Western Digital Aims For 100TB Hard Drives by 2030 (tomshardware.com) 56
Western Digital plans to introduce its first heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives in late 2026, with 36TB conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and 44TB shingled UltraSMR variants. Volume production won't begin until the first half of 2027, following qualification by cloud data center providers in late 2026.
The company projects that HAMR technology, combined with OptiNAND, increased platter count, and mechanical improvements, will enable drives reaching 80TB CMR and 100TB UltraSMR capacities around 2030 -- a departure from Western Digital's previous commitment to microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2017, which evolved into the energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology used in current drives.
The company projects that HAMR technology, combined with OptiNAND, increased platter count, and mechanical improvements, will enable drives reaching 80TB CMR and 100TB UltraSMR capacities around 2030 -- a departure from Western Digital's previous commitment to microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2017, which evolved into the energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology used in current drives.
Whoa.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be storage guy back in the day dealing with petabytes when many people weren't sure of what gigabytes were. (Shitty job btw, never be storage guy).
As drives got larger over the years it was great for cost and data center space but transfer rates and raid rebuild times became a problem. It's verrrrrry cool they can jam 100TB on a standard size drive soon and there are numerous real world uses for these but JFC you don't want to be the guy responsible when an array collapses before the rebuild completes or get yelled at by non-technical C level who think he's technical about why it takes so fucking long to back up, copy, transfer, or restore from these things.
The tub gets bigger n bigger but the faucet and drain remain the same size.
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Try reading what I actually said. It's right there. Stop embarrassing yourself posting stuff that needs the AC box checked.
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I'm sure it was just habit.
You usually post whiny bullshit, so the fact that your post was cogent, on-topic, and somewhat insightful probably caught them by surprise.
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the fact that your post was cogent, on-topic, and somewhat insightful probably caught them by surprise.
You're excluding the possibility he got bit by the SMR write-hole on a RAID rebuild.
Sorry, I just had to go there... :)
T
Re: Whoa.... (Score:2)
Re: Whoa.... (Score:1)
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Re: Whoa.... (Score:2)
Now if you reduce the bit error rate to 0.5, you could instantly restore the 100TB drive and get half of the data right.
I guess restoring it twice would get the other halve right. Cheers!
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As drives got larger over the years it was great for cost and data center space but transfer rates and raid rebuild times became a problem. It's verrrrrry cool they can jam 100TB on a standard size drive soon and there are numerous real world uses for these but JFC you don't want to be the guy responsible when an array collapses before the rebuild completes or get yelled at by non-technical C level who think he's technical about why it takes so fucking long to back up, copy, transfer, or restore from these things.
The tub gets bigger n bigger but the faucet and drain remain the same size.
Assuming physical form factor/platter count of the disk remains constant and the disk spins at the same speed I/O bandwidth is a function of density. Higher density drives generally have commensurately higher bandwidth.
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They're all on the same bus. Be it SATA or SCSI or whatever. Usually SATA but shrug. There have been no external connector/bus improvements since SATA II.
So that's where I was going with this. You get a tub upgraded to the size of an Olympic pool but you still fill and drain it with the same tiny pipes.
Don't get me wrong. I really honestly do think 100TB is awesome but the connection to the system really needs an upgrade. Maybe these things are supposed to be usb5 or direct connection PCIE 5.0 or some
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>"They're all on the same bus. Be it SATA or SCSI or whatever. Usually SATA but shrug. There have been no external connector/bus improvements since SATA II. So that's where I was going with this. You get a tub upgraded to the size of an Olympic pool but you still fill and drain it with the same tiny pipes."
SAS is currently 12Gb/s. SAS4 will be 22.5Gb/s
SATA version 3 is old, but 6Gb/s. I believe that is 732MB/s.
The reality is that no existing spinning rust comes anywhere near to a sustained even 6Gb/s.
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I'm talking data centers and raid systems. You're also talking wire speeds not real speeds.
Anyway back to my original point: it takes a lot longer to rebuild a 100TB drive than a 5TB drive. We can easily agree on this. When you're waiting on a rebuild, 20x longer than current numbers (anywhere from a few hours to possibly days on some systems) is terrifying.
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SAS4 will be 22.5Gb/s
Is 22.5Gb/s... SAS4 kit has been available for purchase for at least 2 years. But... I have yet to see a 3.5" SAS4 drive. So all the large bulk storage switched enclosures are giving people SAS3 speeds anyway. I did get to play with a 48 drive SAS4 SSD array for a couple weeks. It was nice, but not "48 NVMe drives with hookers & blow" nice.
SATA version 3 is old, but 6Gb/s. I believe that is 732MB/s.
SATA3 is dead. There are working groups trying to spec out SAS5 now. It will probably be futile, but they are trying. Nobody is working on SATA at this point. T
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>"I had hoped the controller would act as a "multi-thread" capability, but the FW just presents the other actuator as a second drive, which then becomes a "two-fer" point of failure..."
Yeah, it is stupid. I couldn't believe it. Let's totally destroy all logic and reason surrounding drives, failure modes, all drive tools/drivers/utilities/etc. What a mess.
If you want more heads, then why not just double-wide on a single arm and read/write two tracks at once? Or double-deep on one arm and spin faster a
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WRT two+ heads on one arm (or even one "big" head with multiple read/write units), if one head is tracking its track is it guaranteed the other is right on its track - even in varying temps and therefore expansion of disks/heads/arms - all of which are made of different materials and are of different structures? The tracks are very close together so positioning needs to be pretty precise.
The two synced arms would add to the drive cost and probably somewhat reduce its reliability. About all spinning rust has
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In a well-designed array
You may not have realized who you're replying to, it's the guy whose every post reveals the comprehension of technology that a not particularly bright 12 year-old might possess (and the world at large). He probably ended up as "the storage guy" because his supervisors needed someone to do the grunt work that more competent staff was too busy to deal with.
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SATA 3 is a thing, 650MB/s. SSDs abandoned it because they ended up saturating SATA3. Hard drives right now are barely breaking 200MB/sec off the media and are perfectly happy at SATA2 speeds. These large drives could easily start saturating SATA3 to/from the media.
Still takes days to rebuild, but with these large arrays it's time to have RAID6 at a minimu
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These days the slow transfer speed of mechanical drives is somewhat mitigated by things like tiered storage. Huawei has developed tapes that include some flash memory storage too.
HDDs will probably adopt U.2 or whatever the consumer version is called, once they start to push past the limits of SATA 3 bandwidth. Or maybe not, they may just largely abandon the consumer market for internal drives and only offer them in USB, as the consumer market is mostly SSDs now.
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OptiNAND is such a shitshow, "Here you go, nice super-large HDD" NAND dies "Now you have a 3lb paperweight"
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So you mean software raid. Ok.
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Go parallel or go home.
Nostalgia Post (Score:2)
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It was a Pentium 100Mhz, 16MB RAM, 1MB dedicated video card and a 1GB hard drive.
My first "affordable" upgrade after my 386 40Mhz was the Pentium 90 Mhz and a 128 MB disk, a just under the top of the line PC for fl 2000,-.
I was never a data hoarder and didn't need expensive large disks, and nowadays I use 2x 500 GB in Btrfs RAID 1 on my laptops with an about 300 GB volume for miscellaneous data (mostly occupied by game and media downloads). It's just about the right size that when it's close to filling up I feel that I have too much junk on it and need to clean it up.
The two data server
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8MB luuuuuxury!
Why when I was a lad, uphill both ways, sawn in half wit o bread knife etc
My first machine was a BBC with a 5.25" disk drive. Hundreds of kilobytes! I could fit more on a D120 cassette tape though. My next teenage purchase later was a P133 with 72M of RAM (bought of a mate, his dad was in IT and had spare apparently) with a glorious 700M. And an Nvidia Riva128 graphics card with gloriously janky opengl drivers.
I later added a 9 GB drive for Linux (dead rat 5.2) and a fancy 16x read 4x write
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5.25 inch hard drive? We should have been so lucky! Half a punch card, an abacus and a clip round the earhole and we would have thought wed died and gone to heaven! ...back downt pit int evening an straight up chimney of mainframe come sunrise Iâ(TM)ll have you knowâ¦
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My first hard drive was a 5.25" 20MB drive in an external SCSI enclosure for my Macintosh Plus.
Fast forward and today I'm on a 64 GB RAM Windows PC, booting from a 500 GB SSD with main storage being a 4TB NVMe SSD, and another 1TB NVMe. In my garage I have an old HP server with a 6TB spinning rust array (RAID 5 I think, but maybe RAID 6 - not sure).
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My IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10 Mhz PC came with a 30 MB HDD! I also bought Stacker software, without its hardware addon to double it but it only gave me like 1.5X more and of course slower speed. :P
pfft smart (Score:1)
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Much as I morn the end of that tech it appears they couldn't keep up.
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If it's spinning rust, it's not going to break suddenly and die unexpectedly. You will probably have enough time to copy your data before the drive dies assuming you didn't already have another copy or two already.
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Re:pfft smart (Score:4, Funny)
But what is that 100TB? One of the features of the modern world is that you end up storing the same amount of content in the larger data. Think of your porn collection.
Back in the days of 30GB HDDs you were jerking to 35MB real media files.
In the days of 256GB HDDs we started spanking the monkey to 350-600MB DIVX files.
In the days of eh 2TB HDDs we were gooning at 2-3GB H.264 4K movies.
And currently in the days of 16TB HDDs we're shaking hands with the milkman to 20GB 8K VR porn.
As the size of the HDD increases, we don't necessarily loose any more porn as a result.
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Not exactly the joke I was looking for, but filing it under obligatory, even with the typo/s.
Reminds me of a period when I was working for Internet startups and one of the owners said the whole thing was based on porn. Also not funny that he was murdered not long after that conversation. Rumor said it was an attempted marijuana purchase that went bad...
Story also reminds me of my earliest hard disks around 10 MB.
Some notes (Score:2)
An hour of video is roughly 1GB, so one drive can store roughly 100,000 hours of video.
Hypothetically, a person wearing a system containing one of these drives could record roughly 4 hours a day for 60 years. Assuming that most of the (awake) time we spend in our daily lives is unremarkable and not worth recording, one could make the claim that one of these drives could record a single person's entire lifetime. All the interactions you have, everything that everyone else says (including all the school lesso
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Yeah, I see AI being a big user of huge drives in the future.
I suppose, in the future, Netflix could just send you an encrypted drive with all their shows in the mail so they don't have to pay for bandwidth. Could be a great deal for them.
A third big reason for these things is that a lot of paranoid people are getting footage from their 12 security cameras 24/7 and need someplace to store all that useless data.
For me, someone who isn't very interested in AI, security cameras or tv, I don't see many uses, bu
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I'm pre-ordering 2 for GTA 6.
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Nope. Not if it's 4K.
The minimum acceptable quality is 16-25mbits for 1080p and 32-100mbits for 4K.
I can fill up a 20TB hard drive with just 450 hours of 4K video.
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An hour of video is roughly 1GB,
I can fill up a 20TB hard drive with just 450 hours of 4K video.
Yeah, 1995 called and wants its 720p resolution back. That's about a gigabyte per hour. Even 1080p is higher than that at typical quality settings.
Apple ProRes 4444 XQ video is 764 gigabytes per hour [vashivisuals.com], and Canon RAW 4k (12-bit) is 1036 GB per hour.
And on the extreme end, one hour of 8k ProRes 4444 XQ video at 120 fps takes a whopping 14.57 TB [multiversemediagroup.com].
So in the worst case, the GP was more than four orders of magnitude low with that estimate. :-)
Moving from online storage to back-up media (Score:2)
I'm kind of surprised the usual "But we all use SSDs these days!" comments haven't started, but from my point of view this is fantastic anyway because I've started using HDDs as back-up media. You can get a SATA hotswap bay that'll fit in a standard half height 5.25" bay for about $30. Just insert the disk, copy your files, and then remove it.
This is an application this kind of disk size seems built for and I suspect will still be relevant for in 5 years, as I suspect while demands on disk space will contin
Overheard in the future... (Score:2)
" Finally, I can backup my ZFS pool! "
" ...whaddayamean it's gonna cost $4k per drive--!? "
What's the mtbf for such as these? (Score:2)
Same questions, different number. (Score:1)
Talked about for a long time! (Score:2)