9 ms·

Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives on their way

191 points by mrsebastian 15y ago

driverdan 15y ago
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?
- mrsebastian 15y ago
  Yep, possibly. It might make it more resistant to EM interference from the sun, or something, but not from a huge electromagnet.
- wmf 15y ago
  Each bit will be smaller, so maybe they will be more vulnerable.
- DanBC 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    Magnetic field strength follows an inverse cube law, so an external magnet would have to be incredibly strong to alter data.
    - ars 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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.
guelo 15y ago
I can't imagine a heating element would be helpful to write times.
- thereallurch 15y ago
  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.
c1sc0 15y ago
I'm interested in learning what this will do for I/O speeds, anyone got good pointers?
- dsr_ 15y ago
  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.
ck2 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Realistically, I think most workloads would end up moving to pure copy-on-write filesystems. There won't be much rewriting.
  - mistercow 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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?
      - mistercow 15y ago
        > Most workloads would take weeks, months, even years to write out 60TB of data Today, yes, but this isn't going to give us 60TB drives today, or even tomorrow. It's going to give us 6TB drives. It might give us 60TB drives at some point down the line, and it would be unwise to make any strong predictions about workloads at indeterminate points in the future.
        nknight 15y ago
        60TB is 2+ years of HD video at typical bitrates. It's two months at a patently absurd 100mbps. You could write every bit of traffic passing through a 10gigabit link for 14 hours. Assuming a 100-year lifespan, if every second of your life were recorded at 5mbps, you would need just 30 such drives. Yeah, I'm pretty confident about my prediction as to most workloads.
aw3c2 15y ago
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=terabit-milestone-storage-seagate-pr&vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=... 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.
- borism 15y ago
  actually there are 1TB 2.5" drives already, and WD just released 2TB 2.5" USB drive (by looking at it's pictures I assume it is standart height) http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/20/wd_intros_worlds_first_2tb_portable_external_hdd/ http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/20/wd_intros_worlds_first... Seagate's press release makes it sound like there're no other HDD manufacturers in the world besides them.
  - pyre 15y ago
    I don't know about right now, but last I looked (~1 year ago) the 1TB 2.5" drives were not standard height. Some people were able to jam them into specific laptop models that had enough room (or flex), but that was it. Another way to look at it is to see how many bare drives are being sold at those specs (1TB 2.5") vs. external drives. The bare drives won't sell as well if they are a non-standard height (at least I assume they wouldn't).
    - pmjordan 15y ago
      Samsung and WD are selling 9mm (standard height) 1TB drives, and have done so for almost a year. I think Toshiba or Hitachi recently released a 7mm (extra slim) 750GB drive. Seagate has been selling extra thick (15mm) 1.5TB drives, but only inside external enclosures, for some time now. Many laptops will also accept the thick 12mm drives you're referring to.
fasteddie31003 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  Not just the server market. Home storage is ever-expanding too. For example, my laptop has a 250GB HDD and I have a few (read: too many) external hard drives that add up to about 10TB. I would love to replace my laptop drive with a SSD and the external drives with one or two of these new 6TB drives. SSDs are great, but that doesn't some people won't also need big HDDs.
- wisty 15y ago
  Hybrid drives will also be a big deal. You'll have 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and 4TB HD. Plenty of space for a media collection (no, you will never have enough), and fast access to frequently-used stuff (like databases, docs, programs).
mrbill 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Just like everybody's been doing for the past 30 or so years :-)...
- notatoad 15y ago
  if you are trusting any one piece of infrastructure, you're doing it wrong. keep your stuff backed up and there's no need for your data security to be based on trust and hope.
BrainInAJar 15y ago
That's a lot of data to lose on one drive
- afterburner 15y ago
  I could have everything I have on one drive, and then a second to back it up. Sounds like a good thing.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    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...
xbryanx 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - xbryanx 15y ago
    For sure. However, lately, I've been seeing the storage growth rate increase faster than my personal use growth rate. Maybe it's just me.
  - caf 15y ago
    Hard drive capacities have increased far more than fourfold in that 10 years, though.
    - brianobush 15y ago
      which is why I have 1.5 TB left on my main storage.
- Dove 15y ago
  The day came for me back in about 1998. Ever since then, the smallest drive money could buy has been much, much larger than the sum total of all the data I owned. I may be conservative, though. I mean, I also still instinctively gauge program size by how many floppies it would take up . . .
  - 15y ago
rplnt 15y ago
And this was just a few years back... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 (Get perpendicular! animation by Hitachi)
- Osiris 15y ago
  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/PerpendicularAnimation.html https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/P...
  - cookingrobot 15y ago
    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.
angersock 15y ago
I am going to download so many linux isos with this.
Hoff 15y ago
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 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.
CoughlinJ 15y ago
I can see the first 50% of the reviews having a prodigious failure rate.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
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)

191 points by mrsebastian 15y ago

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?

mrsebastian 15y ago
Yep, possibly. It might make it more resistant to EM interference from the sun, or something, but not from a huge electromagnet.
wmf 15y ago
Each bit will be smaller, so maybe they will be more vulnerable.
DanBC 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Magnetic field strength follows an inverse cube law, so an external magnet would have to be incredibly strong to alter data.
  - ars 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.

guelo 15y ago

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

thereallurch 15y ago
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.

c1sc0 15y ago

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

dsr_ 15y ago
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.

ck2 15y ago

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 15y ago
Realistically, I think most workloads would end up moving to pure copy-on-write filesystems. There won't be much rewriting.
- mistercow 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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?
    - mistercow 15y ago
      > Most workloads would take weeks, months, even years to write out 60TB of data Today, yes, but this isn't going to give us 60TB drives today, or even tomorrow. It's going to give us 6TB drives. It might give us 60TB drives at some point down the line, and it would be unwise to make any strong predictions about workloads at indeterminate points in the future.
      - nknight 15y ago
        60TB is 2+ years of HD video at typical bitrates. It's two months at a patently absurd 100mbps. You could write every bit of traffic passing through a 10gigabit link for 14 hours. Assuming a 100-year lifespan, if every second of your life were recorded at 5mbps, you would need just 30 such drives. Yeah, I'm pretty confident about my prediction as to most workloads.

aw3c2 15y ago

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=terabit-milestone-storage-seagate-pr&vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=... 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.

borism 15y ago
actually there are 1TB 2.5" drives already, and WD just released 2TB 2.5" USB drive (by looking at it's pictures I assume it is standart height) http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/20/wd_intros_worlds_first_2tb_portable_external_hdd/ http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/20/wd_intros_worlds_first... Seagate's press release makes it sound like there're no other HDD manufacturers in the world besides them.
- pyre 15y ago
  I don't know about right now, but last I looked (~1 year ago) the 1TB 2.5" drives were not standard height. Some people were able to jam them into specific laptop models that had enough room (or flex), but that was it. Another way to look at it is to see how many bare drives are being sold at those specs (1TB 2.5") vs. external drives. The bare drives won't sell as well if they are a non-standard height (at least I assume they wouldn't).
  - pmjordan 15y ago
    Samsung and WD are selling 9mm (standard height) 1TB drives, and have done so for almost a year. I think Toshiba or Hitachi recently released a 7mm (extra slim) 750GB drive. Seagate has been selling extra thick (15mm) 1.5TB drives, but only inside external enclosures, for some time now. Many laptops will also accept the thick 12mm drives you're referring to.

fasteddie31003 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
rkudeshi 15y ago
Not just the server market. Home storage is ever-expanding too. For example, my laptop has a 250GB HDD and I have a few (read: too many) external hard drives that add up to about 10TB. I would love to replace my laptop drive with a SSD and the external drives with one or two of these new 6TB drives. SSDs are great, but that doesn't some people won't also need big HDDs.
wisty 15y ago
Hybrid drives will also be a big deal. You'll have 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and 4TB HD. Plenty of space for a media collection (no, you will never have enough), and fast access to frequently-used stuff (like databases, docs, programs).

mrbill 15y ago

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 15y ago
Just like everybody's been doing for the past 30 or so years :-)...
notatoad 15y ago
if you are trusting any one piece of infrastructure, you're doing it wrong. keep your stuff backed up and there's no need for your data security to be based on trust and hope.

BrainInAJar 15y ago

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

afterburner 15y ago
I could have everything I have on one drive, and then a second to back it up. Sounds like a good thing.
- vidarh 15y ago
  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...

xbryanx 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
- xbryanx 15y ago
  For sure. However, lately, I've been seeing the storage growth rate increase faster than my personal use growth rate. Maybe it's just me.
- caf 15y ago
  Hard drive capacities have increased far more than fourfold in that 10 years, though.
  - brianobush 15y ago
    which is why I have 1.5 TB left on my main storage.
Dove 15y ago
The day came for me back in about 1998. Ever since then, the smallest drive money could buy has been much, much larger than the sum total of all the data I owned. I may be conservative, though. I mean, I also still instinctively gauge program size by how many floppies it would take up . . .
- 15y ago

rplnt 15y ago

And this was just a few years back... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 (Get perpendicular! animation by Hitachi)

Osiris 15y ago
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/PerpendicularAnimation.html https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/P...
- cookingrobot 15y ago
  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.

angersock 15y ago

I am going to download so many linux isos with this.

Hoff 15y ago

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 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.

CoughlinJ 15y ago

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

ChuckMcM 15y ago

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)