

18TB hard drives made possible using table salt - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/18tb-hard-drives-made-possible-using-table-salt-20111014/

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sjs
Why must SSDs match the capacity of HDDs, but HDDs not have to match the
latency and throughput of SSDs? Is it only because of the price premium SSDs
carry?

I don't really see the 2 technologies in competition at this point. Even if
there were 10 TB SSDs today almost nobody would buy them for personal use
because of the price. Similarly if you need or want a fast disk HDDs aren't in
the running at any capacity. I see the technologies as complementary right
now, and probably for several years out.

If the price of SSDs ever falls to match HDDs then they would be in
competition.

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trebor
Because I can only afford a 120GB SSD and have at least that much on my HDD
already.

Plus reliability is an issue. Any improvement of SSD reliability is a huge
gain for them.

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sjs
Are there actual reports of unreliable SSDs that are not anecdotal? I have yet
to see any evidence that they are worse than HDDs. That doesn't mean it isn't
out there but I haven't seen any "reports" that are more than anecdotal FUD.

In the consumer space HDDs have a pretty poor track record.

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trebor
The "safe" lifespan of an SSD, this is just hear-say so don't criticize that,
is around 1 year. Any more you get is just a bonus. I think I read that on
codinghorror.com...

Anyway, I've got a Mac which probably doesn't support the latest, greatest SSD
features. And my experience with HDDs says an average of 5 years life is
pretty easy to attain. Therefore, for someone who needs cheap space with
decent lifespan the HDD is the obvious answer.

And at 10x the cost for a reliable SSD ... sorry. I may be a programmer but I
do draw the line at expensive stuff (I don't even on an iPad or iPod, my Mac
is almost 2gen old...).

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djackson
> and a greater challenge for SSDs trying to catch up with the amount of
> storage on offer.

This technology is pretty much exclusively for backups, no? Not really the
competitive space for SSDs. With only a single read/write head and 18TB of
information on a drive, you're looking at an enormous performance bottleneck.

~~~
VladRussian
increasing plate density has been the primary driver of the increased stream
performance of the HDDs - with the same rotation speed the more dense plate
results in the more bits to fly under the head. Random IO of course is a
different beast. Though is you look at the data filling the disks - like
movies - it is more about stream not random.

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jjcm
The headline was extremely confusing to me until I realized that the table
salt they were referring to was NaCl, not a randomized bit sequence padded on
to a string before hash.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Your comment confused me as well for a moment as I tried to grasp how Native
Client might help with this.

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drats
My first HDD was 40 meg (in a ~$6000 inflation adjusted computer). For the
same price it's eminently feasible to get a system (computer + a NAS or three)
with 40 TB. If my calculations aren't wrong that's enough for over ~77.6 years
(24/7) worth of compressed audio @ 128 kB/s.

~~~
rdtsc
Of course if you have 40TB you might also want to have uncompressed audio &
also have video.

Every single hard drive I got so far, no matter how big it seemed at the time,
I managed to fill with data. Generated data is like a gas, it will just expand
to fill in the available space.

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onemoreact
For most people that space is taken up by caching other peoples work, AKA
movies, programs, music etc. After I could stream HD content over my internet
connection I feel little need to keep a local copy of most of these so I have
actually started to use less HDD over the two years.

It's still feels odd, I filled up a 750GB HDD then I got a 240 GB SSD and a
2TB HDD and yet I find I am useing less HDD now than before the upgrade.

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gregschlom
I love to be reminded that my all my precious data is stored on little 7nm
magnetic grains...

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wging
As with all hardware predictions, I'll take this one with a grain of salt.

