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The Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage (ieee.org)
For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.
Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.
Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.
I store all my data on a 2 TB NAS, with plenty of headroom. I really can't think of too many ways I could take advantage of a 20 TB HDD. I'm guessing the market for this stuff will be mostly the people who are collecting and storing data ON you, not FOR you.
People on Slashdot have been posting the equivalent of "640k should be enough for anybody" for decades now.
Something always comes along to fill that space. For a while I thought streaming/cloud might slow it down as people stop keeping stuff locally, but no it's carried on growing as fast as the R&D can manage.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Simple answer: Always keep more than one backup.
Backup yesterday's drives onto today's bigger drives and keep both generations around. Repeat every couple of years or so, discarding the grandparents. This way your total storage keeps growing to keep up with your accumulated data and you always have two copies of it around in case a drive dies.
No sig today...
Or a spinning drive where a head hits the platter, on a sweep. No real difference - just assume all failures are total bricks, and be done with it. If you don't, your backup strategy has already failed, the only question is how much has it failed: 90 or 100 per cent?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.