Seagate will bring a 16TB hard drive to market within 18 months

http://www.techspot.com/news/67928-seagate-bring-16tb-hard-drive-market-within-18.html

by doener • 9 years ago

91 111 9 years ago

techspot.com

velodrome2• 9 years ago

Too bad the $/TB isn't dropping as much as before. $30-40 / TB seems to be the floor...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/10/kryders_law_of_ever_...

js2• 9 years ago

I paid $1000 for my first HD. It was 40 MB.

velodrome2• 9 years ago

I had one of a similar capacity. It weighed as much as a brick (perhaps more).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#/media/File:5....

DougWebb• 9 years ago

About 15 years ago, the company I worked for paid $1,000,000 for a 1TB disk array. Today I have several times that capacity laying around my apartment; I haven't even bothered to hook some of it up.

peter303• 9 years ago

My lab paid 35,000 for PDP 10mB disk in 1976. It was the size of a washing machine. But it did allow us to increase our research.

DrScump• 9 years ago

I paid something like $360 for a full-height 5.25" 30MB Seagate for my first HD (to add to my dual-floppy Zenith AT).

ue_• 9 years ago

I wonder if this will have such high failure rates as other high-capacity hard drives. It's less cost effective to buy many smaller HDDs, but it's probably better for long-term data retention.

I wish there were a cheap and easy way to buy magnetic storage and the associated drive. I have no idea where to start, as I just want to back things up on tape.

gcp4• 9 years ago

It's less cost effective to buy many smaller HDDs, but it's probably better for long-term data retention

How so? Is the MTBF for a size 2*x drive more than twice as high as that of a size x drive?

alex_anglin• 9 years ago

RAID?

mdorazio3• 9 years ago

I don't think we should really be looking at drive MTBF, but rather some measure of total expected loss. The bigger your drive, the more catastrophic the loss in the event of a failure, so even if the MTBF of a 2x capacity drive is only slightly higher, your total risk is more than 2x as high.

segmondy• 9 years ago

Yeah, that's my concern. I want reliability, super reliable. So reliable that I can live life recklessly without a backup. Backup does get expensive, managing, paying, the bandwidth, the restoring.

nradov2• 9 years ago

Increased storage reliability doesn't protect you against data corruption due to software defects or accidental deletion. You still need backups to protect against those problems.

blacksmith_tb• 9 years ago

That's the dream, but until you can guarantee the building your drive is in will never burn down / be struck by an earthquake / be broken into and cleaned out, you will need some sort of backups.

throwawayish3• 9 years ago

shred /array0/important && rm -rf /array0 && zfs list -t snapshot -o name | xargs -n 1 zfs destroy -r

(Or something along those lines)

0xcde4c3db• 9 years ago

Will this be SMR? That seems like an important variable.

IgorPartola• 9 years ago

Random: I had a professor in college who had a bunch of industry experience. He said once that working on computer equipment was really annoying because of Moore's law. You bust your ass for a year-year and a half, make the computer literally twice as fast, and in the end the execs just sort of say "well of course you did. Moore's law said you would." Not sure if true but definitely a little funny.

13of40• 9 years ago

The corollary to that is that in (a lot of) software your application's performance can plummet over time and nobody notices, because it appears to be holding steady. "But AcmePro Enterprise Plus is faster than it's ever been," you counter. Try running it on a 486DX4 with 32 megs of RAM like you did with version one. We'll wait.

gpderetta• 9 years ago

AKA Gate's Law

shmerl• 9 years ago

When will prices of SSD catch up to rotational disks?

zoren• 9 years ago

Will they?

al_biglan• 9 years ago

caveat: I'm in the storage/file system industry.

Everyone in the industry is looking at this. There is a great graph out there by one drive manufacturer that overlays $/GB for different HDDs and SSD technologies. For example, 15K and 10K RPM drives no longer are cost effective to produce. You are better going with SSDs. 7.2K will be next and some of the "lower end SSDs" are encroaching on that. 5.4K will likely live a longer time and if you keep "HDD as archive" you might project these drives to be alive in the foreseeable future (then factor in SMR, HAMR, then SMR plus HAMR.... and $/GB gets pretty cheap). After all, if you aren't keeping 100% of your data "in flight" keeping it at rest on a cheaper medium seems a sane thing. (Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)

Another interesting back of the envelope to do is look at Fab capacity for SSDs and compare it against HDD capacity sold. How much Fab capacity has to be available to serve the total storage demand? If there is a shortage of Fab plants, then a price premium for SSDs is easier to maintain (and may benefit some flash manufacturers in the short term to keep the price premium in place). Looking at the economics of building enough Fab capacity gets interesting quick.

mtanski4• 9 years ago

I've actually been wondering why is not possible to make lower-end desktop SSD drives of capacity 1TB (or more) that are "better" then spinning drives.

I have a samsung 950 pro NVMe drive in my development workstation and I can't statute it without a synthetic workload. There are times I need that for work, most times it's over kill.

For example 1TB SSD drive that can do like 300MB/s sustained transfer with 3000 to 5000 iops. So a speed that's magnitude or magnitude and a half less then current consumer SSD drives. But still a magnitude faster then spinning disk. I'm confident that would be more then enough to make most desktop environment work feel just as snappy as a SSD or within an acceptable factional difference.

If you could make this at $100 to $120 price point drives. That's like 1/2 the cost of a low end desktop 1TB SSD drive (like the Toshiba/OCZ) You'd have a hot seller in peoples gaming rigs, mid-range laptops etc.

Obviously I'm missing something here. Why is not happening? Does producing lower end flash (slower) not saving you any money?

isostatic2• 9 years ago

(Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)

LTO seems to tick a lot of boxes in the archive business. I remember people trying to sell a MAID (massive array of idle disks) some years ago -- something like 100 disks in 4U of space. They came of blades that each held about 8 disks, and there were about 15 of them in a 4U row. With a controller in the middle it meant you could get somewhere in the region of 1000 disks in a rack.

The power consumption would be obscene, but that was fine, as the disks were kept idle, in fact the system could only power about 25% of the disks at once. The idea was you don't need access to the majority of files, and a 10 second latency when you do isn't going to hurt (far faster than tape)

At the same time tape manufacturers were pushing LTO-5 and LTFS, arguing that was the better solution for archive, and after a misstep with LTO6 (launching at 2.5T rather than 3T), LTO7 recovered.

loeg• 9 years ago

~2019

xfactor973• 9 years ago

Wow HDD's really are the new tape drives

salesguy2222• 9 years ago

it's a shame that HDDs fail/lose integrity so much more quickly than tape cartridges used in an equivalent manner :(

but if you put them on a shelf, then the life is roughly the same :D

Alupis4• 9 years ago

but if you put them on a shelf, then the life is roughly the same :D

Careful, that's not always the case.

Anecdotally, I lost a few TB's of data recently after assuming my drives sitting on the shelf (inside anti-static bags) would be fine after only a couple of years. Plugging each drive in prompted the Windows popup asking if I wanted to initialize the drives! Total data loss on all 4 drives after only a couple of years on the shelf. It wasn't a big loss to me, because I couldn't even remember what data was on the drives... but I wouldn't rely on this for business data.

Tapes still have their purpose.

oblio2• 9 years ago

I'm kind of hoping that SSD capacities go up or prices go down. Especially for laptops, in 2017 it feels like the baseline for the storage capacity should be 1TB. Yet here we are, struggling with 256GB, like desktops from 2007.

And don't get me started on RAM, where 8gb should be the norm even for cheap laptops...

zxcdw• 9 years ago

8gb should be the norm even for cheap laptops...

Why? For example, why now, why not two years ago, or in two years time?

isostatic2• 9 years ago

I haven't paid much attention to specs recently, but looking at the Thinkpad T series which I'm typing this on (a 2010 one with a decent keyboard)

The standard for a 2017 T460s is 8G, maxed out at 20G The standard for a 2010 T410s was 2G, maxed out at 8G The standard for a 2005 T43 was 512M, maxed out at 2G The standard for a 2000 T21 was 128MB, maxed out at 512M.

So a 4 fold increase in 5 years seems a historic trend for laptop memory sizes, but that would mean 8G as standard in 2015. The maxout level has tailed off recently too - I'd expect a max out at 32G now, not 20G.

Presumably the demand appears to be dropping, that said my uptime is only 5 hours, and memory use isn't great Mem: 7779 5269 277 713 2232 1437

Browsers use tons of memory, at some point I'll have to buy the bullet and downgrade the keyboard, looks like 20G is the way to go.

placatedmayhem• 9 years ago

I wouldn't count on it. There's an industry-wide SSD shortage happening and prices are actually on the rise. This is a temporary situation while SSD manufacturers retool and ramp up 3D NAND but neglected to ramp up existing 2D NAND to meet demand in the mean time.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssd-hdd-shortage-nand-marke...

I've heard that HDD prices might rise as well, but I can't find a source for it right now.

cptskippy• 9 years ago

Thanks, I was in the market for an SSD for my desktop and was wondering why I haven't seen decent prices anywhere.

jjawssd2• 9 years ago

Scarcity not shortage

Scarcity is based on the premise that there really are a limited number of goods or services. On the contrary, a shortage is backed by the seller's decision to withhold the sale of certain products at their current price tag. Shortages can be solved by raising prices.

jdc0589• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what the price threshold is for me to actually buy all the SSD storage I need, but Dells pricing error a few weeks back was definitely below it ($20 per 256GB drive). Unfortunately my order got canceled, so I'm still rocking a 120GB ssd and a bunch of shitty slow spinny disks.

mrmondo3• 9 years ago

They've dropped enough that it's cheaper for us to purchase all 1TB SSDs to replace our 650GB 15K SAS disks in our SANs, after two years our drive failure rate has dropped by nearly 900% with a 5-40x performance gain depending on what you're measuring and the drives are about half the price of what the 15k SAS drives cost, to top it off our SANs used to run so hot you could barely touch the rear or the servers and now they're dead cold 24x7.

ddito• 9 years ago

How does something drop 900%? Did you mean it's not at 1/9 of what it used to be?

oblio2• 9 years ago

Yeah, but you're comparing SAS disks with server SSDs. I'm talking more about consumer grade SSDs. I feel like the price curve still starts at a quite high price point and cheap or medium laptops can't reach that point, except for very low storage capacities.

By the way, I'm talking about $800 laptops, not $1500+ :)

db48x• 9 years ago

You can get a 4TB SSD. They are a little pricy, but they do exist.

Jedd• 9 years ago

It's not an original thought, but for my home / office environments (ie. non-data center) where most machines have at least one 5.25" bay, I'd be really happy with a larger, slower, higher density, disk.

I appreciate most vendors are selling to the commercial market which eschews this old format, but it's still hard to buy a tower case that doesn't include at least one 5.25 inch bay that never gets populated.

(Nota bene - I'm referring to half-height 5.25". I've long since dumped my impressive stash of 2GB full-height 5.25" SCSI disks.)

aexaey• 9 years ago

Biggest problem with large spindle is that noise and heat dissipation (both mostly due to air friction) are roughly proportional to the square of linear speed of the outer part of the platter, and bigger the platter, more linear speed you'll get at the same angular speed. On the other hand, you want to crank up angular speed to get any decent random IO operation/second value.

Last 5.25" HDD I've seen was Quantum Bigfoot CY [1], (which happened to be half-height FWIW), and this thing was pretty noisy even at 3,600 RPM. Dividing this by 60 (seconds in one minute) gives you theoretical maximum of only 60 random IOPS. Not exactly stellar, and as far as I remember, that was substantially lower in practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot

SoapSeller• 9 years ago

I can imagine a 5.25" drive populated with a couple(3-5) sets of ~1.8" platters, you could also have internal raid speeding things up and protecting from single set failures.

fulafel2• 9 years ago

The Bigfoot failed in the market because they crashed and ate your data. The time might be right to try again with better execution.

The current use for using spinning disk is for capacity applications like archive/media storage, so the speed tradeoff would be fine.

lmm3• 9 years ago

I bought a cheap adapter bracket and put an ordinary hard drive in mine. Not the most efficient use of space but it means it isn't completely wasted.

Arizhel• 9 years ago

They tried that. Quantum made the quarter-height 5.25" "Bigfoot" drives for a little while. They didn't go far. I think the problem is that a larger disc, though it has greater area, also comes with worse mechanical stresses, plus the head has to be larger, which again means greater mechanical stresses and distortion under movement, and can't seek as quickly. There's a reason drives have gotten steadily smaller; otherwise they'd be making big, flat 8" or 12" hard drives for really high-capacity needs.

lisper4• 9 years ago

Those bays are for DVD drives, not hard drives.

fulafel2• 9 years ago

Do you mean it's against the natural order of things, or that there are technical obstacles like limited airflow (cooling)? A good temperature monitoring and throttling system could be a reasonable failsafe for the heat.

BTW does anyone know why current rotating HDD's are always fixed RPM?

detaro2• 9 years ago

Which quite a few people don't use anymore, and thus leave these slots empty. (I didn't plug mine in after the last motherboard change. Didn't have a fitting cable at hand, and never needed it since, so no pressure to fix that)

Keyframe• 9 years ago

I just found out today that Seagate bought Dot Hill.

fencepost2• 9 years ago

These helium-filled drives always make me twitchy and worried. I know they've come up with new seals to keep the second-smallest atom from leaking out, but I'd really like to know what the lifespan of these drives will really be.

That said, in the datacenter environments where they're pushing these hopefully the drives will be better monitored and replaced regularly as opposed to the consumer and small business market where there are still people who will give up their XP when you pry it from their cold virus-infested 15-year old HDs.

effie2• 9 years ago

Fun fact: the helium atom is actually much smaller than the hydrogen atom. See https://www.webelements.com/helium/atom_sizes.html

fencepost2• 9 years ago

Not clear where that's coming from, that site lists the bond length for HeHe as 300pm but for HH it's around 75 which would make Hydrogen ~1/4 the size of helium.

On the scale of individual atoms I don't remember enough about my chemistry and physics courses to recall whether there's supposed to be much physical difference between the "size" of the region where the first 2 electrons are between different atoms, nor do I know if that's being conceptualized as orbits, shells, abstract concepts of energy levels of something even weirder these days.

Seagate will bring a 16TB hard drive to market within 18 months

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