
Seagate will bring a 16TB hard drive to market within 18 months - doener
http://www.techspot.com/news/67928-seagate-bring-16tb-hard-drive-market-within-18.html
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IgorPartola
Random: I had a professor in college who had a bunch of industry experience.
He said once that working on computer equipment was really annoying because of
Moore's law. You bust your ass for a year-year and a half, make the computer
literally twice as fast, and in the end the execs just sort of say "well of
course you did. Moore's law said you would." Not sure if true but definitely a
little funny.

~~~
13of40
The corollary to that is that in (a lot of) software your application's
performance can plummet over time and nobody notices, because it appears to be
holding steady. "But AcmePro Enterprise Plus is faster than it's ever been,"
you counter. Try running it on a 486DX4 with 32 megs of RAM like you did with
version one. We'll wait.

~~~
gpderetta
AKA Gate's Law

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discodave
* Gates' law

~~~
chimeracoder
> * Gates' law

Actually, it's Gates's law. The "s'" construct is for plural possessives (e.g.
"the three organizers' books")

In most style guides, when the name ends in "s", you still use an extra "'s"
\- the _exception_ is for names in antiquity, when you don't (e.g. "Achilles'
Heel").

Though this is becoming less prevalent on the Internet.

~~~
CardenB
I was under the impression that both "s'" and "s's" were correct in this
context with the caveat that "s'" could also be used for plural possessives.

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oblio
I'm kind of hoping that SSD capacities go up or prices go down. Especially for
laptops, in 2017 it feels like the baseline for the storage capacity should be
1TB. Yet here we are, struggling with 256GB, like desktops from 2007.

And don't get me started on RAM, where 8gb should be the norm even for cheap
laptops...

~~~
mrmondo
They've dropped enough that it's cheaper for us to purchase all 1TB SSDs to
replace our 650GB 15K SAS disks in our SANs, after two years our drive failure
rate has dropped by nearly 900% with a 5-40x performance gain depending on
what you're measuring and the drives are about half the price of what the 15k
SAS drives cost, to top it off our SANs used to run so hot you could barely
touch the rear or the servers and now they're dead cold 24x7.

~~~
ddito
How does something drop 900%? Did you mean it's not at 1/9 of what it used to
be?

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dest
I think the poster meant -90%, so 1/10

~~~
mrmondo
I'm sorry and thank you, yes I did!

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velodrome
Too bad the $/TB isn't dropping as much as before. $30-40 / TB seems to be the
floor...

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/10/kryders_law_of_ever_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/10/kryders_law_of_ever_cheaper_storage_disproven/)

~~~
js2
I paid $1000 for my first HD. It was 40 MB.

~~~
DougWebb
About 15 years ago, the company I worked for paid $1,000,000 for a 1TB disk
array. Today I have several times that capacity laying around my apartment; I
haven't even bothered to hook some of it up.

~~~
evgen
As someone who installed a lot of NetApp filers back in the day that had 1T of
storage each I would also point out that it took up the whole rack :) Yeah,
back when the move from 9G to 18G drives in the array was a big deal...

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fencepost
These helium-filled drives always make me twitchy and worried. I know they've
come up with new seals to keep the second-smallest atom from leaking out, but
I'd really like to know what the lifespan of these drives will really be.

That said, in the datacenter environments where they're pushing these
hopefully the drives will be better monitored and replaced regularly as
opposed to the consumer and small business market where there are still people
who will give up their XP when you pry it from their cold virus-infested
15-year old HDs.

~~~
effie
Fun fact: the helium atom is actually much smaller than the hydrogen atom. See
[https://www.webelements.com/helium/atom_sizes.html](https://www.webelements.com/helium/atom_sizes.html)

~~~
fencepost
Not clear where that's coming from, that site lists the bond length for HeHe
as 300pm but for HH it's around 75 which would make Hydrogen ~1/4 the size of
helium.

On the scale of individual atoms I don't remember enough about my chemistry
and physics courses to recall whether there's supposed to be much physical
difference between the "size" of the region where the first 2 electrons are
between different atoms, nor do I know if that's being conceptualized as
orbits, shells, abstract concepts of energy levels of something even weirder
these days.

~~~
effie
I think the helium in the harddrive consists mostly of single independently
moving atoms, not molecules of two. Those have very small binding energy, much
smaller compared to kT.

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Jedd
It's not an original thought, but for my home / office environments (ie. non-
data center) where most machines have at least one 5.25" bay, I'd be really
happy with a larger, slower, higher density, disk.

I appreciate most vendors are selling to the commercial market which eschews
this old format, but it's _still_ hard to buy a tower case that doesn't
include at least one 5.25 inch bay that never gets populated.

(Nota bene - I'm referring to half-height 5.25". I've long since dumped my
impressive stash of 2GB full-height 5.25" SCSI disks.)

~~~
aexaey
Biggest problem with large spindle is that noise and heat dissipation (both
mostly due to air friction) are roughly proportional to the square of linear
speed of the outer part of the platter, and bigger the platter, more linear
speed you'll get at the same angular speed. On the other hand, you want to
crank up angular speed to get any decent random IO operation/second value.

Last 5.25" HDD I've seen was Quantum Bigfoot CY [1], (which happened to be
half-height FWIW), and this thing was pretty noisy even at 3,600 RPM. Dividing
this by 60 (seconds in one minute) gives you theoretical maximum of only 60
random IOPS. Not exactly stellar, and as far as I remember, that was
substantially lower in practice.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot)

~~~
SoapSeller
I can imagine a 5.25" drive populated with a couple(3-5) sets of ~1.8"
platters, you could also have internal raid speeding things up and protecting
from single set failures.

~~~
givinguflac
Why would you ever do that vs having separate disks you RAID if desired? That
sounds like you'll inevitably end up with at least one failed disk in your
5.25" array, and then what do you do? If you can open it to replace the part,
what is the functional benefit over separate disks to begin with?

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0xcde4c3db
Will this be SMR? That seems like an important variable.

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shmerl
When will prices of SSD catch up to rotational disks?

~~~
al_biglan
caveat: I'm in the storage/file system industry.

Everyone in the industry is looking at this. There is a great graph out there
by one drive manufacturer that overlays $/GB for different HDDs and SSD
technologies. For example, 15K and 10K RPM drives no longer are cost effective
to produce. You are better going with SSDs. 7.2K will be next and some of the
"lower end SSDs" are encroaching on that. 5.4K will likely live a longer time
and if you keep "HDD as archive" you might project these drives to be alive in
the foreseeable future (then factor in SMR, HAMR, then SMR plus HAMR.... and
$/GB gets pretty cheap). After all, if you aren't keeping 100% of your data
"in flight" keeping it at rest on a cheaper medium seems a sane thing. (Tape
backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)

Another interesting back of the envelope to do is look at Fab capacity for
SSDs and compare it against HDD capacity sold. How much Fab capacity has to be
available to serve the total storage demand? If there is a shortage of Fab
plants, then a price premium for SSDs is easier to maintain (and may benefit
some flash manufacturers in the short term to keep the price premium in
place). Looking at the economics of building enough Fab capacity gets
interesting quick.

~~~
mtanski
I've actually been wondering why is not possible to make lower-end desktop SSD
drives of capacity 1TB (or more) that are "better" then spinning drives.

I have a samsung 950 pro NVMe drive in my development workstation and I can't
statute it without a synthetic workload. There are times I need that for work,
most times it's over kill.

For example 1TB SSD drive that can do like 300MB/s sustained transfer with
3000 to 5000 iops. So a speed that's magnitude or magnitude and a half less
then current consumer SSD drives. But still a magnitude faster then spinning
disk. I'm confident that would be more then enough to make most desktop
environment work feel just as snappy as a SSD or within an acceptable
factional difference.

If you could make this at $100 to $120 price point drives. That's like 1/2 the
cost of a low end desktop 1TB SSD drive (like the Toshiba/OCZ) You'd have a
hot seller in peoples gaming rigs, mid-range laptops etc.

Obviously I'm missing something here. Why is not happening? Does producing
lower end flash (slower) not saving you any money?

~~~
rasz_pl
Because 128GB piece of second/third grade flash is ~$20, and those go into
cheaper SD cards/usb drives. $160 in cheap memory alone.

There are manufacturers playing aggressive race to the bottom, they make
drives with neither ram nor even SLC buffer. Mostly JMicron and Silicon Motion
controllers, but more and more companies jump on this opportunity like
Marvell. Im not even talking about garbage bin chinese "vendors" like
kingspec/kingdian/kingrich/ki..you get the picture, I mean SanDisk Z400 or OCZ
TL100, proper manufacturers.

At the end of the day those are pretty much USB pendrives with switched PHY,
you can expect same prices and performance. That also means drastically lower
write endurance, ~20-40TB Total lifespan. ~20GB/day in an age of Windows 10
writing ~1-2GB of logs(you know, so they can upload them to ze cloud, harmless
telemetry ..) alone every single day.

~~~
mtanski
Thanks, that was helpful.

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Keyframe
I just found out today that Seagate bought Dot Hill.

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xfactor973
Wow HDD's really are the new tape drives

~~~
salesguy222
it's a shame that HDDs fail/lose integrity so much more quickly than tape
cartridges used in an equivalent manner :(

but if you put them on a shelf, then the life is roughly the same :D

~~~
Alupis
> but if you put them on a shelf, then the life is roughly the same :D

Careful, that's not always the case.

Anecdotally, I lost a few TB's of data recently after assuming my drives
sitting on the shelf (inside anti-static bags) would be fine after only a
couple of years. Plugging each drive in prompted the Windows popup asking if I
wanted to initialize the drives! Total data loss on all 4 drives after only a
couple of years on the shelf. It wasn't a big loss to me, because I couldn't
even remember what data was on the drives... but I wouldn't rely on this for
business data.

Tapes still have their purpose.

~~~
iamatworknow
Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source
programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still
spins. I recently went through some of my own drives (old backups from many
years ago as well as one 2 TB drive in my NAS that decided it wanted to start
failing). Photorec[0] and ddrescue[1] came in handy. They can take a long time
to run (I did multiple ddrescue passes on my 2TB drive and recovered all but
16 MB, but it took about a week's worth of time), but it may be worth a shot.

[0]
[http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec](http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec)
[1]
[https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/](https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/)

~~~
Alupis
> Are you sure it was a total loss? There are some pretty good open source
> programs you can run and try to recover the data as long as the drive still
> spin

Data recovery will likely work, since they mechanically work and Windows does
see them as drives, just no data (says uninitialized).

My initial thought was it's just the partition table that was corrupted, so
something like TestDisk might easily restore the table and allow me to extract
my data. Otherwise something more serious would be needed... at this point
though, I can't remember what's on the drives, so my effort level is minimal.

My "total loss" statement was more along the lines of using hard disks for
backups. Having a corrupted partition table from the drive sitting on a shelf
isn't a good thing to rely on for backups. If it were business data, it would
have been on tapes instead of disks.

~~~
iamatworknow
Fair enough. The drives I looked at didn't have any particularly pertinent
information on them either, but I actually made a pretty fun weekend out of
learning how to recover data and re-live some of my personal history starting
from around 1999. I felt like some sort of digital archeologist -- reading
e-mails and looking at pictures.

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ue_
I wonder if this will have such high failure rates as other high-capacity hard
drives. It's less cost effective to buy many smaller HDDs, but it's probably
better for long-term data retention.

I wish there were a cheap and easy way to buy magnetic storage and the
associated drive. I have no idea where to start, as I just want to back things
up on tape.

~~~
segmondy
Yeah, that's my concern. I want reliability, super reliable. So reliable that
I can live life recklessly without a backup. Backup does get expensive,
managing, paying, the bandwidth, the restoring.

~~~
nradov
Increased storage reliability doesn't protect you against data corruption due
to software defects or accidental deletion. You still need backups to protect
against those problems.

