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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.
Buy 2
a 16TB drive means that there is more of your data to lose
In most cases, if you can fill a 16 TB disk, that data isn't actually yours.
On SATA? Days to weeks would be my guess. With drives this size, RAID-6 isn't even enough. It really needs triple parity, especially with drive arrays that contain 8-10 drives, or with 12+, quad parity.
I'd like to see drive makers focus on reliability. Aerial density is quite high these days. Why not build in two different drive heads that can work in an active/active configuration (some drives about a decade ago had this ability), more ECC, bit-rot resistance, and more resistance to shock and vibration, as well as the other causes of data loss. Perhaps larger bad sector replacement tables as well.
Maybe even go for speciality drives. One drive type would be dedicated to long term archive storage (perhaps as a WORM format with UDF as a filesystem). Another drive type would improve on the SSHD concept, with 256-512GB of SSD, and a good amount of HDD, so shingled writes are less of a performance bottleneck. Still another drive type would have 2-4 different heads, SSD, and be designed for fast, sequential I/O.
Maybe add a new form factor. For example, a drive form factor that has a shock-resistant case so the drives can be used in lieu of a LTO tape, and supports hardware AES encryption, as well as a command to check the entire volume for bit rot and fix it, or at least tell that the volume has bad data on it.
Actually, deal prices for HDDs have yet to drop below ~$30 a terrabyte. This is 2010 era pre-flood/pre-consolidation prices. I haven't seen a price for a new drive from a quality brand dip below that.
While I've seen SSDs hit $200/terrabyte. So the price delta is 6-10x at this point. It's rapidly shrinking.
I'd like to see drive makers focus on reliability.
They do. HDD reliability has been going up for a long time. Some brands and models are much more reliable than others. Google, Backblaze, and others have published longitudinal data about that. The MTBF printed on the packaging means absolutely nothing. If you care about reliability, then check reliability data, and stick to the "one-back" rule and don't buy bleeding edge hardware.
Why not build in two different drive heads that can work in an active/active configuration
Because customers that need high speed non-consecutive I/O have mostly moved to SSD.
The only reason to use HDDs is because they are cheap. So anything that adds to the cost, just pushes more customers to SSDs.