100gig HDs Coming

ensor writes wrote in to send us a link to a bit talking about denser HDs from Seagate. 16 billion bits of data per square-inch on a HD platter with 5 platters per disk for a total of about 100 gigs. Supposedly will be available before the end of the year. This is pretty cool- I like the idea of having enough MP3s locally so I can go long stretches of time without reruns. Long stretches like... March.

Comments

Baaaadd!

[trims]

I hate to rain on everyone's parade here, but am I the only one who finds the ever-larger client disk drive to be much more of a curse that a blessing?

it's gotten to the point nowdays that I can't buy a machine without at minimum a 4GB disk in them. For most of my compute servers, they need little more than a 1GB boot disk, so the other 3GB goes to waste. WTF am I supposed to do when it comes with a 100GB drive?

On a much more practical note, increasing client HD sizes are a royal pain for data integrity. backing up that kind of distributed data is totally impossible, even if you had a fully GigaBit Ethernet network. Backup technology is far behind, and I really wish that storage vendors would spend alot more time working on making better archive/backup media.

As a previous post on NASA's data migration problems stated, the general solution for long-term data storage these days is simply keep it all online, spinning, since disk price/space keeps sinking. However, that doesn't obviate the need for nightly backups and disaster-recovery plans.

I second the guy above who wanted better performance, not more space. Sustained throughput on drives is really only inching up (maybe 18MB/s now). This is a killer. If you double the space on a drive, that means twice as many people are trying to access the data on that drive. Yet, throughput is up maybe 10%. This sucks. RAID helps, but the general problem persists. Given that memory bandwidth is up to 800MB/s now (in a PC), and expecting to go to 1.1GB/s with Rambus RSN, having a disk subsystem that putzes along at under 100MB/s is pathetic. If the vendors can't get the throughput up NOW, we need to start investigating other technologies to help. Like maybe massive NVRAM cache disks (on the order of a 50-100MB) to help I/O.

And, for all you folks, a nice reminder: when was the last time you did a backup of your machine? I know DVD-RAM/-RW will help this, but still, backup costs are out of control. A good-sized (10GB raw) consumer-grade (eg Travan TR5) drive runs $350, and the tapes are $30 each, and well, lets be honest here, they're good for using a couple of times a month if you don't want them to break soon. DSS-3 DATs are $700+, tapes $20+, and the big DLTs (required for serious backup) start at $3k, with tapes approaching $100 each.

We don't need bigger drives, WE NEED BETTER BACKUP!!!!!!

-Erik