Seagate Ships First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive 316
MojoKid (1002251) writes Seagate announced today that it has begun shipping the world's first 8 Terabyte hard drive. The 8TB hard drive comes only five months after Western Digital released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate's high capacity HDDs had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
Porn (Score:5, Funny)
That sure is a lot of porn...
Re:Porn (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey, porn in not the only kind of data. There are youtube how to videos through dirpy.com, which, like porn, could be up in the air and a future raid into your home by the government might force you to erase those - I hope you could keep the advertising banner like things, promotional material samples, as in, do I get a right to keep copyrighted junkmail I never asked for delivered by the post office to my snail mail post box, similarly do I get to keep spam images in my emails that I never asked for in the first place, or are those copyrighted and they want to make me pay for them? But there is the clear cut clear case of public domain, which they are still trying to assault and undermine. And pure public domain, like Wikipedia pages, and pre-1923 pdfs at books.google.com, those you have a right to keep on your TB harddrive, no matter what, unless they change the law and they say we no longer have nomadic public domain lands, and stick your pole down and claim public domain nomadic lands as your own through homesteading rights, so all public domain stuff might go up on auction sale, and then you will be banned from knowing anything unless you can show a receipt, else you will be forced to stay dumb.
So archive.org sometimes does not bother compressing the ebooks and pdfs like books.google.com does on a lot of stuff, and it's like there is no amount of public domain scientific literature that I'm satiated with having in on my 1TB portable harddrive, the only issue being I requested TWC to take me to a higher plan so I can download more, instead they kept talking about download speed, I'm like keep that the same, I wanna pay more so I don't feel bad so bad about the total monthly data transfer, and somehow it got left at the same rate I signed up at, and I haven't tried again to get on the higher cost plan. I'm still getting a lot of downloads this way anyway, but sometimes I hold back my exuberance thinking about the total monthly data transfer, which they are kind to show you.
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Statistics (Score:5, Funny)
2 paragraphs.
6 sentences.
375 words.
On average, your post contains:
3.00 sentences per paragraph.
62.50 words per sentence.
For comparison, typical English text contains:
4.49 sentences per paragraph.
38.58 words per sentence.
Can we get a tape drive to back this up? (Score:3)
I remember when tape drives stored a few times more data than hard drives, and were priced about the same. I know I can back up to external USB drives (which I do using Snebu [snebu.com], but I which tape drives were more affordable.
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No. At least not one that makes sense for storing one or two copies of a consumer hard drive. And you're stuck with a huge investment in one generation of tapes, unlike HDDs where you can gradually buy bigger and better drives. I'd rather see hard drives get cheaper and tape not than nothing getting cheaper at all. What's the real practical downsides to HDDs for the average person anyway? They're standard and can be hooked up to any computer (real fun if your tape drive dies on you or is lost/stolen). They'
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I agree that most of what people have can be re-downloaded. However, separating that out is a chore, and what if you miss something? Might as well back up the entire drive just to make sure. But that would be a great product -- a search engine service that you can upload a list of file hashes and have it return a url for each file that is available online.
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Clients backup to a central server, each client has its own mount point and own file system (limits the possible damage if a backup client goes crazy since this is a push system). Inside that mount point, they create as many rdiff-backup directories as they need to.
Once per day the server checks the file system for a particular backup client (iterates through them in a random o
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I haven't used rdiff-backup, but I used to use rsnapshot (actually a homebrew equivalent to it) -- was backing up several hosts to a central one. But I really missed having all the backup metadata in a database, where I could do simple SQL queries to find out file patterns were taking up the most space (this helps you tune your include/exclude list). Also, trying to replicate a rsnapshot volume that had a bunch of hard links (each day's backup's common files were hard linked to the previous days' files)
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My concern about always-on storage is that if someone gets root, they can zero out the backup storage, purge all snapshots, then rsync the zeroed out changes.
I sometimes wonder about using hard disks instead of tapes in a silo. Perhaps something like iMation's RDX, except with modern, high capacity drives, or maybe even a robotic mechanism that can handle bare bones disks, moving them from a storage part to a reader [1], and so on.
Hard disks are not as reliable as tapes, but if done right, could be used as
Re:Can we get a tape drive to back this up? (Score:5, Informative)
They still sell tape drives?
Yes, tape is very common for backups & archiving. LTO6 is 2.5 TB (uncompressed) per tape and sells for around $40-$50 per tape:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
And LTO is far more reliable than a SATA hard disk.
Must be marketed toward the old geezer crowd or something.
Or, to those of us who care about our data.
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Re:Can we get a tape drive to back this up? (Score:5, Informative)
They still sell tape drives? Must be marketed toward the old geezer crowd or something.
They're cost effective if you're storing a LOT of data and you don't need to regularly access it.
An LTO-6 drive costs about $2500, and it stores 2.5TB of data on a $50 tape. That is about half the price of a comparable hard drive. If you have more than 100TB of data to store then tape becomes cheaper (that is, the savings for the tapes exceeds the cost of the drive). Tape is also a bit less fragile during transport/etc, and likely more reliable than optical media unless you buy the expensive stuff (which certainly isn't any cheaper than tape).
Doing anything with those kinds of data volumes is always going to be slow, whether you're talking drives/tapes/etc. So, if you need rapid recovery or have a lot of turnover then strategies like replication to a live remote site is going to be necessary, and tape will never give you a great recovery time. It is better for retention for "just in case" scenarios or legal reasons - where recovery time isn't as important as just having the ability to recover at all.
Re:Can we get a tape drive to back this up? (Score:5, Informative)
An LTO-6 drive costs about $2500, and it stores 2.5TB of data on a $50 tape. That is about half the price of a comparable hard drive. If you have more than 100TB of data to store then tape becomes cheaper (that is, the savings for the tapes exceeds the cost of the drive). Tape is also a bit less fragile during transport/etc, and likely more reliable than optical media unless you buy the expensive stuff (which certainly isn't any cheaper than tape).
The advantage of tape has always been it's nigh-indestructibility. Spinning drives in comparison are pretty vulnerable.
Tapes has a crapload of drawbacks, write speed, read speed, the fact it's sequential (random access is painful) but it remains popular because you can drop it, smash it, submerge and then freeze it and all you have to do is roll the tape into a new case. Disks have a bad tendency to fail over time where as tape is a lot more reliable.
If you want to back up a lot of data for a short time (sub six months) then disk is good, if you want to back up data for a long time (years) and know that it will be recoverable in 5 to 7 years, then use tape.
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"Always" is a fighting word :-)
I was there for the touted Exabyte revolution. 2 GB on a digital-8 cartridge sounds puny now but it was revolutionary then. Except for one thing. The reliability and lifetime of the drives was piss poor. OK, two things. The recorded data on tape was very marginal as well.
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The advantage of tape has always been it's nigh-indestructibility.
Always? They might be better now but, I've seen massive amounts of data turned to useless piles of crud by tapes getting tangled in the drive. Given that they were generally used for critical backups and only pulled out of storage when you needed them, that was not a good failure mode. Given how slow they were, your previous backup was somewhat out-of-date, and you'd also be needing to replace the tape drive that had all of your precious data wrapped around inside it.
Re:Can we get a tape drive to back this up? (Score:5, Funny)
That was true about a decade ago. Since then, the companies have been able to come up with a much better glue to hold the bits to the tape.
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Dropping hard drives tends to destroy them too, but that doesn't rule them out. Basically if you fling tapes around, you're doing it wrong. Have a care.
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"Enterprise" is not just the subject of that poster on the wall in your mom's basement.
Re:Can we get a tape drive to back this up? (Score:5, Informative)
- need removable backup storage that gets swapped daily and goes offsite (legal reasons)
- have the budget for multiple tape drives, including a spare at your offsite disaster recovery location
- have enough data that you need an auto-loader
- have someone to babysit the tape drive on a daily basis, swapping in tapes in an organized fashion, replacing tapes based on usage history (not when they break), and run period cleaning tapes
The tape drives are $2-$5k each, you should always have at least two of the current generation, in case one breaks. Individual tapes are $40-$60 and you're going to be buying 50-60 per year if you follow a normal setup (daily backups, one tape per week gets pulled for permanent storage, etc.)
For smaller companies, hooking up a 1TB or 2TB USB drive to the server and running a backup is about the limit of their technical proficiency (and limits of their budget). For $800, you could buy 6 or 8 USB drives and have them rotate them out on a weekly basis.
Sure, it's not a daily backup with permanent retention offsite. But it's generally more foolproof then tape (or less fiddly). And it's a lot easier to sell a $800 backup solution then a $8000 backup solution. Plus you can start with a $400 solution, then slowly add more drives to the pool over time to get better historical backups. Older, smaller, USB drives can be repurposed for other uses as you slowly increase the size of individual drives. Not as easy to repurpose old tape drives or media that is now too small.
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Just wanted to say, really good analysis - fair and on the mark. Tape has a very good home in the high end.
It's remarkable how amazing the low-end of hard-drive backup has become. I can set up a small business with a simple ZFS mirror (with or without SSD cache) and by running the default auto-snapshot scripts they can have a year's worth of data retention, on and off-site copies, encrypted even, for well under a grand, and the whole thing is random-access retrievable, online.
I think in real terms my QIC-
Progress (Score:5, Funny)
Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails. But now it's the HD version of the series I will lose. That's called progress.
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if you're trusting a drive, "you're not doing it right(tm)"
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Long gone are the days when you had to sit back and not do anything on your system, waiting patiently while the data was backed up, so as make sure everything would keep up, and not to interrupt the tape/CD-R/etc.
When my system is being rsync'd to the backup drive, the only thing I notice is a small lag when I click on a file, and a HDD LED that's blinking like it's t
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I use various cloud providers to backup important stuff.
But I would expect that a hard drive for which I pay $120 would last at least a year. Of course we live in a world where failure is expected in computer hardware so the blame is on me for not rsync'ing 6 seasons of Nash Bridges and 3 seasons of Airwolf.
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I archive all my stuff directly at Netflix.
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The day Netflix offers The Wire and the Star Wars movies I may consider doing the same. Until then they are my $8/month source for bad British or Swedish series, although they are becoming quite a good source for bollywood movies too.
I'm not kidding. Recently I had the opportunity to watch the puzzling movie Besharam on Netflix. The scene with the exploding car at the beginning got me hooked but the highlight of the movie is definitely this dynamic duo of Indian guys dressed in aluminium foil who dance like
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Buy two.
If you're worried about the drive failing, a RAID-1 setup will take care of it, while doubling read speeds and halving seek times.
If you're worried about user error or other accidents, have one offline in an external caddy, and just periodically power it up and rsync all the new data to it.
I've been doing the later religiously for the past 10 years, upgrading my external drive every time I upgrade my internal drives. In all that time,
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Five years ago I would have agreed with you. But all my machines nowadays are laptops with SSD, and the internal disks are 128 or 256GB. What really matters is in the cloud, and for what is less important I am not about to start doodling around with pairs of external drives.
Maybe I should get a device like a Drobo. Or go nuts and get myself a nice SAN. I saw a Dell PS400E on eBay for $5,0000. 42TB of highly-redundant, high-performance storage... Now THAT would be awesome. Except the the noise and power bill
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Hurry before the next flood in Thailand, where most of the major hard disk factories in the world are conveniently located nearby each other (hence the price surge of 2011).
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11... [nytimes.com]
From the article:
“Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places,” said John Monroe, an expert on storage devices at Gartner, a technology research firm.
Yeah, sure.
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Man, I'd almost forgotten about that but you're right. I'd almost filled my capacity when that happened and got in a pickle with my storage needs. I need to make sure I have some spare capacity to grow into.
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Get Perpendicular! (Score:2)
What does this mean for the data center? (Score:2)
ugh (Score:2)
I just had my third 1tarabyte+ hard drive fail tonight. I remember when hard drives DIDNT fail. It wasn't even a think I thought could happen. It's nice they can get them so large now, but I don't want that much in one place. I'd rather have several smaller drivers raided waiting for the inevitable.
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When did hard drives not fail? I've had failures since the early 90s, when they were in the 200 MB range.
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When did hard drives not fail? I've had failures since the early 90s, when they were in the 200 MB range.
Well, I'm sure someone will speak up about some tales of DASDs of yore still older than what I've had, but I still remember when Seagate was called "Seizegate" because of the frequency of occasion when one needed to dismount the drive, place it upon a soft surface, and give it a good rap on one corner (perpendicular to the axis of rotation) in order to permit it to spin up. 21MB of ST-225, baby.
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You can still raid several larger drives. The advantage: you can have full mirroring, and large storage space. I welcome the technological advancement, but still I've only occupied 50% of my 1.5 TB HDD, and I must note that I've copies of the kernel source, and mozilla-central.
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I remember when hard drives DIDNT fail.
No you don't. HDDs have failed as long as HDDs have existed, and the failure rate has declined over the years. Today's HDDs are more reliable than ever before.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I've had bad luck with using USB drives for backup in general. Two seagates and two Toshiba drives died before I got a synology unit. It's been rock solid so far.
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Ive heard the same thing about WD drives...so NEVER AGAIN for WD drives, and NEVER AGAIN for Seagate drives, so now ill only buy......oh shit.
Re:Seagate failures (Score:4, Informative)
One external drive enclosure that I've been happy with is a Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2. This is a USB 3.0 unit which can hold up to (4) 3.5" drives in a few different configurations (I use JBOD). Not that expensive, has a fan, and has good performance.
Stick some moderate quality 3.5 drives in it (WD Red, Seagate Enterprise Capacity drives, Hitachi Ultrastars) and it should run fine for a few years. Most of those drives have 3 or 5 year warranties.
(For the 4-drive unit, we write to a different drive each day. And our backups are based on rdiff-backups, so each backup set has the full 53 weeks of change history for the source data.)
Re:Seagate failures (Score:5, Informative)
The drives used in external enclosures are sub-standard. Since the whole package only comes with a minimal one or two year warranty and they can easily point to any slight mark on the case as signs of abuse they put the weakest, borderline drives in them.
Many people don't realized that drives are binned that way at the factory. All drives have a certain number of bad blocks from new. Those that have very few become server grade drives, the majority become standard internal consumer drives and those with very many surface errors get turned into external drives. The number of errors the drive starts out with affects the number of available spare blocks and the time before it develops further errors.
Re:Seagate failures (Score:4, Informative)
If you bought all of the drives at the same time and they all failed in such a short span, the likely cause is a bad batch, rather than some extraordinarily poor designs on the part of the manufacturer. And while a bad batch does reflect poorly on the manufacturer, the fact is, all of the manufacturers have bad batches from time to time.
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They used to be so good, but (wouldn't you know) it was when I bought a set of 24 of them (staggered lots) for a big ZFS NAS was the time their quality took a dive. Every drive failed within three years - yeah, there was a warranty but I'd trade not dealing with that on 24 drives, one at a time (failed about every 2 weeks)! And this was in an always-on well-cooled data center with clean power.
I switched over to Hitachi and have been much happier with the reliability. I'm hoping that the WD acquisition do
If this were a WD article (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly if this were a WD article someone would come up with the same anecdote and a different brand. Every manufacturer has had bad batches. I too have had a Seagate fail. I also had a WD fail. Like 4 IBM drives fail, a Quantum drive fail.
At my current ISP's cap... (Score:2)
It would take me 20 months to fill that up.
For the 8TB of data you don't really care about! (Score:3)
anyone remember when (Score:5, Interesting)
Removable platters too (Score:2)
My Altair 8800 running CP/M had a washing machine size hard driver. Air compressor,
big power draw, etc. Had a 5 MB fixed platter, and a 5MB removable platter. I think
was made by Shugart. Interface was parallel port (not printer port, but similar).
In its day, it was the cat's meow.
I still have that Altair, but not the drive. I replaced with a 5MB drive to a parallel port,
8" then 5". I also experimented with IDE interface and a 3.5" drive, but I do not
remember the capacity. Then the Altair got stored
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It only set me back about $600 at the time.
Crystal ball reading (Score:3)
I see in this drives future, let me see my crystal ball.....2 years from this day. Yes....
The drive shall fail.
Your mystical fortune says...let me see...
Use backups.
That'll be $75.
No, you can't see my third nipple.
Which Filesystem? (Score:2, Interesting)
A bit off topic, but what would be the recommended file system to use on a drive like this when you're using it for backups? Something with built-in file checksums or is using ext2/3/4 and writing a script to generate and validate CRC files better?
I bought a 4TB WD My Book yesterday and am slightly concerned about the high failure rates for the 3TB version of the drive. Something about bad controllers...
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ZFS. It's by far and away the best choice for data storage like this. Even if you ignore its technical features (lz4 and gzip compression, checksumming (including of metadata, which you won't manage with a script), redundant metadata so you don't lose entire directories to a single badly-placed bad block, snapshots and the ability to incrementally send snapshots over a pipe to another pool, native block devices, ...), it's just way nicer to administrate than btrfs, which is the only possible contender.
Just
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Plus you will not lose any files without noticing the fact - even when file is
Thaaat's Great... (Score:5, Funny)
So how quickly can you fill up a 8TB Seagate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd guess 2TB, before it fails.
Re: Switched double speed half capacity, realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Before SSD's were all the rage, a common thing to get a speed boost was to do 'short stroke' the drive. Essentially, all you do is only partition the first third of the drive and use that space.
The theory is that the head doesn't need to move around as much and speeds up the drive. I've never done it but modders used to swear by it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Switched double speed half capacity, realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
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I suppose, but if your data is only small, a good OS will probably put it all together at the beginning of the drive anyway.
Plus, OSes perform better when they have got a lot of space to work with. So not all usage scenarios would improve.
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In the early 1990s, AIX allowed you to partition drives (physical volumes) where a logical volume could be residing on the inner or outer part of a drive. That way, DB indexes and critical tables could be placed where access was relatively fast, while the stash for archive logs, program files, and stuff not really accessed could be placed on the outer part. Not SSD speed, but it was a way to help with database performance, especially if one had a lot of spindles.
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Isn't it the outer portion, rather than the inner portion, given that you can reach more per revolution if it's written to the outer edge, on account of the greater circumference? And if so, then yup, this is a viable technique for speeding up read times. OS X actually implemented something similar as far back as 10.4, where it'd move the OS and other frequently-used files to the outermost portions of the platter in order to improve read performance. I never really noticed a difference, personally, but Appl
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But like you said that is totally dwarfed by SSD.
On a super-high capacity drive? (Score:2)
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first third wouldn't really do it on multiplatter drives though?
you'd have to do 100gb there and skip and 100gb and skip and 100gb... just the right way.
wouldn't surprise me if modders used to swear by bullshit though.
what I had do do once was to skip 600mbyte in the middle of a 3.2gb drive because that area was a broken platter or head and would crash the drive if tried to access - it worked just fine when I formatted around that area though...
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Short stroke (Score:2)
Would it be trivial to design a drive that can be switched into a double-speed half-capacity mode?
High RPM drives tend to have smaller capacity if I remember correctly, and any drive can be short stroked to save on seek time.
RAID (Score:2)
Say you have an 8TB drive with 6 platters - the option could be to pair up the platters and write alternate bytes to each, doubling sustained read and write
That would require the head to be right over both tracks at the right moment. I'm not sure the heads are physically aligned that precisely. Or are you suggesting to separate the head assemblies for the top 3 and bottom 3 platters and do RAID 0 in a box?
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That has been done and abandoned [tomshardware.com]. HPT (head-per-track) drives [monash.edu.au] were popular way back, but were a bear to keep aligned.
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Re:Switched double speed half capacity, realistic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pay 2x-3x the amount for a SSD of the same size as the 15k SAS, and you gain 50x improvement in your IOPS. For workloads where that matters, it's an easy choice to make now. As soon as you say something like "we'll short-stroke some 15k RPM SAS drives" - you should be considering enterprise level SSD instead. Less spindles needed, less power needed, and huge performance gains.
The only downside of SSDs is that write-endurance. A 600GB SSD can only handle about 120TB of writes over its lifespan (give or take 20-50% depending on the controller, technology, etc). The question is - are you really writing more then 60GB/day to the drive (in which case it will wear out in 5 years).
And more importantly... will you care if it wears out in 4-5 years? That you could handle the same workload using fewer spindles and less power likely pays for itself, including replacing the drives every 4-5 years.
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If they could strip the capacity across the platters, don't you think they'd do that already? It would mean a 12x increase in sequential read/write with a 6 platter drive.
Re:Switched double speed half capacity, realistic? (Score:4, Informative)
Welp, seems my post was a bit misunderstood. I was actually thinking transfer rates. Say you have an 8TB drive with 6 platters - the option could be to pair up the platters and write alternate bytes to each, doubling sustained read and write.
It could also be an option to turn on when you start using the drive, and if it gets half-filled up, it should be possible to decouple them and get the full size.
The tendency for many consumers is to have an SSD boot drive and a platter storage drive - but that platter drive takes some time to fill up, why not double speed it until it's half full?
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the problem is that the hard drive head assembly moves as a single unit, which means all of the heads for all the platters must move in unison. But the precision required to move the heads to the precise spot on the tracks where the data is recorded is such that it would be too difficult to design the heads in such a way that when one was over its track, all of the others would be *guaranteed* to be over their tracks on their respective platters. To do this you'd need to have the heads each on their own arms with their own voice coils to keep them all on track simultaneously. But that would add enough cost to the drive, it would be cheaper to just buy two half-capacity drives and stripe them yourself.
Basically, I think its possible, but not economically logical to make hard drives in a way that would allow for this kind of in-box striping. That's what RAID is for.
Surely you mean half speed double capacity? (Score:3)
I would MUCH, MUCH rather have half speed double capacity. Just about all my storage comes much closer to write once, read mostly.
if 1 drive full, raid. Dual read write armatures (Score:2)
If you have 8 TB of capacity in the form of two 4TB drives, you can trade speed for capacity via RAID. With RAID 0, each druve gets half of each KB, doubling throughput.
I've often wondered about building a drive with TWO sets of read/write heads. All drives going back decades read one cylinder at a time. Why not add another set of heads intge other side of the platters and read two cylinders at a time. Rotational latency eould be cut in half. One set could be used for the inner tracks and one for th
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Back in the day, my college campus mainframe, a Burroughs B6700, had (in addition to its more conventional "disk pack" drives) a head-per-track (HPT) drive. The disk was several feet in diameter and the whole surface was covered with read/write heads (they didn't need to move).
Can't find specs on the B6700 version, but here's a blurb about the older B5500 version (from http://www.retrocomputingtasma... [retrocompu...smania.com])
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Would it be trivial to design a drive that can be switched into a double-speed half-capacity mode?
There's a word for it... "Velociraptor".
There's even a word for a drive that's "triple" speed... "Cheetah".
In any case, you wouldn't decrease the capacity on account of the faster rotational speed... you'd just use a faster DSP capable of doing its thing in less than half the time as a slower drive. From what I recall, the Cheetah's storage density per platter was basically the same as any other 2.5" drive.
SSDs obviously made the highest-performance spinning disks almost irrelevant, but personally, I used t
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I remember when Washington University in St. Louis installed a new RAID server back in the early 90's. It had a capacity of 1 Terabyte and only cost them $100,000. I remember thinking that was an amazing capacity. Now I've got 7 terabytes of external storage on my desk and it's almost completely full. If you build it, they will fill it.
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12 TB, snort. I've got over 100 TB worth of 2 and 3 TB drives on-line or on-call a boot away. The most critical part is mirrored RAID-Z2 (4 drives' worth of redundancy per data item), and most of the rest is ad hoc replicated via rsync, some of it several times, so there is nowhere near 100 TB of data stored, but there is a lot.
I would definitely be happy with 64 of these 8 TB. At least
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From TFA
PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
They actually use a variant of PMR that's based on magnetic monopoles. The reason why they're "shipping only to select enterprise clients" is because there's a limited supply of those, looted by the Red Army from a secret Nazi lab in 1945 and only recently rediscovered in former NKVD archives in a bunker outside Moscow.
Not a lot of people know that...
It's hard to dedupe ciphertext (Score:2)
Re:multi-drive RV tolerance?? (Score:5, Informative)
Rotational Vibration (RV) is the vibration the drive experiences from the platters rotating at high speed. When you put a bunch of drives in a cage, some interesting harmonics build up which can shorten the life span of the drives further. Enterprise grade hard drives are built to better withstand these vibrations, lessening the chance of failure. (At least that is what their literature says -- personally I'd mount the drives using grommets or something like what Rackspace uses [rubber bands I think?]).
Re:multi-drive RV tolerance?? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: multi-drive RV tolerance?? (Score:4, Funny)
he said winnebago, not airstream dude.
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Classic display of that same effect on drives in an enclosure causing a pretty severe performance drop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:multi-drive RV tolerance?? (Score:5, Informative)
Rotational Vibration (RV) is the vibration the drive experiences from the platters rotating at high speed. When you put a bunch of drives in a cage, some interesting harmonics build up which can shorten the life span of the drives further. Enterprise grade hard drives are built to better withstand these vibrations, lessening the chance of failure. (At least that is what their literature says -- personally I'd mount the drives using grommets or something like what Rackspace uses [rubber bands I think?]).
Actually, multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance is a design feature whereby the drive is designed to be capable of withstanding and tolerating induced rotational vibrations from outside the drive. Enterprise drives are normally designed to minimize the vibrations they generate and induce into their surrounding chassis. But on top of that, being able to dampen vibrations induced from the outside and function optimally can significantly improve the performance of the drives. In enterprise environments where performance is important, disk drives can theoretically tolerate a lot of vibrations by simply temporarily ceasing reads and writes until their read/write heads get back into alignment. But those pauses force the drive to wait for at least a full rotation before they can try again to read the same blocks. If this happens frequently the performance of the drive can be significantly degraded even if the drive lifetime isn't impacted. Multi-drive RV tolerance is not just about surviving the vibrations, its also about being able to function optimally without having to degrade performance when in a (relatively) high vibration environment, as is often the case in large high-density drive enclosures.
Without this feature, you can sometimes find your 4000 IOPS spindle array delivering only 2000 IOPS at random times, and not know why.
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There's an old story posted in a comment on The Register once - someone posted about having an old storage rack with so many hard drives in it that when the power was applied and all spun up together, conservation of angular momentum would make the whole rack rotate slightly in the opposite direction. Solved by configuring them for a staggered spin-up.
Re:multi-drive RV tolerance?? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've got a 32tb array in my RV so that's where my mind went even tho I know it can't be right. :) It's traveled 11,000 miles without a blip and was expanded from 26tb last fall. I don't have any proof to back it up but I'll bet it's one of the largest mobile arrays in the world. Sure, it'd be easy to build a bigger one but who needs that much storage on the move?
Also, I'm getting a kick out of the idea of 8tb drives. Most of mine are 2tb and I just started swapping in 4tb drives last year. Haven't even had a chance/reason to start putting in 6tb drives and now they're up to 8tb. Pretty soon, I'll be able to whittle it down to a mirror.
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Actually, I've got unlimited LTE. Too bad today's consumer no longer has that option. I held onto it for 2 years before I hit the road. Expected to use it as a backup but RV park/resort WiFi universally sucks balls so it's usually my primary connection. LTE makes zero sense at the rates Verizon charges these days. My speed peaked just north of Atlanta at 80 megs down, 44 megs up. Totally pointless if I had a 2 gig plan. Even in my current location out in the country, I'm getting...pauses download...1
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