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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.
Now I can lose even more data when a single disk crashes!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why are the two ending sentences there on SSDs?
It made the summary confusing and off point.
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and will it be enough for the digital hoarders out there?
ceph with smaller disks over 3 or nodes
My U160 SCSI Cheetah 15K7's on a Mylex controller. For speed that's still a hard combo to beat.
Ouch. I didn't think people still use parallel SCSI.
Been 20+ years since I worked on FW for those.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I typically replace my home file server hard drives every five years or so. More out of necessity because the hard drives start failing like dominos. I buy whatever hard drives I can get for $50 each. Last year I replaced Seagate 320GB hard drives with Western Digital Red 1TB hard drives. Maybe four years from now I'll get 16TB hard drives — or 1TB+ SSDs — for $50 each.
As many a wag has pointed out, that a 16TB drive means that there is more of your data to lose in a crash. I also have to think that the latency for finding specific files on the drive - especially in a server - is going to be a concern.
I guess for the home user, this might be a great way to store 100 or more Blu-Rays for streaming around the house but I have to wonder if these drives are reaching sub-optimal sizes for server farms/cloud based storage.
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Where are you going to put that kind of data, should you manage to fill one of these? In the cloud? No way, and your ISP will love the data cap overage charges if you try. Another drive? Well, unless you buy at least three of these then that will get expensive fast, requiring multiple older drives per one of these. Tape? Have you looked at LTO or similar prices? Not gonna happen for home users, even most businesses. So, when your rust stops spinning and the data is at rest, where do you turn?
}#q NO CARRIER
My U160 SCSI Cheetah 15K7's on a Mylex controller. For speed that's still a hard combo to beat.
Yea but who worries about speed from spinning disks anymore, outside of some enterprise uses and those are shrinking fast as cache and solid state storage are both quickly dropping in price. If you need speed, you go SSD.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Relatively cheap long term storage is the only reason I am aware of.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
My first computer was a 386 with a 30MByte disk... and I was PROUD of it!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I still have a few 15K SCSI drives on 320 MB/s. They used to be my primary drives in several machines. But since I switched to SSD for the primary system, the wok great as swap space.
Back in the day, we would have the newest capacities come out to replace the previous generation at that same price point, and the price all of the other lower capacity drives would fall in order. That hasn't been the case lately. Who needs to buy a $900 16TB drive when you could do that in RAID with 4TB drives for $750? Nobody. What we need is these new drives to come out at $500, and push the cost of 8TB drives down to the $150 range.
* Flakey controllers or firmware can cause huge problems. True for platter-drives as well but it's rare on those devices.
* Wear-leveling makes "deletion" permanent. No more going back and "un-deleting" files a week later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
Strange that the discrete 800 degree heating units haven't been integrated AFAIK. However, 250 degrees in an oven for a day fixes most of them.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20579077
Most of the comments so far seem to be about 16TB being a bit on the ridiculous side for PCs and even small servers, etc. What these are exciting for aren't RAID or traditional PC's but for high density storage for Big Data, which typically doesn't use RAID, and generally only looks at SSDs as a "hot tier" solution. 16TB spindles sound great to me, but I'd never stick one in my home PC.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
I'd love to see someone come out with a cheap, trivial-to-use "WORM* USB stick" along with "plug and play" backup software.
Such backups would be impervious to being over-written by ransomware. If using them became commonplace, it would cripple that industry.
Such media could also be used for security systems or any other kind of data-logging system: Record everything to write-once media (along with a copy of recent data to a cached journal, so changing media doesn't cause interruptions).
There is a good business case for this: It provides a nice "give away the flashlight, sell the batteries" profit center for vendors: People would need to replace the USB sticks when they filled up. The key is that it will have to be no more expensive than ordinary USB sticks of the same capacity.
Before you mention "data retention/deletion policies" I'm envisioning this for home users and some types small businesses, not large businesses or those subject to government-driven data-deletion policies.
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* By "WORM" I mean the actual hardware/firmware enforces the write-once aspect, not just a USB stick with an OS-level device driver that makes it "write once." This should actually be cheaper to manufacture than typical USB sticks since you would not need to provide "erase" circuitry nor would you need to have wear-leveling logic in the device's firmware.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
No really it isn't.
To read something from a hard drive you have to seek to the right track and wait on average half a rotation for it to come under the head. So a 15KRPM hard drive maxes out at under 500 IOPS. A raid array can help a bit provided the host can queue up enough operations at once that all the drives stay busy.
15K RPM hard drives have been basically squeezed out by falling SSD prices. The SSDs now offer a comparable cost per gigabyte and far higher performance.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
But when will we see hydrogen filled drives?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Another case, while we're at it.... datacenters.
This would be cool for archival or cold tier storage solutions, where the data is flagged as having some acceptable degree of permanency is moved onto these WORM devices. I can think of all sorts of applications - financial, backup, legal, content libraries with immutable data, (like old documents, manuals, videos, etc.).
You could focus more on read speeds and less on write issues, and while I'm no expert, I imagine there are plenty from an engineering point of view.
I bet YouTube and Netflix would go nuts over things like these...
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
4 days?
Sorry, but it seems like the bigger Seagate drives get, the less reliable they become.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This should actually be cheaper to manufacture than typical USB sticks since you would not need to provide "erase" circuitry nor would you need to have wear-leveling logic in the device's firmware.
Former Flash validation engineer here...
Sadly not the case. The erase circuitry will still be needed if only so you can adequately run test patterns on the parts. Have to return the device to 0xFF's after testing so your customers can use it.
That said, there is the ability to disable erase in the field by setting a bit in the FACS array as the last step of testing.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
Point me to a local backup solution that can handle 16TB in a single go.
Pretty much anything?
But mainly it will all work because most backup systems are incremental. I can easily maintain a backup for a 16TB drive because week to wee I'll not have 16TB to back up...
I back out to an offsite drive about once a month. Even then I'll have perhaps 500GB to transfer, which is easily manageable in an evening.
Point me to a cloud backup solution that can handle 16TB
But that's a problem today, and is irrelevant to the size of drives you store things on locally. It's not like having larger drives MAKES you have more data. It's just helpful for storing what you have on fewer drives.
If you have a lot of data and want cloud backups there's just no replacing a station wagon full of hard drives...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So the price delta is 6-10x at this point
That's a pretty good reason to buy spinning disks. By strange coincidence I actually bought one early this aternoon for backups. My plan is to buy two in the 5-6TB range from different manufacturers and use rsync with --link-dest for incremental backups.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What sort of file system are you thinking about for WORM - OpenZFS? You'll need a copy-on-write filesystem to justify a WORM
That said, there is the ability to disable erase in the field by setting a bit in the FACS array as the last step of testing.
For all practical purposes, is this an irreversible step?
If not, I would prefer some other method, such as cutting a trace or burning out a fuse so that the drive was guaranteed to be "write once, erase/delete never."
For "forensic" purposes, "guaranteed non-erasure" is a hard requirement.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why not? I am sure we will find ways to waste.. I mean use the space. For example 8K 360 VR movies.
That's movie, singular. :)
Okay, maybe movies, plural, if by "movie" you mean "short film."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You realize that spinning disks that size are "archive" only usage. Not actual usage. By that measure, tape is really cheap. There is a reason why you hardly see that any longer.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Install ZFS on your Linux box.
If you're going to do this for anything other than experimental purposes, be sure you're using ECC RAM. You probably aren't and your current board most likely doesn't support it, so you'll need to get a new motherboard, possibly a new CPU and new RAM.
A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Part I: Purpose and Best Practices
But its way more fun to take a chain saw to a pile of LTO tapes!
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You still need an initial snapshot on which to base the incremental diffs though.
Yes, and???
It's not like you are going to have 16TB on day one, is it? So then you just have the initial time to move whatever to a newer drive, then incremental costs after... In fact you do not HAVE to have a 16TB capability on the backup until the content you are backing up reaches that point. I've taken that approach before, which is a good idea as it staggers out the drive purchase baking it more likely you get drives from different batches and different stages of manufacturing reliability.
Or if you are because you are just coalescing other backup drives, then you just pay that penalty a single time (because you could back up to multiple drives at once) and then distribute the now full drives to safe places ad leave them alone.
A single cost of a day or two of data transfer is meaningless over the course of a few years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree that for most "Big Data" applications, you will want speed over price.
However, there is a case for using SSDs for archival data or backups.
For example, if you are doing an experiment where each run creates, say, 1000TB of raw data in a short period of time (minutes or less). You'll probably filter out some percentage of that data before it is ever stored and store the rest (say, 500TB) for a few hours while you post-process it, then store the "potentially good stuff" (say, 250TB) for at least a few more days while you do further post-processing (call it 3 days). You'll wind up keeping only the data you know you can make use of (call it 125TB).
You will almost certainly need 825 TB worth of extremely fast storage to do this right (remember, the bulk of the data will be discarded before it is ever stored).
After a few hours, the bulk of that space - 500TB in this example - becomes available for the next experimental run.
After a few days, another 250TB becomes available for future experimental runs.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could buy some not-so-expensive drives to save some of this data that would otherwise be thrown away in case it turns out to be useful later? The answer is of course "it depends."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What sort of file system are you thinking about for WORM - OpenZFS? You'll need a copy-on-write filesystem to justify a WORM
I am thinking of applications where files are never deleted and which the filesystem - if it exists at all - is only appended to. Basically, a character device in Unix/Linux. The "canonical example" would be an archiving/backup application which did not support erasure or media re-use.
Perhaps the best analogy would be a hypothetical tape drive in which write-head could not erase data once it was written, and writes could only occur in fixed-sized blocks immediately after the last block that was written to.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Introducing the 16TB drives will make everything less than that, cheaper.
You realize that spinning disks that size are "archive" only usage. Not actual usage.
Given the way I said I was using it for backups, yes, I'm pretty sure I know that it's for archival usage, since ya know, that's what I got it for.
By that measure, tape is really cheap
Not for me. In the kind of quantities I need, a 6TB LTO approaches the same price as a 6TB external USB hard disk, and that's of course excluding the tape drive. Then there's the pain in the arse factor and time (which isn't free). With incremental backups that 5TB drive will back up my laptop's two SSDs, my other laptop, my SO's laptop, misc photos, my previous backups, my web host and my email, leaving plenty of spare capacity for a number of incremental backups on the two laptops.
Then add one or two more for redundancy.
At my kind of scale, hard discs are the best archival option.
For bigger things, yes, tape is a better option and still a big seller. Not as common as it used to be, but for long term, reliable storage and price per bit in huge quantities it's still king of the hill.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Not just videos. There are other uses where you have a lot of data, but do not necessarily need very high speed.
Backups, especially if you want to keep them for longer, archival storage, as a third/fourth tier storage (RAM cache, SSD cache, hard drives).
While the capacity of spinning disk have gone up, the price pr. GB seems to have been the same for some years now. I wonder if it ever will change og be cheaper?
I'd love to see someone come out with a cheap, trivial-to-use "WORM* USB stick" along with "plug and play" backup software.
You may be waiting a while. Flash isn't cheap enough and it has data retention problems. Phase change memories (of which 3D Crosspoint seem to be a variant) also have difficulties with long term retention. If you don't need it to be a USB stick, WORM behaviour is a commonly available in optical storage media, including Blu-Ray.
This is 2010 era pre-flood/pre-consolidation prices
Sorry but prices were never that cheap. Pre-2010 the average desktop drive was closer to $60/TB with some cheap ones in the $50 range. We surpassed that mark again early last year, not to mention that you can get 8TB drives for around $220 if you shop at the right places which is below your $30/TB mark.
You realize that spinning disks that size are "archive" only usage. Not actual usage. By that measure, tape is really cheap. There is a reason why you hardly see that any longer.
Typically "archive" hard drives mean that they have relatively poor performance, not that that they're bad. For instance, if you're looking to put together a NAS to store a bunch of media like TV shows or movies, they're just fine. You're going write infrequent changes, mostly when you're adding new content, and you're going to read sequential streams, both of which archival drives are just fine for. That's actual usage. They are not intended for, say, write once, then store in a closet offline for years. They're not like "archival" quality optical media, which is intended to not decompose for a longer time than non-archival media.
Just keep your high IOPS activities like databases off them and they're an excellent tool.
"Oh no... he found the
Sorry but I have the Newegg.com invoice to prove it? I paid $65 for 2 TB in 2010.
So a one off special? Or can you point me to all bottom of the range drives being that price range?
In that case I got one for you. I bought 6x 100GB HDDs in 2000 for $9ea, but that wasn't a market rate.
Most people that care about "forensic purposes" purchase a device called a "hardware write blocker".
yes, once the FACS is locked a fuse is blown preventing any changes to the FACS array, so while its cells are Flash (and technically erasable) the ability to write or erase them is hardware blocked. The enforcement on the rest of the memory arrays is firmware blocked based on the FACS settings. Of course you lose the ability to TRIM, and if you don't write an entire block you lose the remainder (flash must be written block at a time, so to write a partial block it's a read-erase-write step, usually implemented as read-modify-write[another block]-erase[initial block]).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump