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Data Storage

The Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage (ieee.org) 200

For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.

Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.

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The Billion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage

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  • Once they get down to about $100, I guess a few drives would be enough to backup all the devices in my home, and maybe store some other media.

    Until then rsync diffs to a remote NAS will be good enough.

    There isn't much on my systems that can't be downloaded again after installing extra apps and my personal data.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by olsmeister ( 1488789 )
      I store all my data on a 2 TB NAS, with plenty of headroom. I really can't think of too many ways I could take advantage of a 20 TB HDD. I'm guessing the market for this stuff will be mostly the people who are collecting and storing data ON you, not FOR you.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday January 07, 2019 @10:49AM (#57917564) Homepage Journal

        People on Slashdot have been posting the equivalent of "640k should be enough for anybody" for decades now.

        Something always comes along to fill that space. For a while I thought streaming/cloud might slow it down as people stop keeping stuff locally, but no it's carried on growing as fast as the R&D can manage.

        • Re:20-40 terabytes? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:04AM (#57917654) Journal

          You are 100% accurate. My take however, is slightly different.

          As Spindle Drives increase their density(and capacity) so will SSD technology. And based on my subjective (not empirical) opinion, should be able to more than keep up with Spindle Tech.

          The issue is that as these competing forces work, eventually one will win out. We are already starting to see how this is playing out, and it doesn't look good for spinning drives. One of the reasons is that there is a bunch of competing but related techs being hammered out in just the Solid State arena. So in addition to competing with Spinning drives, Solid State tech is competing with itself.

          Does this mean that spinning drives are going away completely? Not any time in the next 5 years. There will be a steady decline in use, but I'm fairly certain that Spinning drives will go the way of tapes (which still exist somewhere). They are too old, too bulky, too slow, too much anything to be useful in the very long run.

          I am 100% sure that there are use cases today for Cheap Dense Slow Storage. Mostly for long term /archival storage. Anything that needs access to a processor will want / require Solid State.

          • Re:20-40 terabytes? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by crow ( 16139 ) on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:13AM (#57917744) Homepage Journal

            That's a fair analysis.

            If the demand for mass archival storage drops too low, then the drive manufacturers won't be able to amortize development costs over enough units, and prices will go up. That's the scenario that will most likely be the final death of spinning drives, as it will lead to solid state mass storage being cheaper.

            While this is likely to be a slow process, I remember when memory prices had wild swings, and it's possible we may see the same with solid-state memory in the coming years. An sudden drop in SSD prices could kill the hard drive market overnight.

          • Re:20-40 terabytes? (Score:4, Informative)

            by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Monday January 07, 2019 @12:46PM (#57918440)

            I am 100% sure that there are use cases today for Cheap Dense Slow Storage. Mostly for long term /archival storage. Anything that needs access to a processor will want / require Solid State.

            Systems and applications that require really fast storage will require DRAM. Flash is way too slow compared to DRAM. On the other hand, many data centers are extremely cost sensitive. These data centers account for many tens (hundred?) of millions of annual HDD unit sales. Many large internet companies require massive cold storage, i.e., data that is needed maybe a few times a year or less but which need to be retrieved in a few seconds when needed (e.g., think about the tail end of the distribution for Facebook browsing or Google search queries). For cold storage, flash is too expensive, and tape is too slow.

            Even though flash prices have been dropping rapidly, they still have not gotten close to HDD prices. As a point of comparison, take a look at average price charts [pcpartpicker.com] for various capacities of HDDs and SSD. Based on this webpage, the average large-capacity SSD price is around $250/TB, while the average large-capacity HDD price is around $40/TB. This roughly 5x price difference has held steady for many years. More importantly, HDDs have held this price advantage in the last decade without the usual historical once-per-decade technology disruptor. PMR was the last mini-disruptor ten years ago. HAMR/MAMR/bit-pattern has been promised for a very long time, and the price difference relative to flash will only increase when these new disruptors are commercially ready.

          • I think we will see different types of storage appear. Most machines will use SSD because it is better in almost every way except for capacity, while HDD will be useful for large capacity arrays where I/O speed isn't as critical, but storage is.

            HDDs also can be useful in desktops, provided they have a good amount of SSD built in, which functions both as a "landing zone" for data (where the drive can tell the OS that it is complete once it finishes to the SSD, and then move the data to the spinning platters

        • 630 Terabytes should be enough for anybody
      • by crow ( 16139 )

        My 8TB NAS is filling up (3 4TB drives in RAID-5). When we were thinking of building an entertainment center in our weird TV space, we realized that it was mostly for storing our DVDs, and it was cheaper to build a file server in the basement instead. Now we're starting to collect Blu-Rays, which I haven't ripped because I want to keep the full menus and special features, but I don't have a good works-on-Linux system for that yet. (The best suggestion so far has been to do a raw copy of the disc and then

        • by suutar ( 1860506 )

          that's about the solution I came up with when I wanted all the menus and stuff for DVDs, but that was a number of years ago. Is there a good solution for playing an ISO image nowadays, especially across a network?

          • by crow ( 16139 )

            I use Xine for DVD iso files, and it works just fine. I use MythTV, and I have it set up as the player for .iso video files, and it is essentially flawless, regardless of whether the storage is local or on the LAN. I did have this fail when the file server had network problems and dropped down to 100Mb instead of 1000Mb, even though that should have been sufficient. I haven't tried it with WiFi.

            Blu Ray has a completely separate system for everything, and I'm not aware of any open source software for proc

            • by suutar ( 1860506 )

              For most of my purposes DVD image/audio quality is fine, but I really like having the menus available for things like language/subtitle selection. Thanks for the pointers!

              • HandBrake has menu options to select subtitles and audio tracks when ripping a DVD. I haven't personally tried to include them, but it should work, and then you can just use VLC's menu to select the desired subtitles or audio track?

          • by RevDisk ( 740008 )
            Yes, there is. Kodi handles it natively. You can also configure it to go straight to the main feature, but be able to call up the menu as or where desired. MKV format is rather handy for this sort of thing over ISO. I like keeping all of the different audio tracks, subtitles, etc in one file rather than a bunch of them.

            MakeMKV for ripping.

            I also use Media Center Master to rename the files, metadata tag them from a couple of sources (IMDB being primary), download artwork, etc. It makes using kodi actuall
      • I store all my data on a 2 TB NAS, with plenty of headroom. I really can't think of too many ways I could take advantage of a 20 TB HDD. I'm guessing the market for this stuff will be mostly the people who are collecting and storing data ON you, not FOR you.

        I have about 3tb used on the NAS I have. Most of it is replaceable in the case of a failure. I keep my photos and other stuff in a couple places, including a local backup drive and remote NAS I setup. With 50Mb/s up, overnight diffs don't take very long.

        I still have about 100 Blu-rays and 1K DVDs I'd like to rip at full size with menus and extras. Mostly because I'm too lazy to walk across the room to pick one out to watch. Maybe I just need a jukebox robot to pick them...

        I'd consider getting rid of

      • I can think of a few uses which might benefit from more storage per disk, such as medical imagery or over the network backup services like Backblaze.
      • Well just because you don't like storing media locally doesn't mean everyone wants to be at the mercy of streams. I'm currently at 20/22TB used... when I can afford a new drive, it's always just to expand, so it's across 10 separate drives now. By the time 20TB comes down to my price range, I'm sure it'll just get tossed in with the rest as I stop downloading untouched Blurays and 4K Netflix/Amazon shows (at 8-20GB/episode these add up fast) and start up with 8K.
        I have fairly narrow taste, so when I find
    • I guess a few drives would be enough to backup all the devices in my home

      Huh? You mean you're not on the 6K porn bandwagon yet?

  • Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.

    Then again, I would really like to see them make this kind of progress with SSD... A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing. :)

    • by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Monday January 07, 2019 @10:53AM (#57917590) Homepage

      Simple answer: Always keep more than one backup.

      Backup yesterday's drives onto today's bigger drives and keep both generations around. Repeat every couple of years or so, discarding the grandparents. This way your total storage keeps growing to keep up with your accumulated data and you always have two copies of it around in case a drive dies.

    • by crow ( 16139 )

      This is what RAID is for. And in the simpler cases, mirroring (RAID-1). The question is how long will it take to copy over all the data from your old drives. Depending on the situation, you might have to do it online, which slows down the process while impacting performance during the migration. Once you've migrated over, the question is not one of size, but of data rates. If you aren't generating data much faster than before, then your old system for incremental backups or offsite copies will work the

      • RAID does not a backup make.

        That said, they're also impractical for a lot of RAID levels these days. It takes a while to rebuild a disk when you have to rebuild 10+TB of data. When "a while" starts translating into 24 hours or more, you end up at serious risk. RAID6 will only get you so far. Full-out mirroring is expensive.

        • ceph with more smaller disks can be better then 3-6 super big disks with high rebuild times.

        • by crow ( 16139 )

          Right. That's why I talked about backus, and the fact that drive size has no impact on incrementals.

          You're right that RAID rebuild time is important. Also, the rebuild puts more stress on the surviving drives, which are probably almost identical to the failing drive, so failures aren't independent. But the issues are similar with SSDs. Regardless of how you store your data, there are complicated management issues, and that's why we have companies like DellEMC that specialize in enterprise storage.

          For my

    • Every time I see posts about hard drives getting bigger, I wonder: how long until they're no longer practical due to concerns about data safety? Backing up a large drive is already difficult.

      Backing up a large drive has ALWAYS been difficult. The only thing that changes is the size of the number. Some of my early machines have 40MB hard drives and I had no practical means to back up that much data at the time. Now it might be 40TB but the problem is the same and so are many of the solutions. Back then we had tape, second hard drives, removable discs. Today we have... tape, hard drives and removable disks (solid state or optical instead of floppies). The more things change the more they st

    • A 10TB SSD would be a wonderful thing. :)

      Ever hear of RAID?

    • When its too big to fail.

      Oh wait...

  • So what does /. think about the below?

    I am uneasy about 2TB+ drives. The way I see it, that is a lot of data running on a single/small set of failure points. At about 2TB, that's about all the corporate data I generate over 2-3 years.

    Each year I trim out a lot of stuff and zip it to about ~50GB of important, must keep, stuff. With 2TB drives, we tend to just keep everything.

    And I just feel more is at risk with few protections. One stolen laptop, bad disk jolt, header jitter, etc and so much is gone. I j

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The advantage of 2TB drives is you can back up everything, twice. And you don't have to waste time sorting out the bits you really need to keep/archive, just do the whole lot.

      Someone posted a break-down of the cost/benefit ratio once. As I recall there was a photographer who had a fair amount of photos to store, and it was suggested he sort out the good ones and discard the rest. Turns out that paying someone minimum wage to do that was far more expensive than just adding more and more storage to keep it al

    • by shess ( 31691 )

      Back in the early aughts I realized I was the biggest danger to my data and sat down to create a sustainable backup system. At the time, duplicate storage was a bit spendier than I wanted to pay, but it was clear that we weren't far from a point where it would be cheaper than organizing my way to using smaller volumes, so I just committed to backing it all up, and mirroring that twice (I swap on-site and off-site mirrors once a month).

      That isn't to say that I don't trim and organize - in the end, keeping b

    • I am uneasy about 2TB+ drives. The way I see it, that is a lot of data running on a single/small set of failure points. At about 2TB, that's about all the corporate data I generate over 2-3 years.

      2TB disks are cheap. Was a time I never thought I'd say that, like back when used MFM disks were $1/MB in Santa Cruz county, home of Seagate. But you can get two of them, and back everything up twice. I use two pogoplug v4s running debian to connect them to the network, because gig is fast enough for my purposes.

  • Have you bought an SSD lately? They are mostly air as it is. There is absolutely no reason these couldn't be packed with newer chips to the same degrees as the solid bricks these drives were a few years back to make 200+TB SSDs. There is no particular reason that we need magnetic drives or similar capacity SSDs should cost significantly more. The drive manufacturers just have a common interest in maximizing return on every bit of infrastructure they own and have formed a consensus around it.

    This isn't much

    • by crow ( 16139 )

      Price.

      Get me an SSD that I can use to store my DVD collection on at the same price I'm paying for the hard drives that do it today, and I'm there. I'll even pay a premium for the power savings. But I don't really care about performance for this application, as the current solution is good enough.

      As long as the drive manufacturers can make magnetic media significantly cheaper than flash, they'll stay in business.

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Price is a value being set by the manufacturer. SSD's are superior technology to spinning magnetic storage. That is my point, the actual silicone used in that SSD doesn't justify the price being charged. Instead the price is based on the "premium" capabilities SSD brings to the table. If you simply eliminate the magnetic tier and price SSD options accordingly you dramatically cut the margins on those chips since it won't be premium but rather standard performance at that point.

        I'm sure the argument that man

      • Exactly my thoughts. I really like my SSDs for data I use every day, but for the TBs of stuff I want to keep around but only access once in a while (or backups); nothing beats the good old HDD. SSD storage is still about 10x the $ per TB as HDD. In spite of all the predictions that they would cross over by now, they are still a big premium. Sure SDD prices have fallen, but HDD prices have as well so the premium has largely remained unchanged. Even if they somehow managed to get SDD or XPoint technology down
    • This is kind of hard to follow, but I agree with your initial point. The reason these guys are trying to sell platters is that they have factories which make platters.

      It's gonna be way cheaper in a decade to just do it all solid-state, but until that time, they're going to milk their investment.

      • For the average consumer SSDs are the way to go; however enterprises still need HDDs. Also anyone who needs a lot of storage needs HDDs. While SSDs could be used for large storage needs, the cost is much higher.
    • need more pci-e lanes / bigger pch link to make a few sdd really not get speed capped.

      Even a few sata ones can over an pch link and / or an SAS back plane

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Sure, the performance would hit bottlenecks (does now, it isn't like there aren't SANs populated with SSD now)... but how is that not a better problem to have than having slow and low capacity magnetic storage? Solid state scales to well over 200TB per disk with existing technology if they package it that way and the silicon isn't any more expensive than in the past when the chips were lower capacity, it is just more efficiently utilized.

        I'm speaking to a technical crowd, so technically yes, some of the new

  • by wonkavader ( 605434 ) on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:00AM (#57917640)

    It's HAMR. HAMR will beat MAMR.

    I don't mean that HAMR will succeed -- it might not come to anything, and/or some new thing might appear that is even more successful -- but between the two, it's HAMR over MAMR.

    Because it's not mostly about manufacturing costs or speed or reliability. It's about sales. Guys will buy HAMMER tech and avoid the clearly breast-referencing MAMR, and non-tech folks are NOT going to want obviously cancer-causing microwaves in their laptop.

    It's not about logic, it's not about technical merit, it's obvious which one can sell and which one cannot.

    They should rename MAMR Wave Assist Recording, because WAR would stand a marketing chance against HAMR.
       

  • "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

    Or in the case of hard disks, a few terabytes.

    I'm actually semi-serious: it seems to me that the days of mechanical storage are numbered. With SSDs, and now Intel's XPoint, one can seriously hope that hard disks will be phased out just as floppies were. Fewer mechanical parts ought to mean more reliability, not to mention the obvious speed advantages. Granted, I did buy two hard-disks last year, but only to replace disks in an existing NAS. Those might well be the last

    • by davidwr ( 791652 )

      "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

      Or in the case of hard disks, a few terabytes.

      Or, "640K ought to be enough for anybody, for a sufficiently large value of K."

  • If you work in a datacenter I'm guessing this is good news everyone!, but my own storage needs have (somehow, for completely unrelated reasons *cough*) gone down since the advent of streaming services such as Netflix.

    Sure, games are getting bigger but I'm not a teenager anymore, so I buy maybe a dozen games per year at the most. Last year I only bought seven and that number is inflated because I bought a cheap bundle of five games on Steam.

  • Ok, yes if you save it in the cloud then you data will at some point will be save on some sort of storage medium, most likely a magnetic hard drive(s).

    However for normal consumer usage. 1tb is more then enough, and it has been that way for a long time, because most of the data that we consume is on the cloud and in general while it is on the cloud the data is more optimized. For example, if you are to backup all your applications, on the cloud normally there would be one copy for thousands of users, and re

  • Hammer

    Mammer (ies)

    Makes me think of Thor's hammer, vs nice tits

  • "Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year", Western Digital has been so far behind in delivering things it promises I wouldn't count on this in any way. Seagate has been shipping 8tb desktop drives for a while now and Western Digital still doesn't have a 8TB Blue or Black drive listed on their website.

  • Beta was far superior to VHS. Guess who won that battle. L-1011 vs. DC-10, ugh! Then we have Mac vs. PC, uh oh!

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