Western Digital: Expect More Energy-Assisted Tech For 24 TB & Beyond

[erek]

24TB on Energy Assisted tech.

"Here is what Siva Sivaram, president of technology and strategy at Western Digital, said at the Wells Fargo Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit earlier this month:

“The 18 TB product that is going out this December will use a variant of the MAMR technology. We are agnostic as to which technology we will have to succeed in the long term. We will introduce the right technology at the right point when it gets to 24 TB and 30 TB. We see a path to get to 50 TB in our hard drive roadmap. As we go to 50 TB, we will introduce the right technology at the point when it actually makes sense.”"

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15229/western-digital-energy-tech-24tb-and-beyond

 

[Private_Ops]

I feel like there's a point were the potential data loss from a failed drive (yes, even in a redundancy setup) out weighs the benefits of having so much storage on a single drive.

Granted.. thats coming from someone who has two 1TBs in Raid 1 and they're not even a quarter full.

 

[erek]

I feel like there's a point were the potential data loss from a failed drive (yes, even in a redundancy setup) out weighs the benefits of having so much storage on a single drive.

Granted.. thats coming from someone who has two 1TBs in Raid 1 and they're not even a quarter full.

i already know that feeling even with the failure of a single 6TB consumer drive from my recent transition to a new build ... not the best for sure

 

[drescherjm]

I feel like there's a point were the potential data loss from a failed drive (yes, even in a redundancy setup) out weighs the benefits of having so much storage on a single drive.

How about a 3 or 4 drive raid 1.

 

[Thunderdolt]

I feel like there's a point were the potential data loss from a failed drive (yes, even in a redundancy setup) out weighs the benefits of having so much storage on a single drive.

This is, without a doubt, a valid concern. As my own datasets have grown over the years, I've run into the same concern.

One thing that help quell my concerns was to take "look at how many bits I might lose" and convert it into "look at how many files I might lose." When I look at it the second way, I actually don't feel as worried. A 24TB drive filled with 1MB photos (circa 1995 I guess) would be heartbreaking to lose. The same 24TB drive filled with today's 100MB photos would would have 1% of the heartbreak.

Ultimately, the two primary drivers for needing larger and larger drives are:

1. We're storing the same types of things we always have, but we're using a whole lot more bits to do it. This is because of higher fidelity, so the memories being saved are sharper memories - but the total number is the same or less.
2. We're storing many new types of data, although they tend to take up far less space than anything else. My random guess would be 1% of the bits that our Old Memories But Better take up. Emotionally, these things are still like 25% though.

The other thing is that there's kind of a limit of how much per drive that people are willing to pay. This effectively means that larger drives make smaller ones less expensive. This, in turn, makes it easier to make use of redundancy to keep everything safe (until a firmware bug kills the whole thing...).

 

[JAB Creations]

Just organize stuff in order of what is taking up the most space by using WinDirStat which is free and only takes about a minute to scan even fairly large drives.