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."

I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

If 4TB is the biggest drive you can get today, wouldn't densities have to increase by 15x to get to 60TB drives by 2016, not just "more than double"

What's the useful limit?

[neokushan]

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?
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. At one point maybe it would have been to store music and films, but that's going to the cloud rather than local storage. Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.
In the same way that RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do, I wonder how Hard drives will fare?

Now as for myself, I could definitely fill 60Tb of space with stuff I'd like to keep - sign me up, but with the price of SSD's seemingly halving over the last couple of months, it's only a matter of time before average joe customer starts to realise that for the same price of a 60Tb HDD, they could probably have a 1Tb SSD that's a lot faster.

I'm going to make a bet or three

[CAIMLAS]

I'm going to make several bets here which will also hold true:

* sequential performance will improve at a rate congruent with storage capacity
* random performance will remain roughly the same as it has for the past 10 years (ie, poor, though it will likely improve slightly unless we go back to double-thick drives like we had 10-15 years ago)
* resiliency will not improve for single disks and will likely be worse for in terms of longevity.
* none of this will matter for the consumer market, because by that time, everyone will be using SSDs almost exclusively. You can still fit a lot of data on a 500GB drive, and those are commonly available for laptops and desktops already.

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

[Conception]

It's not the interface, it's the drives themselves. They aren't really faster than they were when ATA-133 came out. Doesn't matter what interface you stick on there, hard-drives aren't getting faster (thank god for SSD). At 60TB also, the BER rate approaches something like 600% chance over the whole of the drive, or something like that, if they are using the same reliability numbers that current drives use. Terrifying.

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

[afidel]

Actually as areal density increases drives are getting faster, both it terms of streaming reads and average transfer time, it's only worst case performance that is not getting any better. Also the drive manufacturers aren't stupid, as physical density increases logical density isn't increasing as quickly because they are using a larger percentage of the physical bits for error correction meaning the logic BER should at worst remain constant.