60TB Hard Drives Arriving in 2028, According To Industry Roadmap

An anonymous reader shares a report: The arrival of energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies like Seagate's HAMR will play a crucial role in accelerating HDD capacity growth in the coming years. According to the new IEEE International Roadmap for Devices and Systems Mass Data Storage, we will see 60 TB hard disk drives in 2028. If the prediction is accurate, we will see HDD storage capacity doubling in just four years, something that did not happen for a while. Also, IEEE believes that HDD unit sales will increase.

IEEE's latest HDD development roadmap spans 2022 to 2037 and covers 15 years of hard drive evolution. The arrival of HAMR in 2024 will play a pivotal role in the increase in HDD capacity (even though Western Digital has managed to stay competitive with Seagate's HAMR HDDs using a set of its technologies) over the next few years. IEEE engineers expect HDDs to leapfrog to 40TB in 2025 and 60TB in 2028, doubling capacity from 30TB in 2024. By 2037, there will be 100TB of storage space, according to IEEE.

To get to those extreme capacities, HDD makers will have to increase the areal density of their platters steadily. To get to 40TB per drive, they will have to get to 2 TB/inch^2 in 2025 and then to over 4 TB/inch^2 in 2028 to build 60TB HDDs. By 2037, areal density will grow to over 10 Tb/inch^2. Increasing areal density will necessitate the use of new media, magnetic films, and all-new write and read heads.

Disc two

[test321]

With Sci-hub claiming 77 TB in 2021 ( https://www.reddit.com/r/DataH... [reddit.com] ), by 2030 the disk capacity will match that of Futurama's Mars University, where non-fiction fits on a single disc ( https://theinfosphere.org/Mars... [theinfosphere.org] ).

The math doesn't seem to line up

[ddtmm]

They will increase the size to 60TB in 4 years, but will take another 9 years to get to 100? And the aerial capacities don't align.

40TB per drive, they will have to get to 2 TB/inch^2

implying 20sq in., but

4 TB/inch^2 in 2028 to build 60TB HDDs

implying 15 sq. in.

then

By 2037, areal density will grow to over 10 Tb/inch^2

implying 10 sq. in.

I'm confused.

Bandwidth better catch up

[dynamo]

I don't want to be backing up my drive for a week, we will either need to start seeing internal HD interfaces with ACTUAL write speeds approaching 1TB/sec or we'll have to buy two or more with a LOT of internal suspension to avoid data corruption and a special bay that we can just pull one out of and push another into, so we can just swap a new one in to replace the old one. And of course we'd need to deal with a second internal drive and tech inside with Raid 1, and the new drive would have to be stable long enough for the mirroring to finish.

Storage.

[kellin]

Most of us won't need to see this kind of size increase in storage devices. This is clearly for data centers and cloud computing, etc, etc..

I can't imagine squeezing more data into smaller spaces will be good for the life of a drive, so data backups will be even more important.

Re:

[larryjoe]

Most of us won't need to see this kind of size increase in storage devices. This is clearly for data centers and cloud computing, etc, etc..

I can't imagine squeezing more data into smaller spaces will be good for the life of a drive, so data backups will be even more important.

These extremely large HDDs are for cold storage, i.e., large amounts of mostly read-only, rarely accessed data. Like older items on social media sites that take a few seconds to appear when one happens to scroll down that far.

Any data that is frequently updated will need replication and rebuild, and that won't be practical with these large capacities.

Are HDDs still all made in one spot on Earth?

[Fly Swatter]

For that matter, are they reliable anymore? Sorry I switched to Solid State and am so far glad for not having to listen to bearing whine or bad sectors suddenly popping up and growing (hi Seagate).

I guess these are for data centers and data hoarders.

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[markdavis]

>"Sorry I switched to Solid State and am so far glad for not having to listen to bearing whine or bad sectors suddenly popping up and growing"

Solid state drives are just wonderful. Small, low-power, ultra fast, reliable. They breathed new life into computers, for sure. I am a huge fan.

The problem is that if you have a lot of data to store, solid state is still way, way more expensive. So if you have the physical space and don't need incredible speed, spinning hard drives still have a major role. At

Re:

[ffkom]

Solid state drives are just wonderful. Small, low-power, ultra fast, reliable. They breathed new life into computers, for sure. I am a huge fan.

Yes, but they have a nasty habit of losing data when not powered for extended periods of time (multiple years). So for backup purposes of data that may not be accessed for a long time, I would rather rely on magneto-optical hard magnetic drives. Maybe one day we'll see a special kind of SSD on the shelves that is built to keep its content for decades, even if not powered.

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[AlexanderPatrakov]

When you go past 8 TB, ignore M.2. Use enterprise-grade drives, which come in the U.2/U.3 factor, plus adapters. And you can already have 60 TB on a single QLC NVMe drive (Solidigm D5-P5336, available now for 7200 USD). Or, if you don't want QLC, there are multiple 30 TB SSD offerings from other manufacturers.

Re:

[Mspangler]

No bearing whine, but the bad sector was the whole NVME. It was only four and a half years old.

Backups are still needed, but you knew that.

Lots of purposes

[destined2fail1990]

You could convert your entire bedroom of DVDs / Bluray to AV1/MP4 and store them for streaming purposes to family and the entire house. You could store pretty much all the straight (or gay, if that's your thing) porn on Twitter with only a couple of drives. (The API to get it all would cost a fortune, though). You can do 4K video saving. You could record surveillance. You could store an entire collection of video games (at least in their backup form, I'd hate to see load times on one of these).

What we nee