
Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives on their way - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122921-seagate-hits-1-terabit-per-square-inch-60tb-drives-on-their-way
======
aw3c2
Alternatively pass on that hysterical title and go directly to the press
release [http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-
US&name=...](http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=terabit-
milestone-storage-seagate-
pr&vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD)

Main content is: _The maximum capacity of today’s 3.5-inch hard drives is 3
terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per square inch, while 2.5-inch drives
top out at 750 gigabytes (GB), or roughly 500 gigabits per square inch. The
first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will
likely more than double these capacities – to 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB
for 2.5-inch models. The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never
before possible, with a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10
terabits per square inch – 30TB to 60TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB
for 2.5-inch drives._

~~~
reitzensteinm
The maximum capacity of today's 3.5 inch hard drives is 4tb, and has been
since last year. I know it's a press release, but that's bending the truth a
little too far for my taste.

~~~
batiudrami
And I own a 1TB 2.5" external drive.

~~~
lgeek
And I've got a 2.5" 9mm internal one, but I'm fairly sure that they're talking
about density per platter and all 2.5" HDDs larger than 750 GB seem to use two
platters.

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driverdan
Since it requires a pulse from the laser to write does this also mean data
will be more durable and less vulnerable to damage from external
electromagnetic fields?

~~~
DanBC
Have you ever lost data on a hard drive because of external magnetic fields?

For sure, if you get a degausser or other very strong field you will cause
damage. But there are two strong magnets inside the case near the platters, so
I'm not sure what kind of magnetic field is available in common domestic or
office settings that might be harmful.

~~~
mikeash
Magnetic field strength follows an inverse cube law, so an external magnet
would have to be incredibly strong to alter data.

~~~
ars
Magnetic field strength does not follow any specific dropoff law because it's
a dipole.

The dropoff depends on how far apart the ends of the poles are. (i.e. from a
distance the two poles blend together and average to zero), it also depends on
the orientation - are the poles parallel or perpendicular?

~~~
mikeash
True, but for the common case where the distance from the magnet is
substantially greater than the distance between the poles, inverse cube is
plenty good enough as an approximation.

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xbryanx
I really look forward to the day, when, as a general consumer and user of
computers, I can just completely ignore hard drive capacity (cause it's just
always bigger than I need). Even though it won't be, I will just perceive it
as limitless. I'm almost there, but not quite. It's amazing how much useless
busy work limited hard drive capacity generates on an individual and
organizational level. Can't wait to be free of that.

~~~
brianobush
the amount of storage you use and need grows over time, so this may be a hard
dream to achieve. If I look at how much storage I require now compared to just
10 years ago, it is more than quadrupled. I expect that trend to continue.

~~~
caf
Hard drive capacities have increased far more than fourfold in that 10 years,
though.

~~~
brianobush
which is why I have 1.5 TB left on my main storage.

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ck2
Sounds more more suited for write-rarely, read-often data.

Not sure I would trust the wear and tear of an alloy that is constantly heated
and cooled.

60TB of write-rarely cheap storage for backups would be very handy though.

~~~
nknight
Realistically, I think most workloads would end up moving to pure copy-on-
write filesystems. There won't be much rewriting.

~~~
mistercow
A copy-on-write file system still does plenty of rewriting; if it didn't,
you'd run out of space before your harddrive was full.

~~~
nknight
You seem to be in an entirely different universe from the point. Most
workloads would take weeks, months, even years to write out 60TB of data. It
will be unnecessary for the filesystems to garbage collect old data with any
frequency, and you may very well not want them to -- when you have so much
space, why not have an available record of every single I/O transaction back
to the beginning of time?

~~~
wmf
People won't buy drives much bigger than their workload can use. It's possible
that 60TB drives would only be used in massive storage systems, not PCs.

~~~
Groxx
People will, if it comes bundled with their computer.

Nearly every grandparent I've run across has a >100GB hard drive (if not
>500GB). They're all using roughly 20GB of that drive, after a couple _years._

With only very rare exceptions, people don't _choose_ what goes into their
computer. They buy what looks good for a price that they're willing to pay,
for the simple reason that buying a computer is full of more buzz-words,
acronyms, and useless numbers than any other purchase I've ever made. It's
insane, and it gets people to buy more than they need, so the sellers won't
stop doing it.

~~~
roc
> _"People will, if it comes bundled with their computer."_

But what will a computer look like in 10 years?

What I've been noting, from the whole mobile explosion, is that people really
don't care if their computer only has 64GB of storage. Of all the complaints
that people have about tablets and phones replacing 'real' computing, disk
space rarely enters the discussion.

So even if tablets and smartphones _don't_ notably replace traditional PCs,
their effect on consumer perception of the necessity of large disks can't be
ignored.

Sure, it's easy to market 'more gigabytes than your old machine' to a regular
person. But so is "faster boot" and "less waiting".

That's why laptop makers can't seem to ditch spinning disks fast enough.

And what motivation does a PC builder have, to continue bundling increasingly-
capacious hard drives with little markup? Why not bundle increasingly-faster
and increasingly-cheaper SSDs and save the spinning drives for higher-margin
positions as add-ons and external storage?

I'd be incredibly surprised if the market for spinning disks doesn't shrink
over the next 10 years. They'll certainly remain, even for consumers. But
there's no good argument that they'll still be standard.

~~~
Groxx
As far as I've seen, disk space hasn't been in computer-purchasing discussions
at all for a few years now - salespeople just say "more than enough" and leave
it at that. If you know otherwise, you're in a special class of consumers, and
it still matters to you. Plus, if we get 60TB drives tomorrow, we'll have new
ways to fill it within the week, and some people will do so, just as we've
done to this point.

I totally agree that spinning disks are on the way out, except for high-
storage purposes. And then only until flash storage meets / exceeds their
density (solid state has a habit of doing this). And I totally agree that the
HD size means nothing to most people buying computers. But it _does_ drive
sales over smaller numbers, so we'll keep seeing them go up as long as that's
true. Maybe the tipping point is now, but I'm not putting any money on that.

As for 'boots faster / less waiting', it isn't something that's generally
quantifiable because it comes with a wide range of caveats. Even if it were (I
haven't seen any, but I haven't PC shopped for a while), most people I know
are well aware that computers slow down over time. They may not know _why_ ,
but they have seen it happen to _every computer they've ever owned_ \- "It
wasn't this slow when I bought it" is a common complaint. On top of that, the
vast majority of people I know simply don't shut down their computer until an
update forces them to. Computers resume from sleep _very_ quickly - my laptop
is awake and responding by the time I can get my hands on the keyboard to
punch in my password. Cutting that time in half gains nothing, it has reached
the 'fast enough' point that it's not an incentive.

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rplnt
And this was just a few years back...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8> (Get perpendicular! animation by
Hitachi)

~~~
Osiris
I love that video for some reason. When it came out I actually saved the FLV
file from their website because my kids liked to watch it. Great marketing,
IMHO.

EDIT: Here's the original video direct from their website (higher quality):
[https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/P...](https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html)

~~~
cookingrobot
This is cute. And because it's a flash vector animation and not a video, you
can do a neat trick.. Zoom in on the page and it will scale up the animation
smoothly. This clip is perfect quality at any resolution.

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fasteddie31003
In the PC consumer's choice between SSD and traditional HD, I suspect that the
decreasing marginal returns from this increase in storage space, will not
outweigh the benefits of SSDs. However, in the server market this increase
will continue to favor traditional HDs.

~~~
latch
I don't disagree, but to play the devil's advocate..

How soon until Dell, HPs (etc) ship more desktops with SSDs than with
mechanical drives? The average consumer doesn't understand the difference and
doesn't want to pay extra (even though it's probably the best performance/$
upgrade possible).

On the flip side, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw significant adoption for
servers that can live with the space limit (or that can design around it).
Server-based applications are often I/O bound, established solutions are
expensive, and the people responsible know and care.

~~~
baq
they'll use Intel Smart Response or something similar and use a smallish
20-40GB SSD (possibly welded to the mobo) together with a big HDD.

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c1sc0
I'm interested in learning what this will do for I/O speeds, anyone got good
pointers?

~~~
dsr_
IF the disk continues to rotate at the same frequency, then you get an I/O
increase exactly proportionate to the increase in linear (not areal) density.
A new technique which puts twice as many bits per inch of track should read
twice as many bits per second.

Write techniques may or may not need to be adjusted (preheat a track? a
sector? realtime per bit-domain?) but should eventually converge to the same
speed-up as reading.

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Hoff
Seems quite similar to the classic magneto-optical (MO) disk drive technology
that was (at least briefly) popular:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive>

The MO drives use a laser to heat the recording substrate to the Curie
temperature during the recording path, too.

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BrainInAJar
That's a lot of data to lose on one drive

~~~
afterburner
I could have everything I have on one drive, and then a second to back it up.
Sounds like a good thing.

~~~
vidarh
My home system has 3: Two in a RAID mirror and a third that I rsync stuff over
to. Not that I'm paranoid or anything. Then there's my external backup...

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CoughlinJ
I can see the first 50% of the reviews having a prodigious failure rate.

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ChuckMcM
This technology "Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording" (HAMR) is expected to be
supplanted by a new technology to put even more bits into a hard drive
"Krypton-Yittrium Joined-Electron Laser Light Injection" (K-Y JELLI).

(Ok, sorry, couldn't resist)

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guelo
I can't imagine a heating element would be helpful to write times.

~~~
thereallurch
A laser? They are used all day in fiber optics...and they are pretty fast.

Without mention of the power required for the laser it's only speculation.

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angersock
I am going to download _so many linux isos_ with this.

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mrbill
So I can either trust my data to a big stack of transistors and hope they
don't just randomly die, or to a pile of spinning rusty metal discs and hope
that a motor doesn't fail or something scrapes the rust off the platters. :)

~~~
jakeonthemove
Just like everybody's been doing for the past 30 or so years :-)...

