60TB Disk Drives Could Be a Reality In 2016 293
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."
For depressed people (Score:5, Funny)
6000 HD movies (Score:2)
For the HD crowd
h.264 1080p video at 9kbps+1500kbps DTS channel is like 13634.8168 hours of video.
For the pirate people, thats like 6000 movies or so.
Sweet, at 3TB Raid at home, I'm already struggling to store videos from my HD cam. Fortunately I bought the MiniDV type so I always have tape backups.
Re:For depressed people (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:For depressed people (Score:4, Funny)
Cheers,
Ian
WOW (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
That's a shitload of porn.
I must be a nerd, because my digital comic collection is bigger then my porn collection.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all I have to say on the matter.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
I use Spousal Truecrypt. It's an unencrypted folder titled "Sports".
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
Until your smart wife discovers your loot when she types "creampie" or "cup" in spotlight (or similar windows search engine)
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Well, I was joking. I do have a directory called "porn" for that special sentimental stuff, but mostly I just browse xvideos.com. My wife doesn't care (or at least doesn't admit to caring).
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
double play == DP
shot on goal = bukkake
field goal == tittie fuck to completion
play ball == tea bag
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
I use Spousal Truecrypt. It's an unencrypted folder titled "Sports".
A friend of mine kept his porn folder on plain view. The folder title was "Uninstall Windows". The wife never looked inside.
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she probably fapped just as hard to it and never said a word...
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It's been a few years but Tubgirl just won't go away.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Funny)
I must be a nerd, because my digital comic collection is bigger then my porn collection.
For some people, those would be one and the same.
Heh (Score:2)
What internet are you surfing.
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Or 3D.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
I don't get it. (Score:2, Interesting)
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"
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No, you'e thinking too linearly. The density increases in two dimensions, so the capacity increases by the square of the density (approximately). You would need just shy of a 4x increase in capacity without increasing the number of platters. If you can find a way to decrease the spacing between platters, you could get a 15x capacity increase with an even smaller density increase.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
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In that case, yes, it would have to increase by a factor of 15.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
First, the summary above says that Seagate will produce a 60 Tb drive by 2016. That is not true. Seagate has said they will produce a drive with "up to" 60 Tb of capacity (30-60 TB) by the end of the decade. This is based on the theoretical limits of HAMR technology, which are projected to be in the 5-10 Tbits/sq. inch. range. Current 4TB drives are made with platters that have a density of around 650 Gbits/sq. in., so the math works (10Tb/.65Tb is approximately 15x).
The other part of the article is talking about what the maximum density is likely to be over the timeframe from now to 2016 using PMR technology and transitioning to something new like HAMR. PMR technology will top out at about 1Tbit/sq. inch, so anything over that will require something new like HAMR. that underlying article quotes 1.8 Tbit/sq. in in 2016, which may not be out of line with 5-10 Tbit/sq. in. by 2020 as a new technology like HAMR comes online.
The two articles that I am basing the above on are:
Seagate/HAMR article [computerworld.com]
IHS/ISuppli article [isuppli.com]
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
HELL YES! Bring back the Quantum Bigfoot [wikipedia.org]!!!11!
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That's absurd, we bought a couple thousand for our new product to use back in 1997/1998. Out of every ten drives only 9 failed.
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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"
Probably. The first 3tb was released June 2010. [techdigest.tv] 4tb came out Oct 2011. [storagereview.com] Not exactly amazing growth, over a year for 1tb, at this rate we'll be 9tb in 2016. At this rate we will not see 60tb by 2016, and I say "we" meaning end consumer, maybe some lab monkey will see an areal density equivalent to 60tb, but it won't be available for sale. And for anyone wondering the answer is yes, the 4tb drives already use five platters, 800gb each, [computerworld.com] so they can't shove more platters in there to double capacity currentl
More capacity, but what about I/O? (Score:5, Informative)
One thing we have had issues with is that even now, the issue with drives is how fast we can get data in and out of it.
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.
What I really will dread seeing is an external 60TB drive that is stuck with a USB 3 interface as its only I/O. USB 3 (for lowest denominator compatibility), a SATA descendant, and Thunderbolt, would be ideal, but with how cheap some drives end up, it might just be a sole USB port for in/out.
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No. The dreadful part is not being stuck with USB3.
The dreadful part is realizing that attaching an over hyped external interface to it will likely not matter.
Re:More capacity, but what about I/O? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Agreed. I recently was reading that in a Raid 5 array with 2TB disks it is likely that you will lose data in the event of a single disk failure because of UREs. I have been thinking that setting up various raid 10 spindles is the best way to archive and protect data. One spindle for use, and another for backup, all with 1TB drives (2TB of space with 4 1TB drives). It strikes me that HDD is a terribly inefficient way to back up data securely, but surely it is better than optical disks.
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The old wisdom is that "RAID is not a backup." So RAID5, RAID6..doesn't matter, you should be backing up regardless.
Tape is still probably the cheapest medium for backups, though you have to invest in the drives as well (and those can be in the thousands of dollars.)
I use online backups to a remote host along with a large drive which is offline most of the time and rotated with a few others. I'm just getting into ZFS and snapshots, with which I can more easily take frequent backups. Unfortunately, I don't
Re:More capacity, but what about I/O? (Score:5, Funny)
I agree that RAID is not a backup, but that doesn't mean that my backup can't be a RAID . . .
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Absolutely true.
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It's not just another drive failing--it's unrecoverable read errors (UREs).
A URE is a type of drive failure.
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It's not what most people mean when they say, "Drive failure," and the URE could have happened before the RAID was ever put into degraded mode (it could have been the first failure, just no one noticed it.)
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Which is why it's very important to monitor your disks using the tools and the SMART data on the disks themselves.
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I've been hearing about the end of hard disks for a long, LONG time now. RAID1 was supposed to be dead a decade ago, RAID5 a few years back.
Strangely, rumors of their deaths have been repeatedly found to be greatly exaggerated. Speeds have improved, (though not kept pace with the sizes of drives), and so has reliability-per-bit.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More capacity, but what about I/O? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's not as bad as it may seem. With disk speeds up to 15,000 rpm and higher areal densities means that data can be pulled off pretty fast. If HDD manufacturers were to implement technologies such as multi-track disk heads then IO speed could increase a lot more and would be limited mainly by seek times. What a lot of companies are doing nowadays is using 2" (laptop) drives in their servers, packing a lot more drives into the space, which means more smaller disks and therefore less to rebuild in the even
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RAID 10 is better than RAID 6.
Rebuild time is nothing, your performance doesn't degrade to shit, and you're more than likely going to survive a second failure during rebuilding.
If you're paranoid you can run multiple mirrors.
Re:More capacity, but what about I/O? (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's the useful limit? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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If "Average Joe" has any awareness of speed, then the Cloud will quickly get kicked to the curb and greater local storage densities will matter.
"Average Joe" will likely never realize that there is a technical reason to seek out an SSD. Some marketing hype might push them in that direction. Genuine "geeky" technical understanding will not.
Joe is willing to tolerate the cloud but wants the speed of an SSD? That's a clear an obvious contradiction.
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Joe is simply not that engaged. He's not going to see the sales pitch. He isn't a tech geek that gets a boner over minesweeper loading a little faster.
Re:What's the useful limit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Well of course, but you're one of the many who could make use of such space - I'm talking about average only-does-email-and-facebook joe kind of person.
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Yea, I make a few movies and I'll have to record like 40 min for about 5-10 min of final footage.
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Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.
Mostly, because it takes up too much room on a drive, and too slow to download from the internet :)
Re:What's the useful limit? (Score:5, Funny)
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I've found that a larger hard drive just increases the likelihood of me storing redundant data on the same media. I get lazy about housekeeping. I recently pulled the 500G drive from my laptop and replaced it with a 120G SSD. Instead of carrying everything I own, I only carry tools I need. Now I can actually manage a daily backup to a NAS and not have to wait while it completes. If I'd had the extra cash, I would have likely purchased a larger SSD and still be carrying all the cruft that I haven't touc
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This is just sad. You can't even carry your music collection with you and you are trying to make up sad and pathetic rationalizations as to why it's actually a good thing.
Tech should adapt to you rather than the other way around.
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Tech should adapt to you rather than the other way around.
The opposite is actually working pretty well for Apple these days. You just have to market it correctly.
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Personally, I've got my entire music collection available to me via Google Music. It took me ages to upload the 18k or so tracks (a week of overnights with upload maxed out), but now that it's all there, I've got it on anything running a web browser as well as my phone.
Now, I would never in a million years dump the files stored locally, but I sure as shit don't bother loading GBs of music onto an MP3 player or my phone when I go on trips anymore, nor waste time burning CD's for the car or any of that crap.
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Precisely. When my dh0: drive got full, I thought about copying it over to usb0: but when I looked at what was there, I realized I didn't need "Beauty and the Geek" or "Transformers 2" or "Billboard's Hot 1000 songs of the 1960s" so I erased them. I freed-up about 100 GB of junk I never should have kept in the first place.
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Your music collection fits on a 500G? Your aren't even trying.
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Hopefully this will also lower $/GB and decrease cloud storage prices as well. That's what I'm excited about.
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It varies from person to person. I have 700GB storage and don't even use all of it.
Different Strokes, yada yada (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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I've noticed that when friends get faster internet access (100/10 or even 100/100) they tend to download less and less, and just stream the shows/movies they want to watch. For them loads of storage is not really necessary.
Of course you still have the odd one who wants to download everything in 1080p x/h264 rips at 8-20 GB a piece.
So, for people with slower speeds I can see they'd want to have more storage, as streaming is not an option. (no one rents discs anymore, there's a reason the shops are closing)
Al
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While I download less and less, it is because I archive everything and so I have less stuff to download. I like 1080p rips, but do not hunt for them, 720p or even SD can be good enough (though I will download the higher resolution version if I get the option to).
Streaming depends on other people, the data I have only depends on me. I may choose to stream instead of grabbing the tape, but I want the tape to be there, in case I cannot stream (internet connection goes down, the streaming provider goes down or
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If a drive has capacity enough to back up completely at least one of my machines, that would be considered adequate by me. Having the 1TB SSD is nice, but so is having a pair of drives that data is copied to on a nightly basis so if the SSD gets lost or erased, it is still present (without having to waste the time and bandwidth costs to recover from a cloud provider.)
Maybe we will see disks with more options for interfaces. For example, it would be nice if an external drive could be configured to show up
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I can't store 1TB of movies and music on the cloud, this would be a very high recurring fee and I would upload data at 120KB/s. a one-time fee for the HDD and another one for the backup HDD is cheaper. I still get to access files from my cheap ass NAS with VIA CPU, even though at 120KB/s from outside but when I get fiber it will be more like 10MB/s.
I do want to get a 4TB HDD for it, RAID is not so good as you still have to buy one or more backup drives so there aren't any savings. maybe put the OS on a SD c
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>>>Average joe doesn't rip his blu-rays.
No but they might download a pirate rip of a BRD. :-)
>>>RAM has probably hit a peak with consumers who simply don't need more than 3 or 4Gb for what they want to do
It's not the average Joe who is carelessly consuming RAM. It's the programmers. I remember when I bought my PC in 2002 and it had half-a-gig of space. That was almost 10 times more than the minimum recommended by Microsoft XP. It ran superfast! But NOW the Flash has grown, the browse
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>>>I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon
P.S. If I wanted to be really anal, I could argue that my Commodore 64 played music with only 0.00006 GB of memory, and my Amiga did videos with only 0.00025 GB of memory. In consoles, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis only used ~.004 gigabyte cartridges. Why on earth would anybody need more than that? Answer: Media grows in size and needs more storage space.
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When I said "the cloud", I'm talking about streaming services such as netflix. Why should someone clutter up their hard drive with films when they can just steam what they want?
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Don't you need to pay a monthly fee for NetFlix? Also, are you certain, that NetFlix (or a similar service) will be available 10, 20, 30 years later? I know that my record and audio tape collection, VHS tapes, DVDs and data tapes will still be there, they do not depend on some company staying in business and I do not need to pay a monthly fee to keep them.
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...there is no such thing as "The Cloud"
Yahweh Himself was present in the cloud (Ex 19:9; 24:16; 34:5) and His glory filled the places where the cloud was (Ex 16:10; 40:38; Nu 10:34);
There you have it: The power of the Lord compels you to use Dropbox.
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OS RAM usage hasn't gone up in a while. From XP to Vista, there was a jump from about 128Min/1Gb recommended to 1GbMin/2Gb Recommended. Windows 7 has the same requirements as Vista (And tends to run better on the same hardware). Windows 8 is slated to have the same requirements again and Microsoft has actually reduced memory usage by the OS. This means that there's a very real chance that OS RAM requirements won't have changed in a decade.
Yes, I'm aware that I neglected to mention other OS's but we're talki
Good, it makes my 5.x TB NAS look modest finally. (Score:2)
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If your NAS fits on 2 hard drives, it is already modest.
I'm going to make a bet or three (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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A 500G SSD costs more than the laptop or desktop you would want to connect it to.
You seem to be pining for something that you have no real awareness of.
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A 500G SSD costs more than the laptop or desktop you would want to connect it to.
You seem to be pining for something that you have no real awareness of.
Wrong. About a year ago I bought two high-end 256 GB SSDs for less than $500.
Re:I'm going to make a bet or three (Score:5, Insightful)
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512GB SSD for $500 [newegg.com]
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Like the guy said, that's probably more then, or at the very least close to, the median price of a plain consumer laptop. Pretty sure it's even more true for the median price of a plain consumer desktop. Counting the drive that's already in the laptop or desktop.
225 gigabytes per square inch? (Score:2)
Wow.
That's amazing.
And it would be six terabytes if you could squeeze the same density on a floppy.
Just Say No (Score:2)
If windows ever asks if you want it to check out the disk, just say no or be prepared to walk away for a week.
Am I an anomoly? (Score:2)
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Interesting, but probably not a valid statistical sample size, unless you're very, very large. Also, I may have my units mixed up.
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I would rather see access speeds improved. When they can deliver a 2 or 4 TB solid state drive at a reasonable price, then they can work on increasing sizes.
Yeah f'ing right (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Also... 1800gbits/sqin by 2016?
That 4TB hitachi drive is 446gbit/sqin http://www.storagereview.com/hitachi_ultrastar_7k4000_4tb_enterprise_hard_drive_announced [storagereview.com]
So if that increases to 1800.. we'll have 16TB drives NOT 60TB.
Beware The Weasel Words (Score:4, Informative)
HAMR has a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch, enough to enable 30TB to 60TB 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch drives
From previous article about this tech from Seagate [computerworld.com].
In reality do not be surprised to see 10TB and maybe 20TB 3.5 inch desktop drives in this timframe, but I for one WOULD BE surprised to see 40TB let alone the "in theory" 60TB.
Having said that, I'd be extremely happy with a 10TB desktop drive.
I dont really need bigger I want FASTER! (Score:3)
SSD's can be nice and fast but shit they are still pricy, and they have their issues ... coming from someone who still uses a old 80 meg scsi drive frequently on his vintage computers, I really dont want something thats going to kill itself in less than a decade
mechanical drives are peaked right now in terms of speed, and on my main computer, with a ton of games on it, 3 OS and more personal files on it than I would ever use (projects and whatnot) am only using about 150GB (out of 500)
great you can eventually slam 60T on a drive, maybe by then my 4T NAS would be full from me and the family, that is if all of our computers didnt have a half T in them already (8T if I combined it all into one resource)
I dont store every single thing I have ever consumed for life on these things, and its going to be much longer than 2016 before I have a NEED for them, though at some point its futile to find a small drive for a reasonable price so they got us on demand ... I just want faster mechanical disks, something that can actually peak out a simple SATA1 Interface
we get bigger, we get awesome interfaces but nothing to put on them other than overpriced, large ... for like 7 years ago, flash memory that slowly eats its own brain
surely we can do better than just increasing space
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30 - 50 disk array?
I have about 2000 and they are all stored "online" iTunes style.
It's very handy and allows for a number of convenience features you can't really get any other way. Really big drives greatly simplify storage on the media server and eliminate the need for more expensive array hardware and aftermarket controllers.
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Who cares what a bunch of god damn law abiders are going to do with their computers. Fuck them right in the ear.
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It's useful for backups. Raid 1 these things and write every computer and tablet in the house backups to it. Of course that assumes the cloud won't take off. Here's a hint, it won't. The problem with cloud computing is comcast and AT&T. The caps limit the usefulness of the cloud.
I haven't counted, but I would bet I have at least 20TB of storage online in my home now. Most of the used space is for open source project work (packages, iso mirrors, cvs backups, etc) and video. I've got 1TB of iTunes
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Clearly you need to get out more and realize that the world is just a little bit bigger than your mother's basement.
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I want bigger though. I wish the disk manufacturers were making 5.25" full height drives (even if they were spinning at 5400 or 3600 RPM), we could have 20TB or even bigger drives now. Add a 5-10GB SSD as cache and it would probably be quite fast too, though I would just use a 2TB HDD drive for "fast" needs and the big drive for archiving etc.