60TB Disk Drives Could Be a Reality In 2016

CWmike writes "The maximum areal densities of hard disk drives are expected to more than double by 2016, according to IHS iSuppli. Hard drive company Seagate has also predicted a doubling of drive density, and now IHS iSuppli is confirming what the vendor community already knew. Leading the way for greater disk density will be technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which Seagate patented in 2006. Seagate has already said it will be able to produce a 60TB 3.5-in. hard drive by 2016. Laptop drives could reach 10TB to 20TB in the same time frame, IHS iSuppli stated. It said areal densities are projected to climb to a maximum 1,800 Gbits per square inch per platter by 2016, up from 744 Gbits per square inch in 2011. Areal density equals bit density, or bits of information per inch of a track, multiplied by tracks per inch on a drive platter. This year, hard drive areal densities are estimated to reach 780Gbits per square inch per platter, and then rise to 900Gbits per square inch next year."

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[Sancho]

Even the high end SAN makers know this and tell people to always use RAID 6 on the backend, just because the window of time that it takes to rebuild a drive is so long these days that it can easily allow for a second drive failure to happen with no protection.

It's not just another drive failing--it's unrecoverable read errors (UREs). You might not know that a sector is unreadable until it's too late--if you discover it during a resliver of a RAID5, you are seriously out of luck. With very high data densities per disk, the chances of a URE are high.

So you're right--I/O speed is important. Also important is resiliency. If these don't scale along with the sizes, I think these will be considerably less useful than most people hope.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[Crosshair84]

HD video, music, photos. ETC. Even grandma can fill a 1TB hard drive with HD video without even trying.

Re:What's the useful limit?

[vlm]

I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill.

video editing. 1TB is about one of my wife's typical projects. What the "creative" types don't realize is if you record 10,20,30 times as much "stuff" as makes it into the final product, to edit you've got to store all that junk somewhere.

There are batching strategies where you can edit a three hour long interview down to 5 minutes of actual usable clips, repeat until everything is "clipped", then merge up all the clips and edit those. Some video editing software is very unhappy with terabyte scale projects so you have to do this anyway.

You can't edit and dispose of interview #4 because someone might have a cool story to run against it in interview #35.

This is not crazy stuff either, family history stuff

Different Strokes, yada yada

[rsborg]

Ok, there's never going to be a hard drive big enough to suit everyone's needs - that's a given. But average joe consumer must have a limit of some kind - what is it?

Thing is, there are multiple "average joe users". Just from my knowledge I could state about 4-6 profiles which have different processing, portability, storage and interface needs. My dad is chugging along fine with his MB Air, but despite that sweet chassis, I need more local storage and more RAM.

To apocryphally quote a famous person, 64.0GB is enough for most people... and I'm sure both you and I are not "most people".

Yeah f'ing right

[rgbrenner]

2016 is in 4 years. Let's see...

In 2008, Seagate announced the world's first 1.5TB drive. [computerworld.com]

And in 2012, Hitachi announced the first 4TB drive. [extremetech.com]

And in 2016, this will magically become 60TB?!

If you said 10TB, I would believe it. I'll even go along with 15TB.

But 60TB? don't believe it for a second.

Re:WOW

[AngryDeuce]

I stopped keeping porn a long time ago. It's just too easy to stream the shit now, no need to take up valuable hard drive space or leave files around to be found by spouses and children.

Re:WOW

[xQx]

Truecrypt.

That's all I have to say on the matter.

Re:I don't get it.

[MickyTheIdiot]

HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot [wikipedia.org]!!!11!

Re:More capacity, but what about I/O?

[afidel]

Without parity you're going to miss certain types of corruption so RAID6 is actually superior from a data reliability standpoint.

Re:WOW

[rubycodez]

just have to change the file names using sports-related code words, e.g.

double play == DP
shot on goal = bukkake
field goal == tittie fuck to completion
play ball == tea bag

Re:I'm going to make a bet or three

[Spodi]

And I bought 2x 2TB HDDs for less than half that. Your point? Why do some people have such a hard time understanding that not everyone cares about speed for all of their drives. My primary drive, sure, make that baby as fast as possible. But all I need there is 200 GB (85 GB at this time) since that just holds the OS and all programs I use. The rest - the multiple TBs of backups and media (music, movies, pictures), who cares how fast that is. Even the slowest HDDs are going to be able to play 1080p just fine. For the very rare occasions those drives bottleneck, I don't mind waiting. I'd rather spend the money upgrading everything else that bottlenecks far more often.

Re:For depressed people

[wanzeo]

Associating large drives with pirates is just the sort of thinking that will lead to a blank media tax, or even requiring buyers to register.