mlts · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MTBF and transfer rate numbers are boring... but those can be just as important, if not more, than the drive's capacity.

    With high capacity tier 3 drives, one reason that RAID 6 (or a RAID 50 setup with tiers/groups of disks) is used is because it can take days to rebuild a blown drive. If drives continue to have larger capacities, but I/O stays the same, then we will need to add more parity drives to RAID arrays to support multiple drive failures and still keep the data accessible, better algorithms that run in the background to detect (and fix) bit rot, and bigger/smarter caches.

    Maybe this is just me, but I'd rather see drives with double the MTBF than double the capacity. I can always add more drives and arrays. A failed disk will cost time no matter what, even if it is just walking to the server room, pulling it out and replacing it with a spare. For non-enterprise customers, a failed drive can be catastrophic since not many users have RAID arrays for protection.

    1. Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? by rrohbeck · · Score: 3, Informative

      WTF? HDDs have seek times in the milliseconds while total access time for SSDs is in the microseconds.

      --
      thegodmovie.com - watch it
    2. Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I just downloaded a siterip of everythingbutt at 357GB. Also eyeing a 350GB Japanese Bukkake torrent. Those are just niche btw, theres 1TB+ mainstream porn torrents out there. 4k/8k will really be the death of us.

      Anyway, if lesbian rimming isn't a good enough reason for you, Idk what is.

    3. Re:How about transfer rate and reliability? by drkim · · Score: 5, Funny

      100 Terabytes.

      Even I would have a hard time finding enough porn to fill that.

      Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Amateur.

      No, seriously, check out 'Amateur'.

  3. trillions of bits, why one head per platter? by raymorris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Somewhat off topic, but while we're talking about drives:

    We put millions of transistors on a chip. Millions of photodetectors (pixels) in your phone's camera, a million pixels on it's display. Yet our hard drives have ONE sensor that swings back and forth on a mechanical arm?!?! Why the heck isn't the read/write head a strip, with a few thousand "pixels", so it can read any sector as the platter spins beneath it, without swinging the heads back and forth? That would eliminate seek time.

      If needed, you could move the strip back and forth a thousandth of an inch to align a head with one of it's four tracks. That'd be a lot quicker that moving the head a full inch as they do now.

    So presumably there is some good reason that can't be done. Still, an additional arm exactly like the existing one, but on the opposite side of the platter, would cut rotational latency in half and increase throughout up to 100%. Seems like an easy win.

    1. Re:trillions of bits, why one head per platter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Before hard disk drives, they had magnetic drums. It was a large drum that spun at a constant speed and had a separate head per track. You could read from any track, but only once the data you wanted to read rotated to be under the head for that track. Once upon a time computers used drums for main memory and core for cache.

      Your idea for an arm with a head for every track is essentially a more modern drum. That and the two-armed HD are both ideas that are likely more expensive to be worth it. The head mechanism is the expensive part of the drive, so having two of them is almost as expensive as having two whole drives, so why not just have two drives?

      dom

  4. Who would need that ? by bobjr94 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The average new computer being sold today sits on a desk in an office or is a facebook machine at home. It will have in it 500GB to 1TB of storage on average ? Then whats the actual usage, 20% or less ? I have people asking me all the time, my computer is slow do I have too many pictures on it ? I look at their drive, 482GB capacity, 404GB free.

    Sure there are some users who have hundreds of movies stored on their computer and businesses and datacenters who would love a drive like that but by number of computers, thats a small percentage. A majority of computers would do much better with just a SSD 1/4 the size of the HDD they currently have. A faster system overall, bootup times cut by 60%, 20-30 minutes more battery life in laptops....

  5. Re:But what about by nospam007 · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Doesn't matter. It is ten years out. This prediction won't even be on Archive.org anymore by that time..."

    Did the predicter claim his right of his bad predictions to be forgotten?