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Seagate Says 16TB Hard Drive To Hit Market Within 18 Months (techspot.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you haven't shopped around for hard drives in a while, you may be surprised at what's out there. The largest 3.5-inch desktop hard drives currently available from Seagate, for example, offer a whopping 10TB of capacity for less than $500. In the event that 10TB isn't quite enough storage and a multi-drive setup isn't ideal, you'll be happy to hear that Seagate over the next 18 months plans to ship 14TB and 16TB drives. A 12TB HDD based on helium technology is currently undergoing testing and according to CEO Stephen Luczo, initial feedback is positive. Most enthusiasts and even some PC manufacturers are now using solid state drives as their primary drive due to the fact that they're much faster and more power-efficient. What's more, because they have no moving parts, SSDs generate no noise and are much more durable.
Spinning drives are still the way to go for bulk storage because the cost-per-gigabyte remains far, far cheaper than SSD and will seemingly remain so for the near future.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The 10TB drives benchmark at around 240 MB/s on their outer track. Figure a 16 TB drive with 1.6x the areal density will be about 25% faster, or 300 MB/s. That's the speed of the outer track. The inner track is half that, or 150 MB/s. And the circumference is proportional to the radius, so the integral between these two speeds (taking into account more data being stored on outer tracks) yields an average speed 1/3 of the way from 300 to 150 MB/s, or 250 MB/s.
So a straight sector-by-sector (sequential) copy of 16 TB drive to another 16 TB drive would take 16000 GB / 250 MB/s = 64000 seconds, or just under 18 hours.