

10-60TB hard drives coming to tablets, notebooks, desktops by 2016 - ValentineC
http://vr-zone.com/articles/cloud-computing-10-60tb-hard-drives-coming-to-tablets-notebooks-desktops-by-2016/15981.html

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wazoox
It's funny how everybody's reading this backwards. It's a press release, guys,
take it with a grain of salt. "Look, 1184305% increase! wow!". If you take 30
seconds to put drives capacities in a spreadsheet, you can't miss this
actually announces a _huge drop_ in the speed of HDD size increase.

From 1990 to 2005, HDD size (and density) roughly quadrupled in 3 years. From
2005 to 2012, drive size grew by a mere factor of 2.66 every 3 years. And they
dare triumphally announce that in the future, the multiplication factor will
drop to 1,66 every three years, _that's_ a hell of an improvement indeed.

For those who'd point out that this is a report about platter density and not
drive capacity, I'd say that 3.5" HDD have had at most 5 platters for twenty
years, so platter density always reflect quite exactly maximum available drive
capacity anyway.

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reitzensteinm
Who exactly is reading this backwards? That's a bit of a straw man.

I think you're jumping the gun a bit ruling that storage capacity is already
slowing down; I tend to agree it's just around the corner, but this chart
definitely does not indicate a conclusive trend in already released drives:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Har...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg/700px-
Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg.png)

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wazoox
I'm counting only the highest available capacity drives in 3.5" format. If you
mix various physical sizes it changes the overall tendency quite a bit. Until
around 1999 (availability of 50GB 3.5" drives) the biggest available drives
were 5.25" (up to 43 GB). 5.25" drives were also much more common than 3.5"
drives during all of the 80s. That's why I'm counting starting in 1990, which
flattens the curves.

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serverascode
Hard drive sizes seem to be mostly driven by consumer devices which are mostly
moving to smaller SSD. Not saying 60TB drives won't happen, just not sure
there is actually going to be a consumer market for them.

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nevster
I think the article writer is getting confused with the units. Besides making
a typo at one point, using Gpbs, they use the abbreviation tB - lowercase t.
Possibly in the original report, it was Tb - ie Terabit - ie 60Tb = 7.5TB
which sounds more likely.

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reitzensteinm
It doesn't explain why a 2.5x jump in areal density, by their own figures,
will magically yield a 15x increase in drive capacity. What a useless article.

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wazoox
It's because iSuppli study absolutely doesn't say they'll reach 10 TB by 2016,
but that 60 TB on a 3.5" is the absolute maximum attainable through the HAMR
technology, in some unstated (but quite far away) future.

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Jabbles
I think that in 2016 you will not be able to buy a tablet or notebook with a
HDD, everything having been replaced by SSD.

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reitzensteinm
Tablet definitely, but I suspect SSD + traditional HDD will be reasonably
common, though in decline by 2016 (using the space freed up by removing the
DVD drive).

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Kilimanjaro
By 2016 not a single tablet or notebook will have a hard drive.

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forgotAgain
There is no mention of the cost per MB. There is however a statement that the
process is patented by Seagate which has me thinking the price per unit of
storage will be high. Hopefully, assuming the claims made are accurate,
Seagate will license the technology at a reasonable cost.

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sparknlaunch12
Will we need massive physical storage devices now cloud storage is becoming
more accessible for all?

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tomp
I'm guessing that most HDD space is used for music & video. If the anti-piracy
campaigns continue (censorship, TPB blocking, MegaUpload), I expect most
piracy to move "offline", to HDDs.

10 TB would be excellent, I would'n need to pick which of my favourite movies
I want to save...

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stan_rogers
And take the case of a photographer who, with current equipment, can easily
create 100-200GB of content _per shooting day_. (I'm thinking specifically of
a wedding or event photog using a Nikon D800, Canon 5D Mk III, or similar
class of camera. Besides the raw image files, there are the catalogs,
processed/developed/retouched images, resized images for common print and
display formats, album layout pages, and whatever else may be needed to
provide the service offered.)

