Google Proposes New Hard Drive Format For Data Centers (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In a new research paper the VP of Infrastructure at Google argues for hard drive manufacturers and data center provisioners to consider revisions to the current 3.5" form-factor in favour of taller, multi-platter form factors — with the possibility of combining the new format with HDDs of smaller circumference which hold less data but have better seek times. Eric Brewer, also a professor at UC Berkeley, writes "The current 3.5" HDD geometry was adopted for historic reasons – its size inherited from the PC floppy disk. An alternative form factor should yield a better TCO overall. Changing the form factor is a long term process that requires a broad discussion, but we believe it should be considered."

Comments

Form Factor not "Format"

[michaelmalak]

Also, I thought the world was going SSD anyway, which is thinner, not thicker?

Re:Form Factor not "Format"

[p4ul13]

SSD is the heir apparent, but platter based disk storage will likely provide higher capacity at denser, more affordable prices for quite some time to come. I suspect Google is proposing this altered platter HD design as something that could bridge the gap until SSD reaches an affordability / density point that can catch up / replace conventional platter HD designs.

Re:Form Factor not "Format"

[gman003]

That's odd, because my laptop's SSD is four years old and still has plenty of usable life left - and it's from a middle-line vendor, from the early SATA3 days, so it's not even a particularly good SSD. The hard drive in the same laptop (dual-bay) is actually reporting as closer to failure. Maybe that's because it's a laptop, so it suffers more vibration and temperature variation, which is harder on hard drives than solid-state.

And the rest of your bitching seems to be based more on shoddy cloud hosts than SSDs, or on badly-configured servers. "SSDs are too fast, they bring down the entire system by filling up RAM"... wouldn't that be true of hard drives as well, IF they could transfer data that quickly?

2.5" 4X drives

[wren337]

Surprised they haven't just gone with 2X or 4X height 2.5" drives. Same connectors, same platters, easy retrofit. You just need a different bracket.

Re:Eric Brewer = Moron

[yodleboy]

Could be that Google has some inside information that leads them to believe that prices on SSD will not be dropping to acceptable levels any time soon, despite what SSD boosters would have us all believe. If they are proposing something like this, they must have some inkling that spinning platters have a great deal of life left.

Horse sense

[TheRealHocusLocus]

The current 3.5" HDD geometry was adopted for historic reasons --- its size inherited from the PC floppy disk.

The form factor of 3.5" floppy drives was decided during the early planning stage of the Great Data Railroad. You can place exactly 16 3.54" (90mm) bare floppy discs side by side within the standard railroad gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches. For the original 1982 HP single sided format of ~280kB this yields roughly ~4.3mB along every 3.5" of railroad track, or 137 rows along the floor of a a standard 40-foot railroad boxcar without the use of stacking. Thus ~600MB was the capacity of a original single density data railroad car, though it was only only ~1mm in height.

While the floppy disc made data railroads possible, media stacking made them practical. A cylinder of bare floppy media ~10 feet high is roughly 3048 discs, so your standard railroad boxcar held ~1.8TB of floppy storage, in 1982! With an average rail speed of 18mph a single boxcar passes every ~1.5 seconds, which is ~1.2T terabytes or 9200 gigabits per second! By 1998 floppy media storage density had improved ~714-fold, yielding transfer rates of 6568800Gb/s or ~821 TB/s.

So why was floppy data railroad ultimately limited to this 'arbitrary' ~821 TB/s? Northern rail gauge of the US railway based on the English rail system which were based on tramways which used the same jigs used to build wagons whose wheel base was determined by ancient ruts that were left by Roman chariots which were sized to accommodate the width of two horses' asses. As not-quite debunked here.

So the short story is, any chain of decisions regarding technology leads back to some horse's ass.