10TB drives are here..

MrGuvernment

MrGuvernment

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And will cost a small fortune

http://arstechnica.com/information-...hard-drive-seagate-twiddles-shingled-fingers/

HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
WD subsidiary outs world's largest normal PMR drive. Seagate eagerly awaits HAMR.

seagate-smr-vs-conventional-hard-drive-writing-300x212.jpg


Western Digital's HGST division has released the world's first helium-filled 10TB hard drive for everyday use—assuming you have about £600 burning a hole in your pocket, anyway. Meanwhile, despite reiterating that it would have a 10TB drive on the market this year, Seagate hasn't yet moved past the 8TB mark.

The Ultrastar He10 is notable for two reasons: it's hermetically sealed and filled with helium, which is still a rather novel idea; and it has seven platters crammed into a standard-height 25.4mm (1-inch) hard drive.


Enlarge / PMR vs. SMR. With SMR, there's almost no guard space between tracks, which increases density but can reduce write speed (if you want to rewrite a track in the middle, you may also have to rewrite the adjacent tracks as well).
Seagate
The platters themselves are impressive, too: instead of using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to boost areal density, these platters use conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). PMR has been the standard hard drive recording tech since 2005, when it replaced longitudinal recording. The move to PMR has increased the maximum platter density by an order of magnitude—from about 100Gb per square inch to 1000Gb—but now, alas, we're beginning to hit the limits of PMR.

SMR has emerged as one possible way of increasing hard drive storage density, but the way it works—by overlapping magnetic tracks, like roofing shingles—makes it better suited to archival or nearline use, rather than 24/7 online use.

Beyond PMR, the next recording technology to be commercialised will probably be HAMR: heat-assisted magnetic recording. Both Seagate and HGST are working on HAMR tech, which uses a laser to heat up a small region of the hard drive that's being written. The heat causes the magnetic grains to lose their superparamagnetic effect for a short period, allowing for smaller magnetic grains and higher areal density. Superparamagnetism is an annoying trait of magnetic nanoparticles where they randomly flip direction—a problem when, for example, this results in your binary zeroes randomly becoming binary ones.


Enlarge / A diagram showing the basis of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
HGST
Earlier this year, Seagate released an 8TB drive with SMR, and HGST released a 10TB SMR drive. Today's Ultrastar He10 is the first 10TB drive with PMR. Seagate hasn't yet managed to squeeze seven platters into a 3.5-inch hard drive, which appears to be why Seagate is lagging behind HGST in the capacity race. There are a few reasons why Seagate hasn't hit seven platters yet, but HGST's use of helium, which offers significantly less air resistance to the spinning platters, is probably the main one.

Both HGST and Seagate are working on HAMR drives, though Seagate has been more vocal about it, saying that it could have some HAMR drives on the market in 2016. HGST, with shingled recording and seven platters at its disposal, should have no problem hitting 15 or 20TB over the next year—but its path towards larger online drives, using PMR or HAMR, is unclear.
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I can see them moving to a larger physical drive soon if SSD can't meet the density demands or creating specialized disc containers for OEMs outside of the 3.5 specification.
 
Trimlock said:
I can see them moving to a larger physical drive soon if SSD can't meet the density demands or creating specialized disc containers for OEMs outside of the 3.5 specification.
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I may be misunderstanding what you're referring to, but the advent of stacked NAND is allowing SSDs to multiply their density rather quickly. 16TB 2.5" SSDs will be hitting the enterprise market next year. See: Samsung PM1633a.
 
the issue you run into with larger platters is more vibrations. I thin passing 3.5in will cause serious speed issues because they will have to lower RPMs to counter act the increase size if they want to maintain density.
 
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SomeGuy133 said:
the issue you run into with larger platters is more vibrations. I thin passing 3.5in will cause serious speed issues because they will have to lower RPMs to counter act the increase size if they want to maintain density.
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You mean like those 5.25 Quantum Bigfoot drives back in the 90s? We replaced those things so often it was insane. I always assumed the issue was the physics of larger platter spinning at the same speeds made it harder to make reliable
 
I always assumed the issue was the physics of larger platter spinning at the same speeds made it harder to make reliable
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I thought those spun at a slower speed than 3.5 Inch drives.
 
zaniix said:
You mean like those 5.25 Quantum Bigfoot drives back in the 90s? We replaced those things so often it was insane. I always assumed the issue was the physics of larger platter spinning at the same speeds made it harder to make reliable
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Ha-ha, I remember getting more than a few calls from companies back in the day with these crashers. I would strap fans directly to them to cool them down which allowed me to back then up because they got so DAMN HOT they'd crash.
 
drescherjm said:
Didn't those spin at 5400 RPM instead of 7200 RPM?
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Yes, but most desktop drives spun at 5400rpm at least back then they did. 7200RPM was a high performance drive and 10ks were unheard of in a desktop until like 2004.

They were trying to increase capacity at a lower cost by having less platters, but it failed because the drives broke all the time and as you can see it was never adopted by anyone else and faded into history as mistake.

I am not saying it can't be done, but my guess is that it is very hard to stabilize the larger platters
 
zaniix said:
Yes, but most desktop drives spun at 5400rpm at least back then they did. 7200RPM was a high performance drive and 10ks were unheard of in a desktop until like 2004.

They were trying to increase capacity at a lower cost by having less platters, but it failed because the drives broke all the time and as you can see it was never adopted by anyone else and faded into history as mistake.

I am not saying it can't be done, but my guess is that it is very hard to stabilize the larger platters
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IIRC i had 7200 RPM drives back in 2000 or so and it wasn't uncommon

yea i even got a bunch of 7200 rpm IDEs. I think your thinking of the mid 90s

SCSI 15K fujitsu were fairly common early mid 2000. capacity was shit but around and expensive but easily obtained
 
wow 12 posts and not a single "that's a lot of data to lose" post???
 
As a regular user that finds a 1Tb drive more than enough to store my games and such all I can say is Wow! :eek:
 
Brahmzy said:
"that's a lot of data to lose"
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well done :)

and as 4k becomes more prevalent these drives will be a welcome addition when you are talking about 16GB+/hr
 
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