Seagate's Roadmap: The Path to 120 TB Hard Drives

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16544/seagates-roadmap-120-tb-hdds

by rbanffy • 5 years ago

203 204 5 years ago

luckystarr2• 5 years ago

We know the rate of growth of hard drive sizes while keeping the cost equal. We know the same for SSDs.

Did anybody calculate the point where it will not be economical anymore to build hard drives? 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

maweki• 5 years ago

There are physical limitations. An electron trap will have a minimum size. New ways for leaps and bounds need to be discovered. I think it's not reasonable to assume that both magnetic and electric storage have the same maximum density of infinity.

baybal2• 5 years ago

Read/write speeds will be the limit.

How many years it will take to write 120TB on it?

A 120TB flash array can be written in minutes with enough upstream bandwidth, and takes just one rack.

Tape on other hand was always speed limited, is just fine in its nice with that limitation.

gbrown_3• 5 years ago

Unlike disks flash has the nice advantage that it's not really constrained by form factor though. With a server full of E1.L drives you get strong performance and large storage in a dense space. Of course that's eye-wateringly expensive today but I think the combination of these factors will be what displaces disks rather than purely $$$/TB.

wtallis10• 5 years ago

There's no one cutoff or threshold at which hard drives die. SSDs have already made hard drives smaller than about 320GB completely uneconomical on a pure $/GB basis, and have killed off high-RPM hard drives. SSDs will continue to displace hard drives anywhere that performance or battery life matters.

You can break down drive costs somewhat into the fixed costs (SSD controller, or hard drive spindle motor and actuators) and the costs that vary with capacity (NAND or platters+heads). The fixed costs tend to be lower for SSDs (or at least SATA SSDs), and the variable costs are higher for SSDs because adding NAND is more expensive than another platter.

Hard drives smaller than several TB are no longer getting new technology (eg. you won't find a 2-platter helium drive), so whenever NAND gets cheaper the threshold capacity below which hard drives don't make sense moves upward.

For the near future, hard drive manufacturers have a clear path to outrun the capacities available from cheap SSDs. NAND flash gets you more bits per mm^2 than a hard drive platter, but platters are far cheaper per mm^2—enough to also be cheaper per bit. I think that relationship will still be true by the time hard drives are using bit-patterned media and 3D NAND is at several hundred layers.

Ultimately, it might make more sense to ask when we will see SSDs having taken over the former hard drive market with hard drives having moved entirely into the market traditionally occupied by tape.

ethbr0• 5 years ago

hard drives having moved entirely into the market traditionally occupied by tape

It'll be curious if the hyperscale clouds decide to self-manage more HDD functions, and dumb down the devices ($), or leave that to HDD manufacturers ($$).

I imagine there's some savings to be had stripping memory & controllers out of drives, when you're deploying in large groups anyway. Similar to what was done with networking kit.

Or maybe this already happens? Moreso than "RAID-edition" drives.

Robotbeat9• 5 years ago

What’s interesting is we’re seeing the ending of the 2 year Moore’s Law doubling rate at the same time (as we reach near the limits of the physics of photolithography as we reach toward EUV light sources... if we go much shorter wavelength, we get inherent shot noise from the high energy of the photons... and this in addition to device-level quantum effects), so we might never quite reach the point where SSDs totally take over. Also, even tape seems to be defending its niche from hard drives.

Also, higher RPM hard drives are still a thing and are holding their own to some degree. The higher RPM can help with rebuild times and to reduce the impact of the lower random IOPS. Also, conventional hard drives do not have the write limitations that (especially cheaper) SSDs have, although that has improved over time.

So I think we’ll just see a continuation of the three-tiered system of storage for many years to come, but with hard drives increasingly disappearing into the cloud and away from consumer devices. SSDs for most things, hard drives for bulk server/cloud storage, and tape still for cold, long-term-stable storage.

I think we’ve already seen a plateau in storage cost reduction as SSDs are not cheaper per TB than HDs. I think we’ll put more effort into being efficient with storage management in the future as we can no longer simply rely on doubling storage capacity every couple years.

ZWoz• 5 years ago

have killed off high-RPM hard drives

Depends, 15k RPM are indeed gone. 10k RPM drives are sold and used.

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

Will take some time...

The PM1643 16TB SSD is about 7 times as expensive as 16TB disks. (2600 vs 360, euro)

The PM1643 actually uses more than twice as much power in use (r or w) than a spinning disk. Idling they use the same 5W.

luckystarr2• 5 years ago

How much more read/write performance do you get for twice the energy usage? A performance per watt comparison would be interesting here.

whizzter• 5 years ago

I guess that is active power usage, but considering how much faster SSD's are compared to HDD's I doubt that scales with amount transferred (esp for random read/writes). So what would the power usage be when the total over active work time is counted?

dTal• 5 years ago

Is that twice the power at full bandwidth? Because if so, then the SSD is still more efficient, because those reads/writes will be over a lot more than twice as fast, and the SSD can go back to idling.

m4632• 5 years ago

I've read that unpowered SSDs do not retain data for long periods of time.

I've also been told that we have the technology to get data OFF of hard drives in cases of catastrophic failure. we don't have that capability with SSDs.

So for archiving, I think hard drives should stay a long time.

I think hard drives will be the "tape drives" of the future, relying on capacity more than random i/o speeds.

Chris2048• 5 years ago

in cases of catastrophic failure

I'm not sure it would be economical for bulk/cloud storage. It might be cheaper to just have geo-diverse redundant storage such that a failed drive can be rebuilt anew from redundant copies of the same data.

I'd be interested to see if optical technologies find a niche, they seem most stable for long-term storage, e.g. M-DISK

jabroni_salad• 5 years ago

As someone who services client SANs, I could not disagree harder. I cannot count how many times I have seen some site suffer a poweroff and then half the spinners don't power back up even though the health checks were previously green checkmarks across the board. Most folks plan their RAID for 1 or 2 failures, not 6!

If you want to archive at rest, bluray/dvd or tape in good climate controlled storage is the only way to do it. Your HDD will spontaneously die simply because it is a moving part well before a comparative SSD reaches the write-limit.

rany_• 5 years ago

These would take a while to scrub...

zelon88• 5 years ago

I'm excited to finally see multiple actuators on the road map. I've always thought a single actuator was a waste considering you can practically fit two into a standard 3.5" drive without changing anything.

wtallis10• 5 years ago

The dual-actuator drives that Seagate is currently working on still have only one head per platter surface. They're not putting two sets of arms into the drive like the old Conner Chinook drives [1]. Instead, Seagate's dual-actuator drives mean that the arms for the top 3-4 platters move as one group, and the arms for the bottom 3-4 platters move as a second group. They're basically giving you two separate hard drives that share a spindle motor, and are in a transparent RAID-0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Conner_Peripherals_%22Chi...

gruez• 5 years ago

What's the point of that? I guess it doubles random io performance? Not sure why that's even needed when there are SSDs.

londons_explore• 5 years ago

I suspect multiple heads on the same platter might lead to all kinds of calibration issues between the heads. You'll get weird issues like having to remember which head wrote each block of data so you know which set of calibration parameters to use to read back that data.

I could imagine certain resonances (eg. the height of the head oscillating) might differ between the two heads, effectively meaning data written with one set of resonances cannot be read back with another.

notacoward18• 5 years ago

Excellent points. Also, the vibration issues with multiple heads moving independently are a bit of a nightmare, and ameliorating those nullifies some of the merely-theoretical performance gains. Multi-actuator drives have been tried before not once but multiple times, and they've never lived up to their makers' promises.

xenadu02• 5 years ago

Modern drive heads are constantly reading the calibration data next to the user data and adjusting on the fly - an absolute necessity at current densities since minor temperature fluctuations would effectively destroy the ability to read or write data due to expansion/contraction pushing the head out of alignment.

IIRC the next step is to put the logic for that in the head itself with a tiny processor so the feedback cycle can be nearly instant. I suspect that would eliminate issues with one head reading something written by another.

altcognito4• 5 years ago

For long term storage on SSDs, how does one insure long term viability of the storage? Are manufacturers providing some sort of internal refresh as long as the device is powered?

PixelOfDeath• 5 years ago

My wild guess would be that they hold all data erasure encoded and run regular scrubs. So that any blocks with bit flips would be caught and corrected.

wtallis10• 5 years ago

I know some drives do regular scrubs, but I don't think it's all that common. Mostly they monitor error rates when fulfilling read requests from the host, and use that to decide when data needs to be refreshed. If you write enough new data to the drive, eventually wear leveling will mean all of the old data you haven't modified has been moved and thus refreshed as a side effect. So the drive only needs to do background scrubs if it gets a very WORM-like workload but also leaves large portions of the data entirely untouched.

NAND flash data retention is related to how worn-out the flash is, in terms of program/erase cycles. A drive that's at the end of its rated write endurance is still expected to be able to retain data for one year (consumer) or three months (enterprise). Flash that isn't significantly worn out has much longer data retention.

pilsetnieks• 5 years ago

So a quick calculation shows that it will take roughly two full weeks for one complete disk write, like what would happen when rebuilding an array.

I guess an even higher level of redundancy will be required at these capacities.

rini17• 5 years ago

Or a filesystem like zfs/btrfs that can heal itself quicker by spreading writes between more drives in exchange for (temporary) free space imbalance.

Not sure if they do actually implement such algorithm already.

tecleandor• 5 years ago

OpenZFS DRAID, that I think it's coming with v2.1, might help with this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179566

882• 5 years ago

I wouldn’t feel comfortable with RAID5/6 even on today’s ~10TB drives.

The solution isn’t more parity disks, it’s to move away from that RAID set up entirely.

gbrown_3• 5 years ago

I wouldn’t feel comfortable with RAID5/6 even on today’s ~10TB drives.

I fully agree with this part. De-clustered RAID really should have been mainstream a long time ago. Thankfully dRAID in OpenZFS will bring this to the "masses" in the sense of it being an open source implementation, whereas this has traditionally been a proprietary feature.

The solution isn’t more parity disks, it’s to move away from that RAID set up entirely.

But I strongly disagree with RAID being the problem. Rather the increasing of capacity with bandwidth not really improving is the issue. Of course this is a inherent limitation of disk drives.

nsgi• 5 years ago

Depends what you use them for. With a high-capacity hard drive you could store a lot of downloaded movies and you can always download them again if it fails

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Yeah, these would be more for data warehousing; keep in mind that at the same time, SSD's are getting much bigger (while being more compact), so SSD's are taking over from hard drives on the 'front lines', while these new big disks can be used for big / slow storage.

api2• 5 years ago

I'd skip RAID altogether with these and use a RAIN approach with multiple lightweight nodes with one drive each.

effie20• 5 years ago

Why? It is cheaper to run redundant disks and power supplies with single mainboard than to run two mainboards.

ChuckMcM• 5 years ago

The more interesting data point is that the "URE" spec. That is "unrecoverable read error". All of these drives do track at a time with full ECC to facilitate reading in the presence of noise, but a track write can have effects on adjacent tracks and temperature can affect head flying height, and vibration can affect head tracking, etc. All of which, statistically, can create a non-recoverable bit error. Typically this spec is like 1 in 10^14 bits.

What it interesting about this spec is that it is statistical, meaning that the more times you read the bits, the more likely you are to hit a URE. HDD manufacturers do all sorts of things to avoid them (re-trys, track mirroring, etc) but ultimately it is a mechanical system and there are a LOT of bits.

When I was at NetApp, the company would get reports of UREs that were fixed by RAID reconstruction (so you read a disk, you get an error and you fix it by the ECC in the other drives). And we had determined that by 4TB it would be "stupid" to using mirroring for protection since if a drive failed you couldn't count on being able to re-silver the mirror by getting a clean read of the other half. (something like 1 in 20 attempts would fail and you'd have data loss). And of course reconstructing a RAID-5 group for a failed drive you need to read the other drives, for larger groups of disks (which people did to maximize data storage) you started becoming at risk of being able to reconstruct all of the stripes. That was the genesis of doing dual parity (which Netapp called 'diagonal parity' because of the design).

The ZFS folks have also considered this and designed both dual and TRIPLE parity which makes sense for these larger drives!

It already takes a long time to reconstruct any "wide" vDev in ZFS that is zraid2. So one wonders if you could solve for device capacity where 'reconstruction takes 3 years' (the depreciated life span of a drive at Google).

NateLawson• 5 years ago

Kirk McKusick took this kind of scale into consideration when designing softupdates for UFS. One of his criticisms of the competing log structured filesystems at the time was that the replay process would require RAM in excess of any server's capacity once disk drives were large enough. He had designed the softupdates recovery process to be incremental and use a fixed amount of RAM that didn't scale with volume size.

This kind of holistic systems' awareness is a sign of software that's designed well.

effie20• 5 years ago

Agreed on 4TB to be a reasonable upper limit for RAID1 if URE rate is 1e-14. However, why would 1 in 20 rebuilds fail? And if it did, why would there be a data loss? The data is OK as long as the remaining disk is alive, you can retry the rebuild.

Dylan1680712• 5 years ago

You did the wrong calculation.

Either you used a very pessimistic estimate for drive speed and forgot to factor in the increase in linear density, or you used a relatively accurate calculation and mixed up megabytes per second with megabits per second.

effie20• 5 years ago

With 200MB/s I'm getting one week as the lower limit for rebuild time. If the drives are used heavily while rebuilding, this can go much longer.

Mandatum• 5 years ago

It took 24 hours for me to validate/check my 16TB disk (I don't know the linux commands, it was a tool /r/DataHoarders suggested). I've upgraded the quality of all my video files and I've still got TB's of space to go..

120TB.. Man, to those in the future laughing at this comment with your 120TB games and your 60TB super-high-definition VR feature length movies.. I'm jealous.

Pelam2• 5 years ago

Will all this be shingled or will that remain optional?

Pelam2• 5 years ago

Hmm.. found this from 2016: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10470/the-evolution-of-hdds-i...

It seems that shingled recording (SMR) could still be the future, although the original article does not seem to mention it?

monocasa2• 5 years ago

It'd almost have to be. None of their improvements in the article are around increasing the resolution of the write heads.

CivBase• 5 years ago

This is all within the 3.5-inch form factor.

Data density is great and all, but this line got me wondering if we wouldn't be supporting more than just the 2.5" and 3.5" form factors. I'm suspect there would be a market for storage devices with twice the volume and 50% or more storage. Or does the 3.5" form factor have something to do with the limitations of spinning rust tech?

boomboomsubban3• 5 years ago

I'm suspect there would be a market for storage devices with twice the volume and 50% or more storage.

With your extreme example, I doubt it. Already you can get two drives of 75% of the capacity for just a bit more money, and that would perform far better than one drive of twice the volume.

sitkack• 5 years ago

I wouldn't look at current drive economics to determine that a slight increase in platter size wouldn't enable more storage at a lower incremental cost.

The current form factors are baked in, how would we know what the free variables are?

pixl97• 5 years ago

I think you're neglecting that the biggest issue in datacenter density is power usage.

timc3• 5 years ago

Changes in form factor/standardisation can have enormous others costs associated. For example shipping, enclosures, re-tooling etc..

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

>does the 3.5" form factor have something to do with the limitations of spinning rust tech?

There are issues. As the platters get bigger they get wobbly, more probe to vibrations. The difference in platter speed between the inner and outer 'rings' of data also increases. There is no hard reason for 3.5 over 4.5 or 4.8 inches, but the advantages of going bigger do not outweigh the practicalities of trying to push a new form factor for a commodity product.

> spinning rust

This is a common refrain, but seagate and the others are proving that HDD tech is not 'rusting'. With lower per-TB costs, and phenomenal reliability numbers (<1% chance of failure per year) HDDs are going to be around for a while. Outside of the datacenter, most users are more limited by more by network speeds than storage speeds.

johnsoft• 5 years ago

Other issues with larger platters:

- more power usage

- more heat

- more noise

Datacenters in particular are not interested in increasing heat or power usage. 5.25" hard drives used to be common, but were phased out sometime around Y2K.

sennight2• 5 years ago

> spinning rust
This is a common refrain, but seagate and the others are proving that HDD tech is not 'rusting'.

It is a common refrain because disk platters were originally coated with iron oxide, and iron oxide is rust. It isn't a value judgement.

at_a_remove• 5 years ago

I think the "rust" comes not from the fact that the technology is aging, but that we're dealing with metal oxides. Tapes, then, are spooled rust.

tablespoon• 5 years ago

I'm suspect there would be a market for storage devices with twice the volume and 50% or more storage. Or does the 3.5" form factor have something to do with the limitations of spinning rust tech?

There used to be larger form factors for HDs, for instance full-height 5.25 inch (think two DVD drives stacked on top of each other). This Wikipedia page has pictures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_drive_form_factor...

This was apparently a product that took the strategy you described in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot

dehrmann• 5 years ago

There might be issues with Bigfoot-like drives with platter stability at the edges, but I have no idea if this is actually the case. What I do know is you get better performance towards the edge of the platters, and for larger drives, the variability in throughput might be a downside for some buyers. Seeks times are also slower.

There was a variant of the WD Raptor that took the opposite approach: it put a 2.5" 10k RPM drive in a 3.5" enclosure, but this drive played the role SSDs do today; they weren't for mass storage.

notacoward18• 5 years ago

storage devices with twice the volume and 50% or more storage

More the opposite, really - same capacity in lower volume. The people who buy most disks are a lot less concerned with capacity per disk than capacity per rack. Sometimes capacity per kW or capacity per BTU, but mostly capacity per m^3 in my direct experience. I also suspect that a lot of consumers would prefer the same capacity in a smaller package, since they mostly boot off flash and their disk is basically a cache for much larger amounts of data elsewhere.

savant_penguin• 5 years ago

I'm always amazed by how hard drives manage to survive by becoming so much cheaper in spite of the much slower speeds compared to ssd's

ChrisRR• 5 years ago

Everything has its place. It's going to be a long time before we see SSDs become as cheap per TB as HDDs

Synaesthesia• 5 years ago

They've kind of stayed the same price for a long time, but capacities have evolved somewhat. SSDs have steadily decreased in price in the meantime.

someperson• 5 years ago

It all comes down to dollars per terabyte.

Also some workloads perform poorly on SSDs (due to their limited read/write cycles). But mostly dollars per terabyte.

speeder• 5 years ago

When you compare for price, they are not that slower.

I have 3 1TB WD Blacks that reach 300 mb/s, when I was shopping for my drives, similar SSDs were either crazy expensive (10 times are much for example) or they were tiny, or the ones with "use-able" size and reasonable price, were SLOWER than the WD Blacks in sequential writes and reads (they were still faster in random access, for obvious physics reasons).

To be honest I am perfectly happy with my WD Blacks and never felt the need to switch to SSD, usually my speed bottlenecks are somewhere else (often network speed! it is surprinsingly hard to find good network hardware, all I find is random cables, adapters and routers, that shops don't even know what their speed limits are, asking if a cable supports gigabit ethernet just get me confused looks)

EDIT: This post score is fluctuating, suggesting to me people are sometimes downvoting it. I wonder why... I mean, I posted some anedacta, but why the downvote? There is not even anything to disagree with on my post, unless I wrote something very wrong, but nobody replied to say what is wrong...

sbierwagen2• 5 years ago

Were you looking at the ratings on SATA SSDs?

The WD SN850 NVMe flash drive does 7000mb/s reads. (Close to maxing out a PCIe 4.0 4x slot) That's 23 times faster than the hard drive speed you quoted. SATA SSDs have been obsolete for a decade now.

Edit: Just checked some prices on Newegg. Looks like the XPG GAMMIX S50 goes for $139, and does 3900 MB/s reads, while SAMSUNG 860 Pro does 560 MB/s reads... and costs $179.

It is unfortunate that the invisible hand does not seem to care about drive speeds. Absent price signals, online retailers do not do a terribly good job signposting the enormous gulf in performance between SATA and PCIe. Newegg lists 999+ 2.5" SATA SSDs, and there is no reason at all to buy any of them when building a new computer.

iamsmooney• 5 years ago

Where is there a performance benefit to increasing storage density rather than using multiple drives to increase storage? A few comments here mention the time it'll take to rebuild an array and that feels like a blocking issue, at least for me.

I suppose as things like 8k video editing come up and file sizes explode there will be use cases for this kind of density, but without read/write and throughput increasing it seems like it won't be super useful for a little bit.

kijin• 5 years ago

Throughput tends to increase with storage density, because more data is stored in the same length of physical track.

Consumer-grade HDDs barely managed 100MB/s 10 years ago. Now they can often do 200MB/s, and enterprise disks are even faster. With these much larger Seagate drives I guess SATA will be the bottleneck, not the drive's sequential read/write speed.

dragontamer4• 5 years ago

SATA3 is 6Gbps at 8/10b encoding: or 600MBps.

SAS is 12Gbps or 1200MBps (I don't know if it uses 8/10b encoding, but I'll assume that for simplicity)

------------

Hard Drives are no where close to breaking the SATA3 barrier, let alone the enterprise SAS 12Gbit barrier.

deelowe• 5 years ago

I'd like to see a graph of density versus iops over time. It definitely feels like the gap has been widening for quite some time just based on how long my ZFS arrays take to do a scrub.

To answer the OP's question, it seems to me that after around 12TB or so, it makes more sense to move away from implementations that require rebuilds such as raid 1, no raid, or jbod solutions.

effie20• 5 years ago

Using multiple drives is costly, it is much cheaper to consolidate if possible.

Rebuild time per TB will actually slightly improve because of better throughput due to higher density and higher number of disks inside the drive, so the recovery time for small arrays will actually get better.

True, rebuild time for a whole drive will get very long which is not great, but if the array is designed with good enough redundancy, this won't be a problem, less alone a blocking issue. The very point of RAID is that the system is functional even in the state of rebuilding. If enough drives are used, it does not matter that the rebuild takes 1 month.

notacoward18• 5 years ago

In a large enough system, over a long enough time, even rare failure modes become inevitable. I was hearing about RAID-6 insufficiency at national labs ten years ago. Rebuild times were already long enough that, sooner or later, a second and then third failure would hit the same RAID group during the first rebuild. Data go poof. Since then, I've worked on even larger storage systems and seen overlapping failures cause data loss with even higher levels of redundancy. Throughout, I've seen the performance degradation from overlapping long rebuilds cause system-wide performance to drop below acceptable levels.

Higher areal density won't improve rebuild times unless internal transfer time is the bottleneck (it's not), and it very much does matter if rebuilds take a month. If that additional capacity isn't accompanied by proportional amounts of external-interface bandwidth and CPU/memory somewhere, then bigger disks will mean more risk of data loss. The math is unforgiving.

Twirrim• 5 years ago

Data Density is the biggest single driving need for storage when you get towards datacentre / cloud environments. You want as many TB per rack as you can possibly get, because your dominant cost over time is not the initial upfront capital + depreciation, it's the per-rack running costs.

S3, BackBlaze etc. all focus on cramming as many hard disks in to a single machine as they can do, without running in to other bottlenecks on the machine level (CPU, memory, NIC bandwidth, controller etc).

You very much want to get out of the RAID business in those environments too. Backblaze mention their use of Reed-Solomon which is fairly common on large scale storage, and moves you much closer to resiliency on an individual object basis, rather than thinking in terms of the entire drive.

tibbydudeza• 5 years ago

We need new file storage concepts , imagine rebuilding a RAID system with one of these monsters.

vmception• 5 years ago

we have NVMe, it supersedes this technology and can catch up

effie20• 5 years ago

More read/write heads (not necessarily more actuators). Maybe dozen heads suspended from a radially movable bridge above the platter so they can read and write simultaneously on different tracks.

ancarda• 5 years ago

How reliable are they going to be? I have heard RAM isn't as reliable as it used to be due to the ridiculous densities we've gotten them to. Same for HDDs.

At what point do we stop because reliability has gotten unacceptably low?

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

Depends on how you define reliability. Drive failures? Bad sectors? Incorrect data read?

cyberlab• 5 years ago

Does anyone have a use-case for a 120TB drive for casual personal computing? I know we are in the age where 4K video is the new normal now, so I can see the use-case for massive .MP4 binary blobs sitting in these drives. But what other use-cases besides hi-def video are there? Also: if it is backups I would love to know what you're backing up! I try to keep my critical files down to 10GB so I can mirror it multiple times in many locations, but 120TB is whole new levels of strange.

brundolf• 5 years ago

Games have started exploding in size now that basically everything is downloaded (meaning there's no hard upper limit). In a particularly comical example, the last two Call of Duty games won't both fit on the PS4's 500GB hard drive at the same time, by themselves. [1]

120TB may still be more than you need for now, but 1-2TB in a gaming PC is now "cozy".

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/22302057/call-of-duty-war...

quelsolaar• 5 years ago

I have saved on hard drive, pretty much all linear media I have watched the last 15 years (recorded TV). It takes up ~25Terra. Most of it is in SD, some of it is in HD, pretty much nothing is in 4K. With a 1Gbit connection I'm not bandwidth bound, I'm storage bound. 120TB for a single drive is a lot, but I could see myself being in striking range of using that.

rudyfink• 5 years ago

I hear you, but my experience is that increases in capacity (be it storage, processing, network, etc.) bring new possibility, new technology, and new use cases.

Here are some off-the-cuff possibilities:

"Photos" that are interactive "spaces" composed of combinations of many high-resolution images and (LI/RAY)DAR point clouds.

"Videos" that are the same or far beyond 8k

Individuals using constant-capture systems to archive their day-to-day, providing the ability to "never forget." This could be supplemented with local capture and storage of extensive biometric data for personal-health analysis.

Amazing graphics / texture sets to locally provide standard libraries for very high resolution AR / VR experiences.

Local archives of reference and web content so that it can be browsed privately to ensure privacy.

A general push-back against cloud storage in favor of local privacy. This might be powered by some federated system that allows individuals to give up some local storage in exchange for storage on other's systems.

joshocar• 5 years ago

I don't see much need for the personal computing. I know with my work, we regularly produce >30TB of high def video that we then need to sneakernet to our on shore storage and give out to clients. Not having to split the data between drives would really help.

blihp• 5 years ago

Photos keep getting larger (raw, higher resolution, capturing additional information such as depth etc), videos keep getting higher resolution at 4k+ with higher bitrates, you can currently easily fill up a 1TB+ drive with video game assets and so on.

If you do any 3D work (engineering or artistic), the assets for these projects can be huge. If you're doing ML work training sets are massive. If you do more conventional development/content creation, software and assets needed keep getting larger with a never ending list of things to pull down from github etc. If you're just working with data/databases, the amount your working with never seems to get smaller and if it's time-based there's always more history to deal with as the years tick by.

Even if one does everything in 'the cloud', all you're doing is shifting the location of the storage needed rather than the quantity. So it's pretty much the same old story of 'more' when it comes to how much storage is needed.

retrac• 5 years ago

While it's not really "casual personal" computing, if you're dealing with video streams for archive, you can run into that much data pretty easily. A dozen HD security camera streams will eat up like 200 GB a day at high quality.

novok• 5 years ago

full image backups that rotate out of multiple machines and phones would be an ideal usecase

asymptosis• 5 years ago

The size of data which "must" be stored always increases to fill the storage space available.

At the moment, I'm content with 14T drives for personal use, which is about 4x bigger than what I was using just a few years ago.

But if I had 120T, I would just start hoarding every bit of data I could get my hands on. I'm not quite https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ level yet, but I could totally see myself heading in that direction.

And at $DAYJOB we need to store data in the order of magnitude of a petabyte. This also seemed huge just a few years ago, but now feels restrictive. 30x 120T drives to shove into a rack in the data centre would totally be considered if it were possible.

I remember in the 90s I heard someone ask how you could ever fill a 1GB hard drive ...

trollied• 5 years ago

One thing I've always wondered, and somebody on here must know the answer :) When a HDD is manufactured, how are the disk platters initially seeded? Are they just liberally splattered with material & the tracks are created on first write, or are the tracks pre-created? If so, is it a stamping method, akin to making a vinyl record or CD?

matesi• 5 years ago

The servo signals are written using special equipment (a precise head/servo mechanism, not the regular HDD heads).

You can see them in this magnetic image - the whole 25% to 75% of the image is the servo signal area. The tracks are seen on the bottom 20%, top 80%:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aufnahme_einzelner_M...

Bottom to top:

  - sync (the regular lines)
  - positional track number, gray encoding (irregular lines)
  - track fine tune (the block trio)
  - fine track ID

After fine track ID is read correctly, the position is deemed correct, the RX head is turned off, and the TX head is turned on. This is the rx-tx gap. Then track data starts.

effie20• 5 years ago

Wow, thanks for this. It seems insanely complicated. Why not just use single fat track that announces the ID number of the corresponding data track?

BeetleB2• 5 years ago

I've had way too many disk failures with Seagate. I won't buy from them ever again. A number of PC building forums have it as a sticky: Don't rely on Seagate.

wing-_-nuts3• 5 years ago

Your recommendation then? WD? What?

BeetleB2• 5 years ago

It changes as the years go by, but for the last decade I've not had problems with WD.

Of course, a failure once in a while is expected. With Seagate I had a string of failures over a few years. I tend to think that randomness was not alone in explaining it (or I was really unlucky).

effie20• 5 years ago

Enterprise Seagates >4TB are fine now. Most problems in the past were with 3 and 4TB models. They seem to have fixed the problem and new bigger drives seem OK.

ww5202• 5 years ago

It's amazing that the storage capacity has advanced so much. It's been largely keeping up the Moore's Law. Putting a dozen of these in an array and we're in petabyte territory. Wonder whether the 64-bit file systems are coming up a cliff in 10 years?

Sohcahtoa823• 5 years ago

2^64 is ~1.84e19.

2^64 bytes would be 16 exibytes, or about 18,446,744 terabytes.

I'm not even sure YouTube has that much data.

ww5202• 5 years ago

Ha. It's fun to throw these estimates around. While 16EB is a lot, let's see where a back of envelope estimate gets us. Assume that storage mostly follows Moore's law of doubling capacity in every 18 months. That is 2^6.667=97 in 10 years; let's say about 100X capacity in 10 years.

So in 10 years we will have 100x120TB = 12PB per disk. Put 8 of these disks in a 2-U unit and we'll have a 100PB box. Stack 10 of these units together in a rack and we'll get an 1EB storage rack.

Remember some file systems use couple bits off the 64-bit addressing space for other purposes. Shaving 4 bits off and we get 1.15EB. That's within the 10-year storage capacity estimate.

While present day Youtude might not have that much data, I'm sure when the 16K, 32K, and 64K videos come along the space will be filled up. Let's not forget the voluminous 3-D Lidar scan data generated by every iPhone when people start recording 3-D VR-Holodeck from their phones. Besides wouldn't it be cool to host an entire copy of the Youtude in your closet? ;)

Hypx• 5 years ago

Youtube has been estimated to have an amount of data in the exabyte range: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-size-storage-capacit...

This was a few years ago, so it might be possible that Youtube has more data than what can be addressed with a 64-bit value.

Seagate's Roadmap: The Path to 120 TB Hard Drives

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