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There's No End In Sight For Data Storage Capacity (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: Several key technologies are coming to market in the next three years that will ensure data storage will not only keep up with but exceed demand. Heat-assisted magnetic recording and bit-patterned media promise to increase hard drive capacity initially by 40% and later by 10-fold, or as Seagate's marketing proclaims: 20TB hard drives by 2020. At the same time, resistive RAM technologies, such as Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint, promise storage-class memory that's 1,000 times faster and more resilient than today's NAND flash, but it will be expensive — at first. Meanwhile, NAND flash makers have created roadmaps for 3D NAND technology that will grow to more than 100 layers in the next two to three generations, increasing performance and capacity while ultimately lowering costs to that of hard drives."Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk.

18 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Reliability? by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'll generally take reliability over volume. I wish they'd work on that more.

    1. Re:Reliability? by Distan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The big purchasers of storage want the opposite. They prefer cheap capacity over reliability. All their data is replicated multiple time so losing a storage device is nothing to them, the data just auto-replicates to other devices.

    2. Re: Reliability? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Informative

      Don't we all have cron jobs to scrub our zpools?

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    3. Re:Reliability? by tnk1 · · Score: 2

      Agreed. Since they are required to replicate data to ensure high availability anyway, the major cost is not the quality of the medium, but rather the costs of raw storage. For quality considerations to overcome capacity, they would need a medium that is utterly reliable, which is a very, very hard thing to prove. That means that dropping quality by some low percentage, if it reduces the price of storage appreciably, is an acceptable trade off.

      As an individual, we do not expect to buy a lot of storage, and sometimes we accept only one drive to store our material. For many, if not most individuals, quality would be priceless because we aren't going to necessarily want to create a RAID array of our disks. Providers of storage and cloud services have not choice. RAID is already expected, so they might as well let the price and quality drop. After all, the worst that happens is that you use the RAID capabilities more often, instead of having a RAID setup which is never used because the disks are extremely reliable.

    4. Re:Reliability? by harrkev · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My home server has around 8TB of data on it and out of that probably 7.5TB is videos/music/games that I can redownload or rerip as necessary if I lose them.

      So, the time required to feed optical discs into a computer and/or browse web pages to get downloads is worthless? Some of us value our time, and don't seem to have enough of it.

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  2. what is the point of streaming by known_coward_69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    if i can simply carry around enough movies and music and TV to last me a few months to a year?

  3. War of the marketing material... by Junta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    HDD company says HDDs are going to continue to be the best price/capacity for a while, and it's going to be awesome, traditional SSD company says that's bollocks and HDDs will be completely obviated in the same timeframe, and Intel/Micron say 'screw nand, we got something better'

    It's great to see real advances in technology (unlike the various BS 'revolutions' that are commonplace in pure software), but it would be nice if once in a while a marketing person said something straightforward and honest.

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    1. Re:War of the marketing material... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      "Very soon flash will become cheaper than rotating media." In which case you don't buy rotating media anymore. SSD commands a premium because it's got advantages over HDD, so much so that many modern data center SAN racks are going all-SSD despite it costing 4 times as much.

    2. Re:War of the marketing material... by mikael · · Score: 2

      How long before they stick a couple of embedded CPU's or GPU's along with those SSD's?

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    3. Re:War of the marketing material... by swb · · Score: 2

      I think they pay 4x because the value is worth more than 4x.

      You get a dramatic performance improvement which in itself provides efficiencies in service delivery, reduced power consumption. And the performance benefit itself is an exponential improvement, not just an incremental one.

  4. If you have all the garbage it's no longer garbage by Overzeetop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Garbage is actually filled with valuable substances. GIGO is more applicable to older, discrete entry systems which have specific analysis paths.

    Consider real garbage in your trash, or in transfer station, or in a landfill. It generally has no value - it's garbage. But at a larger and larger scale it begins to have, statsitically, more valuable material in it. Now consider minerals trapped in the earth. We regularly process millions of metric tons of earth to refine and process into the elements we need.

    A truck full of garbage is a smelly mess. An earth full of garbage is a resource which can be mined for nearly anything you need. That's why all the trash we put in Google has greater value as the total amount of garbage they collect increases. It's still garbage...but at that scale it can be refined into money.

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  5. why stop there? by Comboman · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm just going to download and store a local copy of the internet. Then I can cancel my ISP service.

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  6. Will it ever get cheap again? by grumbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Back in 2011 I could get a 1.5TB drive for 45€, now five years later the best I can get is 3TB for 90€. Double the storage for double the price. If I just want to spend 50€ I only get 1TB. It's nice that we now have 6TB and 8TB drives, but they aren't cheap and so far haven't really lowered the price of the smaller drives and given how long this has already taken I am not even sure if HDDs will ever get cheap again before SSDs will take that space.

    1. Re:Will it ever get cheap again? by Solandri · · Score: 2

      Price per GB has resumed dropping since the effect of the Thailand flooding and HDD consolidation in 2011-2012. Quite frankly, that price adjustment upwards was needed, as the HDD industry had some of the slimmest margins in the electronics industry (around 1%-3%, vs 5%-10% for electronics overall). Slim margins = less money companies are able to devote to R&D = slower rate of capacity improvement.

      And don't fret about the rate of price drops slowing down since 2009 in the graph. The y-axis on that chart needs to be on a log scale to draw that sort of conclusion.

  7. Re:fast, non-volatile by castionsosa · · Score: 2

    LTO 7 WORM tapes seem to be the best thing for this as of now. Not cheap for the drive, but cartridges are not bad, and have a very long archival life.

    After that, perhaps Amazon Glacier comes to mind. Cheap to get the data in... costly to get it out.

  8. Re:640K by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Absolutely yes. I could harness a 1000 GHZ CPU, and 10,000 TB of storage TODAY no problem. IT would vastly increase my output. Yes, we need more, and that need is not going to abate for at least another 30 years without a quantum jump in storage tech. 4k/60 FPS video is BIG, imagine what 4K 360-degree VR video will take up, and then 8K. Its an unending thirst that will take us the better part of a century to quench.

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  9. Seagate claimed 60TB by 2016 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This post on Slashdot reminds me of previous post on Slashdot from 2012 about 60TB 3.5 inch and 10TB 2.5 inch drives by 2016. Again it was based on Seagate's 2006 patent on heat assisted magnetic recording. I think it is more realistic at his point to expect LTO tape to provide 220TB storage than Seagate making good on it's dream of HAMR drives. This latest claim should be an indication of how much trouble Seagate is having with their heat-assisted technology. They are essentially giving themselves a 4 year extension to achieve only a third of the results that they previously claimed.

    1. Re:Seagate claimed 60TB by 2016 by DoctorBit · · Score: 2

      It goes back even farther than that!

      Here's an article from 2010 reporting Seagate promising 100TB HAMR hard drives:
      http://www.myce.com/news/seaga...

      Here's an article from 2006 reporting Seagate promising HAMR hard drives in "a few years":
      http://webcache.googleusercont...

      Also I'm puzzled by the claims about hundred layer 3D NAND chips. I can see how a hundred-layer chip would increase density and therefore could reduce access latency, but I don't see how it could significantly reduce cost-per-bit. Sure, there will be a hundred times as many bits per square cm, but a hundred times as many manufacturing processing steps should be required to make it, thereby increasing manufacturing cost a hundred-fold. Also, with all those manufacturing steps, the chance of defects also goes up, thereby reducing yields and increasing costs even more. Reduced latency would be cool, but I don't see it reducing cost-per-bit by much, if at all.

      Also, Intel seems to be peculiarly self-contradicting when discussing their 3D XPoint technology. In 2015 they claimed that 3D XPoint was NOT phase-change technology and that it was already in volume production to prepare for sale in early 2016. In 2016 they're claiming that 3D XPoint IS phase-change technology and will not enter volume production until 2017.

      I've become very cynical about all this. Frankly, I'll believe these things when I can see them with my own eyes.