Seagate Works toward Goal of a 20 Terabyte Drive by 2020

Megalith

Megalith

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SSDs may be the trend, but Seagate is moving ahead with their Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, which is on track to deliver 20TB+ drives by 2019, and to continue thereafter with a forecasted 30 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in data density to achieve 40TB or higher by 2023.

The HAMR technology will continue to evolve, and if all goes according to the ASTC roadmap, take us to drive capacities around 50 Terabytes early next decade. At this point we will have to combine HAMR with bit-patterned media. We call this heated dot magnetic recording (HDMR) and the industry consensus is that 100 Terabyte drives will be possible with this technology in the future.
 
I'd rather they work on more reliable drives cause right now I wouldn't touch any of their drives with a 10 foot pole. I might just lose the pole.
 
Seagate Exec: WD made an announcement of MAMR which is a superior technology and ahead of HAMR and cheaper. What should we do?
Seagate Exec #2: Tell everyone our HAMR technology is ready and realiable for a long time.
 
So now when your Seagate drive fails, you can lose 20TB+ of data!
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I say the rule is if you don't have 3 copies of your data you did not really care about it anyways..
 
Eh, Seagate's reliability on their newer drives seem to be improving, but only time will tell...Remember at one point Hitachi had drives that were referred to as "Deathstar" drives. Now they make the best drives in the industry. I'm not entirely convinced Seagate is there yet, but based on reviews they seem better. When they came out with their 3TB drives though those were indeed awful and the reviews reflected it. Mine managed to live for quite some time, but alas I have a dead 3TB Seagate sitting on my desk now.
 
I'm terrified of using Seagate drives as a system builder. I've seen many many Seagate drives fail. In fact I am almost sure that this is by design. Meaning, they are engineered to fail after the 1 year warranty. The more that fail, the more that are sold.

I can't speak to their enterprise level mechanical drives but I sure can speak to all the cheap shit I've seen over the years at the consumer level.

All your cheap Walmart computers, Target, Sam's Club, Costco's .... a majority of them have Seagate drives simply because system manufacturers get them cheaper than any other brand

I literally had a 500GB Seagate fail on me 3 times in one year and kept sending it back. Serial number and date was different each time. Bad batch(s) maybe? Still ........

Many do not know this but Seagate drives sold in the EU have a mandatory 2 year warranty. In fact, all consumer electronics by law must carry a 2 year warranty if sold within the EU. Toasters, Can Openers, etc.

The United States use to have this until lobbyist got this changed. It's only 1 year here in the US and they lobbyist have tried to get this changed on several occasions to a type of manufactures desecration type warranty meaning, whatever they deem the product 'fairly' needs. 90 days, 6 months? They keep arguing that to be competitive and sell cheaper products, the cheaper products on need a 30 day warranty. So far this hasn't happened. Walmart can past the buck because it's another company do this, not them. Anyways.

I'm going to stick with HGST / Hitachi / WD.

Massive solidstate drives cannot get here fast enough.
 
Sircolby45 said:
Eh, Seagate's reliability on their newer drives seem to be improving, but only time will tell...Remember at one point Hitachi had drives that were referred to as "Deathstar" drives. Now they make the best drives in the industry. I'm not entirely convinced Seagate is there yet, but based on reviews they seem better. When they came out with their 3TB drives though those were indeed awful and the reviews reflected it. Mine managed to live for quite some time, but alas I have a dead 3TB Seagate sitting on my desk now.
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IBM Deskstar (Deathstar), then they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi. Not Hitachi's fault.
 
instead of bigger and bigger hdds, i want to see some modular drives where you can easily swap platters and recover in case you get the click of death.

i do not want to lose 20tb of porn in one click
 
Kdawg said:
instead of bigger and bigger hdds, i want to see some modular drives where you can easily swap platters and recover in case you get the click of death.
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That will never happen. Even if it was possible the market would be way too small and thus it would have a crazy price tag like 10 times the cost of a drive without this feature.
 
Kdawg said:
instead of bigger and bigger hdds, i want to see some modular drives where you can easily swap platters and recover in case you get the click of death.

i do not want to lose 20tb of porn in one click
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Drives already are modular. pull one out, pop in another. Back in the day, you had to match the controller to the drive (FM, MFM, RLL?), set the parameters in BIOS, low-level format to create the sectors with the right interleave and mark off bad areas (today's format tools do not perform low-level formatting). Only then could you create a file system and start storing your data.

Making the platters modular would take a whole of of expensive effort for not much gain; you'd have to worry about contamination, alignment, defects, and data consistency. Since drives write data spanning the platters, if you replace only the second platter of a five platter device, how do you restore only every 3rd and 4th 512b-4kB section of a file spread across?

drescherjm said:
I was worried about that when I got my first ~40MB drive. I think it was around $800 US and had a list of bad sectors printed on the outside of the drive..
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Today's drives still have those defects lists, we just don't have to worry about them anymore so they don't print them on the label.
 
Let's hope you have another 20+ TB drive for backup/archive so you can restore what was lost. I like that Seagate is pushing the boundaries of hdd size. I would rather see a speed increase instead of a huge storage increase. Whatever happened to 10,000 rpm hdd's? I use to have a 80 GB Raptor. It was noisey but it was fast. I wish they would work on better 10k rpm speed hdd's and apply them to 8TB drives. Maybe even those enterprise 15K drives. I would pay a little more for speed vs storage and reliability for the consumer sector.
 
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Say what you want about Seagate, we've had far less RMAs with their surveillane drives than WD Purple. That being said, a 20TB drive would be awesome.
 
The whole 'when your drive dies..' argument is irrelevant , these drives will never be used except in raid enviroment , at least basic raid 1 for a home user.
 
Seagate should just pack a spare hard drive in every hard drive box. You know, the first replacement one is free!
 
Ok damnit, we need a HARD One, to chime in. Kyle or Megalith, would you trust your data to a 20TB Seagate??
 
DukenukemX said:
I'd rather they work on more reliable drives cause right now I wouldn't touch any of their drives with a 10 foot pole. I might just lose the pole.
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They can't afford to. Size and value are the only benefits they have over SSD's which will continue to improve themselves. They really have no choice but to try and stay ahead of SSD sizes so their products remain relevant for mass storage.

Anything else and they risk total obsoletion of their entire core product line.
 
Ultima99 said:
They can't afford to. Size and value are the only benefits they have over SSD's which will continue to improve themselves. They really have no choice but to try and stay ahead of SSD sizes so their products remain relevant for mass storage.

Anything else and they risk total obsoletion of their entire core product line.
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Which is why they should buy some memory tech startups now, while they are still relevant to some degree, and attempt to get out of spinning platters of unreliabilty before they can't anymore. Not likely of course, but how long do spinning drives have left (long term)? Of course they are still necessary for some people right now, but that's going to change.
 
J3RK said:
Which is why they should buy some memory tech startups now, while they are still relevant to some degree, and attempt to get out of spinning platters of unreliabilty before they can't anymore. Not likely of course, but how long do spinning drives have left (long term)? Of course they are still necessary for some people right now, but that's going to change.
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I agree, but its very likely that they just Kodak their way into the grave.
 
Meanwhile my SSD enabled PC boots up faster than I can blow my nose in the morning... but yay, storage capacity!
 
sfsuphysics said:
Meanwhile my SSD enabled PC boots up faster than I can blow my nose in the morning... but yay, storage capacity!
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Divisions like s3 care more about capacity than speed. That division alone is worth millions of dollars.
 
I'm curious to see what the actual price tag will be.

As they add more complex mechanism into the HDD, I'd imagine it would drive the cost up.
 
vegeta535 said:
People said the same thing when the first 1gb drive or the first 1tb drive.
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Yeah but idiot average Joe still wont back them up. I'm now getting 4TB HDDs handed to me with 3.5TB of ripped movies on them to recover. Why people tie themselves down with so much data baffles me.

It's mostly junk.

I'd like to see HDDs with multi platter internal RAID1 and independent RW Heads.
 
Ultima99 said:
They can't afford to. Size and value are the only benefits they have over SSD's which will continue to improve themselves. They really have no choice but to try and stay ahead of SSD sizes so their products remain relevant for mass storage.

Anything else and they risk total obsoletion of their entire core product line.
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Yes and no. As SSD push storage limits with die shrinks, TLC and QLC their long term reliability and speed drop perceptiously. It reaches the point where they reach close to parity. Especially on long sequential access.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Yes and no. As SSD push storage limits with die shrinks, TLC and QLC their long term reliability and speed drop perceptiously. It reaches the point where they reach close to parity. Especially on long sequential access.
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But how much farther can magnetic storage go? They're going to hit the wall before too much longer.
 
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