Seagate Debuts First 16TB Hard Drive

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Seagate claims its has produced and tested "the world"s first formatted and fully functioning 16TB enterprise hard drive platform in a standard 3.5-inch form factor" The new drive uses Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology to achieve that density, but the company says it operates just like a conventional drive. Unlike the Seagate's recent 14TB offering, this technology is aimed squarely at the enterprise market, and there's no telling when it will trickle down to consumer drives.

Check out Seagate's video on HAMR technology here.

HAMR uses a new kind of media magnetic technology on each disk that allows data bits, or grains, to become smaller and more densely packed than ever, while remaining magnetically stable. A small laser diode attached to each recording head heats a tiny spot on the disk, which enables the recording head to flip the magnetic polarity of each very stable bit, enabling data to be written. Seagate’s proprietary execution of HAMR technology will be delivered in the industry’s standard form factor, thus reducing total cost of ownership by getting a lot more terabytes (TB) into the same space as a conventional hard drive.
 
While I know that more and more storage capacity is now the norm and has been for some time, I can't imagine myself ever having this much storage in a single device - guess I'm just weird.

Not only that, but I can't imagine actually filling such a device (to roughly 85% capacity) and then having some mishap and losing all that data in a split second. :eek::oops:o_O
 
Haven't read the article yet, PC not loading link, too lazy to use phone ATM.
Hmm, wonder how many times the area can be heated, maybe more for low use backup storage than everyday usage?
 
While I know that more and more storage capacity is now the norm and has been for some time, I can't imagine myself ever having this much storage in a single device - guess I'm just weird.

Not only that, but I can't imagine actually filling such a device (to roughly 85% capacity) and then having some mishap and losing all that data in a split second. :eek::oops:o_O

I bet you said the same about a 1GB drive back in the day. :D Well, as long as this is a solid Enterprise level drive, I would like it, even though I do not need one. I would not trust Seagate consumer hard drives though, for the most part.
 
That's some crazy tech - 450c and back to room temp in a nanosecond in one spot? I wonder what the temps will be on huge data transfers.
 
I bet you said the same about a 1GB drive back in the day. :D Well, as long as this is a solid Enterprise level drive, I would like it, even though I do not need one. I would not trust Seagate consumer hard drives though, for the most part.

Nah, I'm not into hoarding, never really was over the decades either. I just upgraded to Gigabit Internet service a little over a week ago (because the ISP said "Hey, we can bump you to Gigabit for $10 less each month for 12 months if you're interested...") and honestly I can't think of a damned thing to do with this speed (tested at 940Mbps give or take a bit down and 65Mbps up) or the bandwidth (6TB a month). There's just nothing out there that matters so much to me that I have to acquire it and I don't have - ironically - the storage space to grab it anyway. With all the streaming services nowadays my wife is content being able to watch basically whatever she wants at any given time so there's just no use for that much local storage.

Crazy but true. :D
 
This is the size that will replace my 4tb array, when I can get them for $300 a pop lol. One problem that we're running into is the MTBF not increasing along with sizes, so the chance of failure just keeps going up and up as data densities increase.
 
Wow, now I can lose 16TB's all at one time.....
If I put 10 of these in a raid 5 (144 TB), I wonder how many week it would take to rebuild if one failed....
(of course it will likely never rebuild as the odds of an error during the rebuild would likely be in the 95% range)
 
Wow, now I can lose 16TB's all at one time.....
If I put 10 of these in a raid 5 (144 TB), I wonder how many week it would take to rebuild if one failed....
(of course it will likely never rebuild as the odds of an error during the rebuild would likely be in the 95% range)
I'm scared enough with eight 8tb drives in Raid 6, I wouldn't go anywhere near this with Raid 5.
 
I'll stick to smaller 3 or 4tb raidz2 pools but that deal on the 10tb for 150 the other day worked out pretty awesome as a pool backup.
 
I'll stick to smaller 3 or 4tb raidz2 pools but that deal on the 10tb for 150 the other day worked out pretty awesome as a pool backup.
Link? I've only seen those down to 300 range, at 150 I would have just bought 8 and figured it out later...
 
While seagate is no western digital - their numbers and reliability are better than they used to be. In the old days I wouldn't touch a seagate drive, now? Ehh I'd take one if the price was right and it came in something NAS rated.

The only mechanical disks I buy these days are NAS rated 8TB Red's for my Drobo, outside of that it's solid state or nothing.
 
Eh, I have seagate drives from 1TB enterprise to 10 year old 320G drives with over 60K on them in a really old rig and they are still 100%
There are many factors that come into play with drives so to just discount seagate is dumb.
That said, 16TB is way more then I'll ever need, I run 4TB HGST drives in raid 1 which has been 100% rock solid and still only 50% used.

Truth is unless you have a massive porn collection or are a serious 4k movie collector you won't dent this size as a home user.

As for the drive, if they are using 7 platters that is around 2.3 TB per platter, that is hellish dense.
 
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Eh, I have seagate drives from 1TB enterprise to 10 year old 320G drives with over 60K on them in a really old rig and they are still 100%
There are many factors that come into play with drives so to just discount seagate is dumb.
That said, 16TB is way more then I'll ever need, I run 4TB HGST drives in raid 1 which has been 100% rock solid and still only 50% used.

Truth is unless you have a massive porn collection or are a serious 4k movie collector you won't dent this size as a home user.

As for the drive, if they are using 7 platters that is around 2.3 TB per platter, that is hellish dense.

The Seagate 2 and 3TB drives were absolute garbage. Yeah, I have 2 of the 2TB drives but, I also had to do rma's with them. I have yet to see a 3TB Seagate drive last at all. However, my 2 x 1TB Seagate drives are still going well.
 
I wonder if perpendicular storage, as it gets denser, will suffer a superparamagnetic effect like the longitudinal bit did.
 
While working for Seagate some years ago, I brought up HAMR. We had been discussing it on tech sites for years. I wasn't even involved with HAMR, uet it caused a shitstorm! Corpo-hysteria that exposed how much of management were just college grads with no actual tech affinity or interest.

Also found it interesting that these open secrets we rando internet commentators know about are enough to get employees burned at the stake.


Re drive reliability, of my massive home plex servers it's my western digital and hgst that keep dying on me. My cheap shucked seagates keep running. Plausibly because I don't rely on them for heavier workloads. But still. To pay double$$ for WD red and have one of them fail and take down a whole NAS really sucks.
 
I wonder if perpendicular storage, as it gets denser, will suffer a superparamagnetic effect like the longitudinal bit did.

Hard drives have never been hard reliable since SMR and PMR were introduced. Drives used to just work and last until a major mechanical malfunction. Now they are constantly fighting internal data corruption.

We are really hitting natural limits of silicon and metal for computing. Im hoping HAMR and x265 will be good enough because nothing major is on the horizon. I expect a lengthy tech plateau in our future. Has already begun but I think it will keep getting bv flatter.
 
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i don't care for these huge hard drives. there needs to be an easy way to swap the platters into a working drive when you get the click of death
 
i don't care for these huge hard drives. there needs to be an easy way to swap the platters into a working drive when you get the click of death

The click of death isn't a platter problem, it's pretty much always an issue with the actuator on the stepping motor so, a whole different can of worms in that respect. :)
 
The click of death isn't a platter problem, it's pretty much always an issue with the actuator on the stepping motor so, a whole different can of worms in that respect. :)


that's what I mean. make it so that swapping can be done by the consumer, instead of spending tons of money on data recovery
 
Wow, now I can conveniently lose all my data in one go, instead of having to wait for multiple drives to fail. Thanks, Seagate!
 
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