Larger-than-30TB Hard Drives Are Coming Much Sooner Than Expected (techradar.com) 66
Inside of hard disk drives are platters which hold all your data; these are all manufactured by one company in Japan called Showa Denko which has announced it expects to "realize near-line HDD having storage capacity of more than 30TB" by the end of 2023. From a report: Deciphering that statement, we'd assume it will provide platters with a storage capacity of more than 3TB, sometime in 2023, to partners such as Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital, who will then produce the hard disk drives, targeting hyperscalers and data centers operators. We'd expect some of them to end up in NAS and 3.5-inch external hard drives, but that won't be the main target markets, as performance is likely to be optimized for nearline usage.
Showa Denko has now started shipment of the platters that will go into new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR hard disk drives announced by Western Digital only a few days ago. A 2.6TB platter -- which uses energy-assisted magnetic recording and shingled magnetic recording -- also marks an important milestone as it hits the symbolic 1TB/in^2 density. Showa Denko's announcement comes as a surprise as Toshiba recently suggested 30TB drives (rather than higher capacities) would not come until 2024. A 30TB model would comprise of 11 platters with 2.73TB capacities each, a slight improvement on the 2.6TB capacity that are on the way. Given the fact that 26TB HDDs have now been announced in the first half of 2022, there's a remote chance that we could see 30TB drives before the end of the year or (as the saying goes), depending on market conditions.
Showa Denko has now started shipment of the platters that will go into new 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 UltraSMR hard disk drives announced by Western Digital only a few days ago. A 2.6TB platter -- which uses energy-assisted magnetic recording and shingled magnetic recording -- also marks an important milestone as it hits the symbolic 1TB/in^2 density. Showa Denko's announcement comes as a surprise as Toshiba recently suggested 30TB drives (rather than higher capacities) would not come until 2024. A 30TB model would comprise of 11 platters with 2.73TB capacities each, a slight improvement on the 2.6TB capacity that are on the way. Given the fact that 26TB HDDs have now been announced in the first half of 2022, there's a remote chance that we could see 30TB drives before the end of the year or (as the saying goes), depending on market conditions.
Re: Good news (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, they are probably going to be cheaper than SSDs, probably by a lot.
Right now I can get 18TB nearline HDD for 346EUR or server-grade for 412EUR. Cheapest 4TB desktop SSD is 449EUR, server-grade 3.84TB is 813EUR. Yes, SSDs are a lot faster, but not all applications require the speed.
NAS? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. They're shingled. Terrible sustained write speed, no lousy for resilvering.
Re: (Score:2)
no --> so
Sorry.
Re: (Score:3)
Who is the customer for these? (Score:2)
Looks like a PR exercise rather than an expectation of being a volume product. The capacity makes it NAS, but the shingling makes that unlikely. Betcha there's a lower capacity CMR version released at the same time.
Re: Who is the customer for these? (Score:2)
These disks should be written like tapes and can be read like disks, so theyâ(TM)re ideal for cold storage and backups, but theyâ(TM)re worthless for ânormalâ(TM) hdd workloads. The manufacturers should just market them as a new form of storage that just happens to look a lot like a hard disk, but they donâ(TM)t, and thatâ(TM)s where the problems start.
Re: (Score:1)
You're right. Real performance comes from many spindles, not large drives.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: NAS? (Score:2)
You might be mixing up Mbps and MBps. There isn't much mainstream content that requires over 100Mbps yet, and that's mostly from UHD Blu ray. It's only 12.5 MB/s, a throughput you could possibly get from some pricey SCSI drives back in the late 1990s. You would only have minutes of content to watch with rhe drive capacities of that epoch, though.
The SMR drives do really suck for NAS, though. Servethehome reported that a resilver could take 9 days with an SMR drive. I have seen my own single SMR drive, a Sea
Finally (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I am sure you will beat the computer at Tic-Tac-Toe any day now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was running out of space to store all my editions of Grand Theft Auto.
Joke's on you, the next GTA will probably run very poorly from spinning rust. Everything these days is coded with the assumption it will be loading all the assets from a NVMe.
30TB drive is more for pirating everything worth watching from Netflix, and then still having like 29.9TB leftover.
Re: (Score:2)
Slight complication (Score:2)
which uses energy-assisted magnetic recording and shingled magnetic recording
Shingled makes it less desirable for some applications. It might be okay for archival and backup purposes maybe. Enterprise and NAS would have issues with it.
Re: (Score:3)
Shingled makes it less desirable for MOST applications
There, I fixed it for you. They'll be fine for things like Amazon Glacier or Facebook's custom backups but there's almost no consumer use these are good for. They won't work well in a RAID, they'll work like crap as primary storage and there aren't really any consumer-grade tools for doing cold backups in a way that survives the loss of a drive.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
What could go wrong? (Score:1)
SMR? (Score:2)
Laptop drives still stuck at 2tb (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish to god someone would make a 9.5mm 2.5" SATA drive larger than 2TB. Hell, I'd even settle for a shitty SMR drive if necessary (it's just for bulk data to augment the 2tb SSD).
It's crazy. Laptop drives hit 2tb ~4 years
ago, then just stagnated. Larger 2.5" drives exist... but not 9.5mm, only enterprise-thickness 15mm drives that won't fit in a laptop.
Note to WD: a perfect laptop drive would combine a 2tb ssd & 6-18tb smr drive in a 2.5" 9.5mm SATA3 form factor, made to appear (to Windows) as 2 separate drives (one ssd, one magnetic).
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The good news is SSD storage keeps coming down in price, even if it's not shown it much this year.
Unfortunately the endurance and retention keeps coming down also.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Laptop drives still stuck at 2tb (Score:2)
The problem with "SSDs Everywhere, for Everything" is, they're STILL expensive as hell for storing bulk terabyte tonnage... and beyond 1-2tb, every doubling of capacity basically QUADRUPLES the cost-per-byte. A 2tb ssd might be inconsequentially more expensive than a 2tb 2.5" drive, but an 8tb ssd is enormously (and almost an order of magnitude) more expensive than a 3.5" 8TB SMR drive (I can't directly compare a 2.5" 8tb 9.5mm drive, because they don't exist).
Compounding the crisis, brand new laptops don't
Re: (Score:2)
Mechanical drives are battery killers, and have much higher warranty rates.
Plus if they give you too much storage how are they going to milk you for their cloud services?
Best bet is probably a Lenovo with dual M.2 slots. You could get 8TB of SSDs in there.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish to god someone would make a 9.5mm 2.5" SATA drive larger than 2TB. Hell, I'd even settle for a shitty SMR drive if necessary (it's just for bulk data to augment the 2tb SSD).
It's crazy. Laptop drives hit 2tb ~4 years
ago, then just stagnated. Larger 2.5" drives exist... but not 9.5mm, only enterprise-thickness 15mm drives that won't fit in a laptop.
Note to WD: a perfect laptop drive would combine a 2tb ssd & 6-18tb smr drive in a 2.5" 9.5mm SATA3 form factor, made to appear (to Windows) as 2 separate drives (one ssd, one magnetic).
You can get 5 TB 2.5" HDDs, larger capacities are available but there's no demand for them as they're pretty much only for laptops and portable drives, both of which are trending towards flash based storage for larger capacities with a 2TB SSD dropping below £150 last year. There's a limit to what we can do with spinning rust, largely governed by how reliable we can make smaller parts (so whilst the platters may be good for more TBs, the other bits wont be, it's like an old BMW, the engine is bulletpr
Re: Laptop drives still stuck at 2tb (Score:2)
2.5-inch drives larger than 2TB are too thick to fit into laptops... they only fit in enterprise RAID arrays and external USB enclosures.
As far as I can tell, 4-5 years ago, they made single-platter 7.5mm drives with 1tb, 2-platter 9.5mm drives with 2tb, and 3-platter 12.5mm drives with 3tb, and 4 or 5-platter ~15mm drives with 4-5tb.
For the next generation (starting ~2 years ago), they increased density again, then used SMR to increase it enough to claim 2tb on a single-platter 7.5mm drive... then just use
Re: (Score:2)
In that situation I think I would try to build a small form factor NAS which uses Ethernet, USB, or WiFi to provide storage to the laptop. Maybe it could be built into a small Pelican or Nanuk case.
Re: (Score:2)
There are 2.5" drives up to 5TB - don't know if there's 3's but def 4 and 5.
Heighwise however, I'm unsure if they've retained the correct height.
I believe some laptops will accomodate the 9mm drives (7mm being ultra slim) but I think the 4 and 5 are extra high, fairly sure of it.
As much as it's wildly expensive, a "cheapo" 4TB SSD might be the go here.
RAID for everyone, then? (Score:3)
So what's the backup strategy for everyone else, now? MIrror sets by default, with a 3rd backup drive sitting on the shelf? RAID-5? Because aside from prohibitively expensive backup solutions, there's no practical way to back up double-digit terabyte drives.
Re: (Score:2)
RAID should be built into hard drives (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Mirrors and raid are not backup. Maliciously delete a file from raid and its gone everywhere.
If you want backup and are only going to buy two drives, don't do mirror or raid. Just put one drive in your main system and another in an (offline) backup system. If you have more drives lying around, make a Raid 5 in your main system, and have sufficient drives in the backup system to cover the same size (no raid needed there, just link the drives together so they act as one volume, I use unionfs).
Re: (Score:2)
Mirrors and raid are not backup. Maliciously delete a file from raid and its gone everywhere.
Yes, I understand that, I am no neophyte when it comes to computers -- but offline backup is only as effective if it's used often. In your scenario where a file gets deleted (either by accident or maliciously), if that happens between backup sessions then it's effectively lost anyway. I mention mirror sets and RAID because those get around that flaw. Mirror sets and stripe sets with parity can regenerate anything. Meanwhile the closest you could get with an 'offline' backup would be incremental backups done
Re: (Score:2)
If you want backup and are only going to buy two drives, don't do mirror or raid. Just put one drive in your main system and another in an (offline) backup system.
That is what I do now for critical files that I might want to evacuate on short notice. I have two identical USB enclosures with 2.5" SATA drives that I trust. Periodically I update the backup from the main and do a complete comparison using hashes to force both drives to scrub on read if necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not really talking about enterprises or data centers, they can afford the expensive backup systems.
So what's the backup strategy for everyone else, now? MIrror sets by default, with a 3rd backup drive sitting on the shelf? RAID-5? Because aside from prohibitively expensive backup solutions, there's no practical way to back up double-digit terabyte drives.
Erm, we've been doing disk to disk for ages. many will do disk to disk to tape. When it comes to your backup strategy, there is no such thing as too much redundancy.
Even the latest LTO tape drives are far to slow to do direct disk to tape backups. In addition to tape, you've also live backup storage on disk arrays (or whatever tech you prefer really, the point is, as long as your eggs aren't all in one basket).
With double digit TB drives, your big issue is going to be throughput on a SATA interface, b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So what's the backup strategy for everyone else, now? MIrror sets by default, with a 3rd backup drive sitting on the shelf? RAID-5?
ZFS [itsfoss.com]. The awsome combined block level + file system originating from Sun Microsystems. The file system is copy on write which means that generating snapshots are superfast, and if you set up a task to generate snapshots regulary with some retention policy (e.g. zfs-auto-snapshot [github.com], znapzend [znapzend.org] or similar) from the client side you only need to to synchronize file content into a zfs destination folder (using rsync, synchthing or whatever), and the zfs will implicitly create and maintain all the "incremental" histo
and to think (Score:2)
and to think, I remember ordering my first hard drive for my first computer that was only 20 megs and thought I had something. Things sure do change..
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A windowing, pre-emptive multitasking operating system fit in 512 kB those days. So yes, 20 megs was indeed quite a lot :)
these are all manufactured by one company (Score:2)
Ouch! Really only one company? That sounds a lot like a single point of failure, regardless of where it is located.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that's right either. I know both WDC and STX both make their platters in-house. They often work w/ SDK and TDK on next gen stuff, but it won't be cost effective to buy the platters for manufacturing.