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And what exactly are people going to use? I can get a used server on eBay with 96 TB of storage, usually in 12 x 8TB configs for around $2000 - $2500. Flash d

And what exactly are people going to use? I can get a used server on eBay with 96 TB of storage, usually in 12 x 8TB configs for around $2000 - $2500. Flash drives? I'll spend 10 times that... hell, probably more. I love having my movies, music, television, etc. on my home server, but I don't love it at the level of 25 large. Now $2500? That's a lot more reasonable.

notacoward 6y ago
Sounds like you have a solution that works with today's medium-sized drives, so how is this even relevant to a discussion of 60-120TB drives? Do you think you'd be well served by putting that 96TB on one drive? I doubt it. If your active set (for any useful or relevant definition of "active") is X and the number of drives you need for IOPS or MB/s is Y, then the ceiling for how much you can effectively use per drive is X/Y. That's quite likely less than current drive capacities, and almost certainly within what can be achieved by current PMR technology. How would HAMR or BPM or any other more fundamentally new disk technology actually help you other than to store cold data on that "spare" capacity?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Yes? I mean, the sequential write speeds are fine for many video-heavy applications. You don’t want it in cold storage. Tape drives are not cheap. And neither is retrieving from tape terribly practical, either. There’s a large overhead for tape storage if you want it automatically accessible (ie a big tape jukebox). A big hard drive can store large volumes of data just a few milliseconds away, not minutes as you have to wind the tape to the right spot in a big tape jukebox... or hours or days if you have to ask someone to retrieve some tapes by hand. And can do hard drive storage for an order of magnitude lower cost than SSD. Spinning disk is still really useful for video. Which is not shrinking any time soon.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    That's a lot of time spent trashing tape, which I never suggested as a solution. The central question remains whether that single huge disk will provide the I/O rates that you need, and it won't. If video sizes increase and frames/second doesn't, then I/O need goes up so you'll need multiple drives even more. That means the sizes we already have, without fundamental shifts in technology, are even more likely to be sufficient. You'll just need more of them. What part of this math is escaping you?
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      No math is escaping me. Video is sequential I/O, which hard drives do fine at. Multiple drives is needed under many workloads, but not video. If you want to do video stuff on a laptop you have room for maybe one extra hard drive. And if you are willing to have an external drive (which isn’t too bad), it’s not going to work to plug several hard drives in and expect to RAID them together. Secondarily, there are only so many drives you can stuff in a workstation. A lot of compact ones only have a couple slots in them, and not everyone wants a RAID or JBOD controller with a bunch of ports on it just to do a video workflow. And if you have a video surveillance small server or appliance, you might only have a few slots in it (4 is fairly common). So again, even one or two hard drives is fine for most uses. Not everyone is gonna put a 24 slot JBOD/RAID chassis in to just provide enough storage space for their video surveillance system or whatever.
      - notacoward 6y ago
        > even one or two hard drives is fine for most uses. The scenario you describe hardly sounds like "most uses" to me.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    "Video" is ambiguous use case. It would be fine for watching video on home server by single person or hoarding video files, but obviously not fine for video editing, video CDN edge, etc.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  You asked, "What market is there for big hard drives outside of FAANG [etc.]?" I answered. The home prosumer market. And if anyone ever bothered to develop a multi-terabyte solution for "normal people", whereby they could easily have their DVD / Blu-ray / Compact Disc collection converted from disc to a media server, probably a lot more people. 100 TB hard drives will end up in consumer PCs by 2035, I'm certain of it, even if we won't really need it. 8K is just plain stupid for home use, I honestly don't know why its being pushed, since you'd need a 120" screen or more, but I'm sure there'll be new media types beyond 4K... 4K60 FPS for instance, or high-resolution VR movies. I could easily see a world where 4K60 FPS movies take up 200 GB space each, and high-res VR movies are that large or even larger.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    > You asked, "What market is there for big hard drives outside of FAANG [etc.]?" No, I didn't. PaulHoule did. > 100 TB hard drives will end up in consumer PCs by 2035, I'm certain of it, even if we won't really need it. I think you're confusing the need for more capacity with the need for more capacity within a single drive. This is the same distinction you'll find in the original RAID papers. With a big single drive ("SLED" in the papers) your performance per megabyte stored and your reliability per megabyte stored keep going down. At some point this will make your system unusable. I contend that we're already on the edge and these newer technologies that only increase capacity will push a lot of people over. Increasing video resolutions only make the problem worse, not better. How many 4K60 streams are you going to get over a single interface? Now consider an alternative: same amount of storage, across multiple drives. In the same physical space, because that higher areal density can be used to make drives physically smaller just as well as it helps make them logically bigger. In a similar power/heat envelope, because smaller also means lighter. But with better performance across more heads and more external interfaces. And with better reliability because with multiple drives you can add some redundancy (and even if you don't at least a single failure will only cost you some of your data). Why would you want a single big disk instead? Complexity? It's not actually that big a deal. Non-specialists build such systems every day. The only thing the drive vendors need to do is use those improvements in areal density to make drives physically smaller instead of logically larger. Stop making the capacity/bandwidth gap bigger. Let people build balanced systems that actually work, instead of on systems with a striking resemblance to those used for "virtual tape" cold storage in the bad old days.

notacoward 6y ago

Sounds like you have a solution that works with today's medium-sized drives, so how is this even relevant to a discussion of 60-120TB drives? Do you think you'd be well served by putting that 96TB on one drive? I doubt it. If your active set (for any useful or relevant definition of "active") is X and the number of drives you need for IOPS or MB/s is Y, then the ceiling for how much you can effectively use per drive is X/Y. That's quite likely less than current drive capacities, and almost certainly within what can be achieved by current PMR technology. How would HAMR or BPM or any other more fundamentally new disk technology actually help you other than to store cold data on that "spare" capacity?

Robotbeat 6y ago
Yes? I mean, the sequential write speeds are fine for many video-heavy applications. You don’t want it in cold storage. Tape drives are not cheap. And neither is retrieving from tape terribly practical, either. There’s a large overhead for tape storage if you want it automatically accessible (ie a big tape jukebox). A big hard drive can store large volumes of data just a few milliseconds away, not minutes as you have to wind the tape to the right spot in a big tape jukebox... or hours or days if you have to ask someone to retrieve some tapes by hand. And can do hard drive storage for an order of magnitude lower cost than SSD. Spinning disk is still really useful for video. Which is not shrinking any time soon.
- notacoward 6y ago
  That's a lot of time spent trashing tape, which I never suggested as a solution. The central question remains whether that single huge disk will provide the I/O rates that you need, and it won't. If video sizes increase and frames/second doesn't, then I/O need goes up so you'll need multiple drives even more. That means the sizes we already have, without fundamental shifts in technology, are even more likely to be sufficient. You'll just need more of them. What part of this math is escaping you?
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    No math is escaping me. Video is sequential I/O, which hard drives do fine at. Multiple drives is needed under many workloads, but not video. If you want to do video stuff on a laptop you have room for maybe one extra hard drive. And if you are willing to have an external drive (which isn’t too bad), it’s not going to work to plug several hard drives in and expect to RAID them together. Secondarily, there are only so many drives you can stuff in a workstation. A lot of compact ones only have a couple slots in them, and not everyone wants a RAID or JBOD controller with a bunch of ports on it just to do a video workflow. And if you have a video surveillance small server or appliance, you might only have a few slots in it (4 is fairly common). So again, even one or two hard drives is fine for most uses. Not everyone is gonna put a 24 slot JBOD/RAID chassis in to just provide enough storage space for their video surveillance system or whatever.
    - notacoward 6y ago
      > even one or two hard drives is fine for most uses. The scenario you describe hardly sounds like "most uses" to me.
- fomine3 6y ago
  "Video" is ambiguous use case. It would be fine for watching video on home server by single person or hoarding video files, but obviously not fine for video editing, video CDN edge, etc.
cbozeman 6y ago
You asked, "What market is there for big hard drives outside of FAANG [etc.]?" I answered. The home prosumer market. And if anyone ever bothered to develop a multi-terabyte solution for "normal people", whereby they could easily have their DVD / Blu-ray / Compact Disc collection converted from disc to a media server, probably a lot more people. 100 TB hard drives will end up in consumer PCs by 2035, I'm certain of it, even if we won't really need it. 8K is just plain stupid for home use, I honestly don't know why its being pushed, since you'd need a 120" screen or more, but I'm sure there'll be new media types beyond 4K... 4K60 FPS for instance, or high-resolution VR movies. I could easily see a world where 4K60 FPS movies take up 200 GB space each, and high-res VR movies are that large or even larger.
- notacoward 6y ago
  > You asked, "What market is there for big hard drives outside of FAANG [etc.]?" No, I didn't. PaulHoule did. > 100 TB hard drives will end up in consumer PCs by 2035, I'm certain of it, even if we won't really need it. I think you're confusing the need for more capacity with the need for more capacity within a single drive. This is the same distinction you'll find in the original RAID papers. With a big single drive ("SLED" in the papers) your performance per megabyte stored and your reliability per megabyte stored keep going down. At some point this will make your system unusable. I contend that we're already on the edge and these newer technologies that only increase capacity will push a lot of people over. Increasing video resolutions only make the problem worse, not better. How many 4K60 streams are you going to get over a single interface? Now consider an alternative: same amount of storage, across multiple drives. In the same physical space, because that higher areal density can be used to make drives physically smaller just as well as it helps make them logically bigger. In a similar power/heat envelope, because smaller also means lighter. But with better performance across more heads and more external interfaces. And with better reliability because with multiple drives you can add some redundancy (and even if you don't at least a single failure will only cost you some of your data). Why would you want a single big disk instead? Complexity? It's not actually that big a deal. Non-specialists build such systems every day. The only thing the drive vendors need to do is use those improvements in areal density to make drives physically smaller instead of logically larger. Stop making the capacity/bandwidth gap bigger. Let people build balanced systems that actually work, instead of on systems with a striking resemblance to those used for "virtual tape" cold storage in the bad old days.