Do you know what the largest hard drive in the world is?

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westrock2000

[H]F Junkie
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Saw this page while googling how big an IDE drive can go.....it's unrelated to that search, but it was amusing none the less.

https://www.high-rely.com/spotlight/largest-hard-drive-in-the-world-24tb/

For a number of years now the largest hard drive in the world has been a RAIDPac by High-Rely. The size is currently 30TB (updated 3/2017). For those that challenge calling it a single hard drive given it is made up of three individual 10TB drives, let us point out the SATA connector on the back, which allows it to be plugged into any system that supports large drives (GPT partitions etc) and “appear” as a single drive to the host. RAIDPac inserts into the High-Rely RAIDFrame purpose-built backup appliance. It can also be accessed via USB 3.0 connectors. Power the unit with a standard Molex power connector available on most PC power supplies.

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I added the underline....the sentence was theirs, but the emphasis was needed.

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I think mine might be larger...... its 10mb. In these shots I've removed the heads. The head magnets/actuators stick another 4 inches or so out of the two flat angled sides. I actually have a few of these, pulled them from an early mainframe that was being retired from a bank operations center I worked at in the 80's. I recall being told they were close to 50 grand each when new. The one shot is next to a typical 3.5" drive. These even make the big old double 5.25" drives look small. Each of the four 1.25mb per side platters is about 8.5" in diameter.

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Actually it got me thinking a bit and I spent a few digging online. I think its actually a 30mb model from around 1984. Now I am compelled to dig the other ones out of the garage and better ID one that is still complete and even see if I can determine the power requirements and spin one up for fun. :)
 
Would also wonder if it uses 12V as well (more amps though) or if used something like 24 or 48VDC or even just straight up 110AC.
 
i had some 5" and even and old 8" SCSI drive that would have been from the early 90's in datacenter stuff. they actually had molex connectors and pulled from 5v and 12v rails to run. pretty wild that at one time the HD was the single largest drain on the power supply. those monsters you have were probably mounted in a dedicated cage with a 220v psu but i bet the drives were still 12v themselves.
 
Well - I dug the most complete one I have out. I've not really even seen it in probably close to 15 years. Its been way up on a shelf in the garage. Its not as complete as I had hoped. No circuit boards and nothing that really identifies it other than a generic bar code and a label that says the warranty will be void if opened. As it sits here it weighs in at 21 lbs. and it about 15" x 9.5" x 5.5". Each of the two head modules has a ribbon cable with an 18 pin connector (looks like it would plug right into a modern mobo header), a two little two pin connectors. The motor has a cable with a 9 pin connector (8 wires). Kinda neat - each of the ends of the head modules has a clear cover so you can see inside. I really dont remember much about it. I was working at a bank operations center back in the 80's and I remember a massive mainframe was decommissioned and they had it out back to be picked up for scrap. I asked if I could grab a couple of bits and they said go for it. I want to think it was an IBM but heck it could have been DEC or something else. There definitely much bigger ones around still. This is still physically pretty massive though.

I might still fiddle when I get some time and pull the motor cover and id the windings so I can try and spin it up for fun.

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Yum. 30tb in RAID.

Moldy oldies there. Wonder what the trans rates are on those puppies?

Feel compelled to share my lightning fast 6gb Bigfoot currently running in a retro gaming rig.

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westrock2000 said:
Do you think any of them envisioned that one day they would be able to put pictures of naked ladies on that? I mean they probably literally did stick pictures of naked ladies to it.....but they had no idea what the future to come was.
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I am sure some of them would have agreed that we will hit some sort of scientific limit someday, I doubt ANYONE thought we'd be able to do it that fast.

Granted, given the history storage development, things seems to have slowed down a few notches, it was around a decade ago since I got my first 1TB external Harddrive, but in 10 years we only managed to grow 10x the capacity. Either we are already hitting the capacity limit of MR drives and branching out to other techs, or "the technology isn't there yet".
 
chenw said:
I am sure some of them would have agreed that we will hit some sort of scientific limit someday, I doubt ANYONE thought we'd be able to do it that fast.

Granted, given the history storage development, things seems to have slowed down a few notches, it was around a decade ago since I got my first 1TB external Harddrive, but in 10 years we only managed to grow 10x the capacity. Either we are already hitting the capacity limit of MR drives and branching out to other techs, or "the technology isn't there yet".
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The issue is more likely this. The cost of additional capacity per platter, vs the benefit, vs the speed of data access are such that we would end up having more expensive, slower platter drives with less reliability for greatly increased capacity.

The cost of storage is such that if you want high speed SAS drives you buy around 600gb in size and throw them in a large array.

If you need data density you MIGHT go with 2TB or 4TB drives, but the speed of access at an enterprise level becomes abysmal.

Now if you want to do this for home use then whatever floats your boat. You're not going to have simultaneous reads and writes happening and large cache to manage data write speeds and everything else.

I only recently on my last rebuild went with a 1TB drive. My youngest is into photography at the collegic level and has a 256gb internal drive in his Macbook Pro, but uses a 3tb external for media storage of files they are not actively working with.

So the REAL reason for no increased capacity int he 10x or 100x area... complete lack of demand at the consumer level.

I pay out 10 bucks a month to microsoft for 5 office 365 licenses each with 1 TB of dedicated cloud storage. At this time for me... that's more than enough for the family photo's and videos, as well as all of the documents I create in a non professional capacity.

So I ask you the question... is it technology that's holding us back.. or a market that doesn't care?
 
Well I can't answer that question properly since I still use a lot of platters for my own data (I have a total of about 11TB in spinners in internal drives, then a couple of externals on top of that, and I am looking at getting more in the near future).

I don't use cloud because the information that are small enough to be saved onto cloud are too sensitive to be stored there, and the stuff that are not sensitive are too big to store there, and uploading takes FAR too long.

So I am not the average consumer, hence why the wonder. But I can at least agree that a lot of things we use these days, an average Joe or Jane may not need more, I am more of an outlier.
 
Nothing wrong with being an outlier. I was just getting at why we don't see 100tb harddrives today. considering we have processors at 10nm, optics at INSANE DPI's. And other such fun inventions in micronization.

I think we will see enhanced capacity out of SSD style drives start to surpass what platter can do in a specific form factor soon. (ok we do already with M2 drives. Platters can't get that small.)

A veritable brick of slower speed less heat TLC NAND flash could easily top 10TB in a 3.5 inch form factor. You would spend more on cooling and controlling that much flash than on just the raw storage itself.

But... imagine the data density... 10tb no problem.. 30 tb still no problem.
 
Grimlaking said:
Nothing wrong with being an outlier. I was just getting at why we don't see 100tb harddrives today. considering we have processors at 10nm, optics at INSANE DPI's. And other such fun inventions in micronization.

I think we will see enhanced capacity out of SSD style drives start to surpass what platter can do in a specific form factor soon. (ok we do already with M2 drives. Platters can't get that small.)

A veritable brick of slower speed less heat TLC NAND flash could easily top 10TB in a 3.5 inch form factor. You would spend more on cooling and controlling that much flash than on just the raw storage itself.

But... imagine the data density... 10tb no problem.. 30 tb still no problem.
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Well they are packing 16tb in 2.5 drives already and 32tb in the next 6 months or so.


So in 3.5" I would hope for at least 64tb
 
Holy... yea I just read the article about the 15.2TB SAS connected SSD that Samsung is making for enterprise storage...

I just envision swapping out all of our SAS Platter drives for these..

I would go from what I am at now to over a petabyte and not even change the size of my array physically. That's disgusting. And the speed.. OH GOOD LORD THE SPEED.

My only real issue with that sort of scenario is the limitation of disk subsystems.

Because my array would split these into 5 disk N-1 raid 5 chunks.. I would have 60tb chunks to assign. as in the smallest size I could assign to one Storage pool is 60tb. That is so disgusting and beyond the pale for needs.

From an enterprise standpoint unless I'm just crazy about data density... that screams risk to me. Probably my own mental hurdle I would need to overcome, but... Yea that's harsh.

I'm still trying to picture how we would slice up the physical disks in my head. 5 years from now.. I'm pretty sure platter drives for enterprise storage will be a thing of the past, with SSD hitting these kinds of size's and speeds.. it just doesn't make sense to stick with platter.

The primary concern over this form factor and data density for me is heat. 80+ of these in an array that's being hammered.. that's GOT to have a serious power draw.

And backing it up.. LTO 5 isn't going to cut it.. I need like LTO 10.. or whatever will be 30TB on a tape.
 
We just bought a new san full of the 16tb SSDs 500tb in 4U... Uses 300 watts of power give or take
 
DeChache said:
We just bought a new san full of the 16tb SSDs 500tb in 4U... Uses 300 watts of power give or take
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Not nearly what I would have expected. Are you already utilizing the disks or is that a close to idle power use? Also curious about the heat output. I know my little 1tb NVME can cook itself if I'm not a bit careful and have bad poor air flow.
 
Grimlaking said:
Not nearly what I would have expected. Are you already utilizing the disks or is that a close to idle power use? Also curious about the heat output. I know my little 1tb NVME can cook itself if I'm not a bit careful and have bad poor air flow.
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Heat and airflow really isn't an issue in the data center. I might be wrong on the power usage I'm working off memory on the docs from the vendor.
 
westrock2000 said:
Do you think any of them envisioned that one day they would be able to put pictures of naked ladies on that? I mean they probably literally did stick pictures of naked ladies to it.....but they had no idea what the future to come was.
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not sure they would stick pictures to the machine.... article said you had to rent those units.
 
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