Slashdot Log In
Seagate Plans 37.5TB HDD Within Matter of Years
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 05, 2007 10:29 AM
from the lot-of-pr0n dept.
from the lot-of-pr0n dept.
Ralph_19 writes "Wired visited Seagate's R&D labs and learned we can expect 3.5-inch 300-terabit hard drives within a matter of years. Currently Seagate is using perpendicular recording but in the next decade we can expect heat-assisted magnetic recording (HARM), which will boost storage densities to as much as 50 terabits per square inch. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum." In the meantime, Hitachi is shipping a 1 TB HDD sometime this year. It is expected to retail for $399.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Terabits??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Terabits??? (Score:5, Funny)
Through the magic of math: Tb / 8 = TB and so (300Tb)/8 = 37.5TB
/GASP
Aikon-
Re:Terabits??? (Score:4, Informative)
1 kilobyte (kB) = 1000 bytes
1 kibibyte (kiB) = 1024 bytes
come on, the original specs date back from 1999.
Re:Terabits??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Terabits??? (Score:5, Funny)
Backup Solution? (Score:5, Funny)
Coming Soon: The LTO-48! (Score:5, Insightful)
All BS aside: you do bring up an excellent point. I'm a guy who has to do backup/recovery, and I've found that even a fully compressed LTO-3 will barely --just barely-- hold up to 1.2TB if you rig it right (by combining hardware/software compression, and the love that Bacula gives it (though admittedly sparse file handling most likely has inflated the reported amount of stuff).
Anyrate, that boils down to --maybe-- two full HDD's if the two are 500GB SATAs.
The good news is, after you pare down the crap you really don't need to backup, it usually isn't all that much for most companies. You can safely exclude out most of the OS itself for starters... w/ kickstart on RHEL and a .ks file that replicates what you've got on a given server (partitions, packages, etc), you can cut a LOT out.
Even more good news - if you get up a monster RAID array of similar drives (full SAN kitting or just attached to a big ol' server, no biggie), you can use it instead of tapes for most of your day-to-day backup. Then latch your tape drive or autoloader onto it and only commit to tape the reallly vital stuff that requires a long retention period. Most backup software suites (even Bacula) support writing to file as well as tape, so this shouldn't be too big of a problem for a sysadmin if s/he knows what s/he's doing.
Adaptation and all that.
But then, most of the servers in my care consist of a pile of RAID5'ed SCSI drives that range 36-140GB in size... and I doubt that most of them will get much bigger before it's time to replace the servers themselves. Just because you can get monster capacity on a single drive, doesn't mean that you need to or even want to.
Now if I already had a monster robotic multi-drive tape library running 24/7 now, and the boss wants to up the HDD capacity on a given pile of servers because he pretty much has to? Yeah. That would require a lot more thought and planning, and at that stage of the game a disk backup solution similar to what's been outlined above would be big and ugly, but would pretty much be what you're stuck with having to do.
Funny you mention that. (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost, longevity, performance, and capacity is completely inferior to making backups of disks onto other disks, and has been for quite some time. I have no idea why people ever stick with tape at all these days other than for nostalgia. Does it feel good to have a cartridge using a remarkably old fashion approach to data storage or are people just ill-informed?
Re:Funny you mention that. (Score:4, Informative)
Disks DIE. Tapes rarely do (comparatively). Tapes, although slow and linear, are incredibly durable.
HDDs aren't exactly volatile, but they are a heck of a lot more susceptible to corruption and failure due to the fact that you have both a magnetic storage medium AND the circuitry to power and control it on one device. And if one dies, you're pretty much fucked. A tape is only one of these, and is simpler and more reliable.
So why do we do things the old-fashioned way? Because it FSCKING WORKS!!
Re:Backup Solution? (Score:5, Funny)
I sprained a rib, choking back a laugh.
Re:Backup Solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
The tape is still cheaper. It also takes up less space on my shelf and I can drop it and not worry about loosing anything.
I am looking at these drives for the front end disk array that I use in my d2d2t setup (disk -> disk -> tape). Given about 40 of them I can keep 2-3 weeks of backups online in the disk and then destage to tape for the offsite vault and archive backups. This way restores of recent data is almost instant (no need to mount and seek to the spot in the tape), but the old archives cost me less and I save on power and cooling (the tape library expansion modules take no additional power. its just a shelf with tape slots).
Its not an either/or choice. Most folks with any real amount of data to backup use both.
That's great. (Score:5, Insightful)
The largest drive in the world isn't any use to me if it's slower than a 3.5" floppy or I can use it to replace my space heater.
Re:That's great. (Score:5, Informative)
- 5 discs, two heads each, rotating at 7200 RPM
- 1070Mbps transfer rate
- 8,7ms avg seek time
- 4,17ms avg latency
- around 9 watts power consumption while in "inactive-mode" (NOT reading or writing)
Hope this helps
Re:That's great. (Score:4, Funny)
product looking for a market (Score:4, Interesting)
All a bigger drive gives joe average is a longer defrag time, and longer search time. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of current domestic end-user drive space is currently empty.
Sure, many slashdotters will have filled their disks with all manner of stuff. I'm a developer, and the obj files alone for games stretching back 10 years certainly take a up a huge chunk of my disk, but we aren't average joes.
I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:
Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK)
Seek Time
Cost
Why innovate on capacity? it's the one major metric that most people have stopped caring about. I'm not being a luddite, for a long time disk capacity *was* a major issue, and we regularly ran out of space. I think that time is over.
Re:product looking for a market (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, if you could store all of music/movies/images that where -ever- created on your home drive (not just those copies of libraries of congress), why not? I'd certainly wouldn't mind having all that storage---cheaply.
Re:product looking for a market (Score:5, Funny)
Re:product looking for a market (Score:4, Informative)
The innovation in capacity and density is driven by the needs of enterprise users, and atypical users like me. The advances that come of it are then incorporated into lower-end drives as well. The reason that you start to see 100GB drives being the lowest capacity you can find is not because nobody could get by on less, it is because it would cost more to keep producing drives using the older technology -- each leap forward in drive technology has to be accompanied by retooling of manufacturing equipment and process, and it doesn't make a lot of fiscal sense to keep producing lower capacity drives if they cost as much or more to make as a newer one with higher capacity.
Product will create the market, it always does. (Score:4, Insightful)
The PVR market has been crippled in recent years because of market confusion, and compatibility problems (will my TiVO work with my cable box, etc.), plus competition for consumers' money by HDTVs themselves.
Once people get done buying their HDTV and paying off their credit cards, they're going to start looking at PVRs. I think that's a market that's probably going to explode in the next 5-10 years, even more than it has already. I also think you're going to see PVR functionality being built into the 'standard' cableco boxes, rather than as an upgrade. (Not that it will be free, they'll just charge everyone for it.)
High-def TV takes up a lot of space. That means if you want to have significant PVR functionality, you need to have a lot of local storage. 37.5TB, or 300Tb (aka 300,000,000Mb, if we use the 'marketing department' definitions) would be about 4,340 hours (180 days) of 19.2Mb/s HDTV. While that seems impossibly huge, I could imagine a future PVR using it as local cache: constantly downloading and storing programming based on your preferences. Add in a big HD movie library (say the contents of your local Blockbuster) and you can give the customer the impression of many simultaneous channels, even if they only have a relatively narrow pipe. (Narrow being 1 HD channel at a time, or a 20Mb pipe -- fat by today's standards, granted.)
Content always expands out to fill the available capacity. I remember when I first heard about the development of DVDs, back in the early 1990s. They seemed pretty ridiculously big then, too. Now I have stuff that I can't back up to DVDs, because it would be impractical to split it among so many discs as would be required. (Apple's Aperture doesn't even try to have a backup-to-DVD option, it's designed strictly to work with removable hard discs as backup 'Vaults.')
There was a time when people thought 20MB removable media was more than a single person would ever need, though we might look back and laugh. There's going to be a time in the future when 40TB looks the same way.
HAMR not HARM (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HARM (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ANOTHER LIE (Score:5, Informative)
Kilobyte = 1000 bytes
Megabyte = 1000 kilobytes
Gigabyte = 1000 megabytes
Terabyte = 1000 gigabytes
Kibibyte = 1024 bytes
Mebibyte = 1024 kibibytes
Gibibyte = 1024 mebibytes
Tebibyte = 1024 gibibytes
Re:ANOTHER LIE (Score:4, Informative)
Is a kilogram 1024 grams?
It is the software makers who do not understand these historic terms. Fight the redefining of words!
300 teraBIT, 37.5 teraBYTE. (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet jesus, do you people not even read the summary anymore??