Seagate Says 16TB Hard Drive To Hit Market Within 18 Months (techspot.com)

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Seagate Says 16TB Hard Drive To Hit Market Within 18 Months (techspot.com)

Posted by msmash on Friday January 27, 2017 @06:40AM from the thirst-for-more-storage dept.

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.

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Great! by TWX · 2017-01-27 06:41 · Score: 5, Funny

Now I can lose even more data when a single disk crashes!

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1. Re:Great! by sims+2 · 2017-01-27 06:51 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  How long will it take to rebuild a raid array with discs that size? Even with only raid 1 I'd think the times would be horrendous.
  
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2. Re:Great! by sims+2 · 2017-01-27 06:52 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  disks*
  
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3. Re: Great! by silas_moeckel · 2017-01-27 07:41 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  For these large drives you really want something like snap raid for their use cases. Large media stores backups and other bulky and rarely changing datasets are perfect for it. Not to mention that since data on any single drive is coherent you can loose more than parity can correct and still only lose the files with errors blocks or the content of that one drive were it to completely fail.
  Right now using 8tb drives as it's the best price per gb.
  
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4. Re:Great! by ctilsie242 · 2017-01-27 07:42 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
5. Re:Great! by Solandri · 2017-01-27 08:13 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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.
6. Re:Great! by ShanghaiBill · 2017-01-27 08:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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.
7. Re: Great! by amorsen · 2017-01-27 12:22 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Please provide a link where I can buy a cheap 16TB tape drive. Even an LTO-7 is too small, so you have to play tape jockey, and the tapes cost about the same per TB as the disks. And that is after you find the extortionate amount for the drive.
  Tape possibly makes sense if you can afford an autoloader. HP has a LTO-6 autoloader for $4,239.99 that will do 20TB really (50TB fake). It will, however, only backup/restore 560GB per hour. Let us hope you have a slowly changing dataset and incremental backups are your thing...
  
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Re:how much porn is that? by mykepredko · 2017-01-27 06:58 · Score: 3, Funny

11Mpussy if you use MKS units. Slightly less if you use imperial.

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Re:how much porn is that? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-01-27 07:02 · Score: 3, Funny

For the less technical inclined, that is about 350 MWanks.
Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · 2017-01-27 07:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

Buy 2
Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by religionofpeas · 2017-01-27 07:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:Still using by tuffy · 2017-01-27 07:22 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Re:And you still can't back it up by religionofpeas · 2017-01-27 07:26 · Score: 5, Funny

I just divide it into two equal partitions, and make copies of everything.
Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for backup by davidwr · 2017-01-27 07:33 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by networkBoy · 2017-01-27 07:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Re:Still using by ShooterNeo · 2017-01-27 08:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by spire3661 · 2017-01-27 08:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

Oh fuck off. With 360 video becoming a thing, we are going to need 16k cameras to capture reality in decent fidelity. My personal raw 4k footage already vastly exceeds the 2 TB of backup media content i maintain.

I store my physical CDs as straight up .wavs at this point. My home surveillance package could fill a 16 TB quickly, even quicker if i upgrade to higher resolution cameras.....You lack imagination.

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Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by garryknight · 2017-01-27 11:09 · Score: 5, Funny

My friends speak quite highly of helium.

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Garry Knight