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OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/25726/Seagate_breaks_1_terabit_barrier_60TB_hard_drives_possible Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:45:25 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Comment by benb320 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511248 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511248 I think I will never use that much memory, but who knows Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (benb320) Comments RE: Comment by benb320 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511253 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511253

I think I will never use that much memory, but who knows

You're going to need that 60TB with the future release of Windows 9.

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (randy7376) Comments RE: Comment by benb320 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511254 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511254 I have no doubt we will find a way to use it - collectively, at least.

Sure, present HDDs (or SSDs, almost) might be more than enough, on a local personal level.

But datacenters and such? They're always hungry for more spacious drives. Ultimately, HDDs store our civilisation - it runs on them (kinda like, yeah, we do "personal" long-distance travel largely by airplanes nowadays - but ships, trains and such are what really still runs the place, our global economy) Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zima) Comments Comment by ssokolow http://www.osnews.com/thread?511259 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511259 Nice. Maybe I'll be able to keep my movies and shows readily accessible AND have RAID after all.

I've got something on the order of 7TiB of them and I can't afford a NAS, so it has to be do-able in four or fewer SATA drives.

That means I need 14TiB of drives for a RAID-10 array before you even take room for future growth into account.

(As you may guess, a lot of my disposable income goes into entertainment, so my media center is XBMC with scrounged hardware.)Edited 2012-03-20 19:16 UTC Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ssokolow) Comments 60TB hard drives possible http://www.osnews.com/thread?511265 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511265 A 60TB hard drives sound great, but do you guys have any idea how heavy that would become once you put all your data on it :o Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sagum) Comments RE: 60TB hard drives possible http://www.osnews.com/thread?511266 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511266 If you put the drive between two large electro magnets with reversed polarities, you can "float" or "hover" the drive between them and not worry about weight.

;) Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (phoenix) Comments Pain http://www.osnews.com/thread?511267 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511267 I can't measure the pain of loosing a single 60TB hard drive. These increasingly larger drives are making RAID setups a necessity! Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (CapEnt) Comments Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511274 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511274 Alright, now if only someone could find a software or hardware method to turn a slow multi-TB hard drive into a superfast ~200GB hard drive... Perhaps possible by using a variant of RAID between drive platters ?

I believe I'm not the only one findind the capacity of modern HDDs too big for domestic use, and getting a compromise between SSD's speed and "pure" hard drive price and reliability could be pretty cool...Edited 2012-03-20 21:45 UTC Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments RE: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511287 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511287 I was under the impression that it already does it. It reads multiple metal disks at the same time, to parallelise read and write. The only way to make it faster is to add more disks. I suspect those new harddrives are going to be almost as fast as average SSD. They increased physical density, so much more information can be read/written at the same time. Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (aligatro) Comments RE: Pain http://www.osnews.com/thread?511292 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511292

I can't measure the pain of loosing a single 60TB hard drive. These increasingly larger drives are making RAID setups a necessity!

I have RAID since 500GiB. I'm at 4TB (3x2TB Linux md-raid5). I remember RAID saved my pr0n once when one of the disks die without any previous warning (even with (notso)SMART enabled...

) Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (nbensa) Comments RE: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511324 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511324

Alright, now if only someone could find a software or hardware method to turn a slow multi-TB hard drive into a superfast ~200GB hard drive...

Actually, there is a method and a fairly simple one. You could use only outher most tracks (cylinders). Reducing multi-TB drive to only several hundred GB would provide quite some 'speediness'.

And another thing... RAID is not a substitution for backup it is mainly a method for increasing system's availability. Always backup your (important) data! Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (magick) Comments RE: Comment by ssokolow http://www.osnews.com/thread?511337 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511337 Maybe you could pirate even more movies, that way you'll be able to save and pay for a NAS! Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (alexz) Comments Thailand floods http://www.osnews.com/thread?511339 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511339 I just wish the HD industry would manufacture all the critical parts in several countries that aren't prone to flooding. Perhaps they should use RAID in the manufacture. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (transputer_guy) Comments RE: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511343 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511343 I believe they already have something like that. Its called a Western Digital Raptor. Another option is the hybrid Momentus series of drives from seagate. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 06:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSbunny) Comments RE: Thailand floods http://www.osnews.com/thread?511344 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511344 RAID costs too much. Thais work cheap. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 07:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSbunny) Comments Comment by ilovebeer http://www.osnews.com/thread?511350 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511350 Can't wait to see what kind of absurd price tag these come with. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 07:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ilovebeer) Comments RE[2]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511352 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511352 I wonder... Since LBA has been the norm, are OSs still in control of where their data goes on the HDD, or is it the job of a hard drive's manufacturer to propose a LBA->physical geometry mapping which verifies such laws as "First LBA blocks are accessed faster" ?

In any case, if the full drive capacity is kept, II guess that constant monitoring of disk usage and moving data around would be necessary in order to keep the most frequently used data in the first sectors. I was thinking of something simpler, more along the lines of putting exactly the same content on all disks (like RAID 1 does with multiple HDDs), which slows down writes a little but should vastly increase read speeds.Edited 2012-03-21 08:03 UTC Wed, 21 Mar 2012 07:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments RE[2]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511353 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511353

Actually, there is a method and a fairly simple one. You could use only outher most tracks (cylinders). Reducing multi-TB drive to only several hundred GB would provide quite some 'speediness'.

Don't modern filesystems already try to do this as a default ?

And another thing... RAID is not a substitution for backup it is mainly a method for increasing system's availability. Always backup your (important) data!

Yes, I know that disks in RAID are at the same physical location and thus vulnerable to the same external breakage factors. However, I was only considering the ability of RAID to speed-up disk reads here, write redundancy being only a way to achieve this goal. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments RE: Comment by benb320 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511366 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511366

I think I will never use that much memory, but who knows

Have more faith in possibilities mankind will invent to occupy such big disks. Hint: Parkinson's Law applied.

Data expands to fill the space available for storage. Storage requirements will increase to meet storage capacity. The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. The reverse is not true.

Maybe also see Jevons paradox.

A technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.

As it has already been mentioned, big datacenters, primarily governmental installations and "big business" will happily use such disks to store more data. This is good for for the customers, good for the people, good for the market. :-)

Let us be thankful we have storage. Store now. Store more. Store more now. Store... and be happy! Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Doc Pain) Comments RE[2]: Comment by ssokolow http://www.osnews.com/thread?511379 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511379

Maybe you could pirate even more movies, that way you'll be able to save and pay for a NAS!

He did say "a lot of my disposable income goes into entertainment", so the reason he can't afford a NAS is that he's not pirating at all. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Zer0C001) Comments RE[3]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511425 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511425 Neolander,

"I wonder... Since LBA has been the norm, are OSs still in control of where their data goes on the HDD, or is it the job of a hard drive's manufacturer to propose a LBA->physical geometry mapping which verifies such laws as 'First LBA blocks are accessed faster' ? "

Even picking sectors randomly, most data will end up on the outer half of the disk anyways (hmm 'half' is a misnomer here). Assuming all data has the same priority, then ideally it should be equally distributed. For this, random placement turns out to be not bad at all. Keeping file sectors far apart even helps avoid fragmentation which is a much worse bottleneck than throughput. If the system had a policy to store all files in the faster sectors fist when the disk is empty, over time the newer files would be placed in slower parts of the disk. Consequently the file system would appear to slow down over time, which I feel is a bad quality. Maybe the OS can move files around in the background, but this could slow it down further.

In my opinion seek performance is far more critical for most real-world applications. Even slow sectors on cheap consumer drives can beat 50MB/s.

You mentioned RAID 0 in the context of increasing throughput, but it could also help reduce seek latencies. It'd be theoretically possible to have two or more disk having identical content synced to spin together out of phase, and have a smart controller to direct read requests to the disk which is closest to the data. This design would give a performance boost not only for seeking, but also raw throughput. The inherent redundancy might be a selling point also. One could do the same thing minus the redundancy by having two heads on the same platter.

The above arrays would require specialized disks, but one might approximate it with off the shelf hardware using software alone. The OS would send 2 or more identical requests to the disks, and the data from whichever happens to respond first is used. This would negate the throughput multiplication factor, but for the average case seek time could be halved (it would be unfortunate if the disks ended up spinning exactly in phase out of coincidence). I'm also not sure if this software solution could scale unless we could immediately cancel the read request on the loosing disk. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Alfman) Comments RE[4]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511434 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511434 A very clever OS might even be able to pragmatically determine the disk's phase and velocity by timing it's response latencies. It might then create a model in software of the disk's platter/head position at any given point in time and then determine which disk of a raid array is more likely to respond quicker and then only send the request to that disk.

I have to wonder whether any of this micromanaging could offer a performance benefit over a simpler implementation of using a dual disk elevator algorithm. Even a 25% increase in seek speed might be worthwhile for a seek-bound database. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Alfman) Comments RE: Comment by ssokolow http://www.osnews.com/thread?511441 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511441 Why are you limiting yourself to 4 disks?

I have a 6x 1TB ZFS raid which gives me 2 disk redundancy, about 3.8TB of storage and the ability to grow that storage dynamically if/when I add more HDDs. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Laurence) Comments RE[2]: Comment by ssokolow http://www.osnews.com/thread?511448 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511448

Why are you limiting yourself to 4 disks?

The original poster said two things:

1) He needs 7TB of storage

2) He is using RAID 10 (1 + 0)

3) He is "scrounging" hardware (ie. he is poor)

Four disks is the minimum to achieve RAID 10. What you are suggesting is that he either put up with much less storage or spend much more money on disks. He ruled both those out.

RAID 1 = Two redundant disks

RAID 0 = Two striped (aggregated) disks

RAID 10 = RAID 1 + 0 = A stripe of two RAID 1 volumes

To get 7TB of storage as RAID 10, you need 14TB as he said. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tanishaj) Comments RE: Pain http://www.osnews.com/thread?511449 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511449

I can't measure the pain of loosing a single 60TB hard drive. These increasingly larger drives are making RAID setups a necessity!

RAID has burned me more than once. I also live in terror of these new huge disk sizes but RAID does not make me sleep much better. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tanishaj) Comments RE: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511450 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511450

Alright, now if only someone could find a software or hardware method to turn a slow multi-TB hard drive into a superfast ~200GB hard drive

Perhaps we will start to see consumer level systems using RAID (or RAID like) multi-platter storage with SSDs (or even RAIDs of them) acting as a kind of cache. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tanishaj) Comments the 3TB maximum we currently enjoy http://www.osnews.com/thread?511451 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511451 I don't think you live in the same world I am. We've been beyond 3TB for awhile now and the manufacturers are capable of producing a 5TB drive now if they chose to. They choose not to. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (0brad0) Comments RE[3]: Comment by ssokolow http://www.osnews.com/thread?511453 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511453

The original poster said two things:

1) He needs 7TB of storage

Yes, I know that. I wasn't suggesting he clone my set up - like for like.

2) He is using RAID 10 (1 + 0)

Actually no. He said he wasn't running a RAID. He gave an example of the requirements he would need if he ran RAID10

3) He is "scrounging" hardware (ie. he is poor)

Which is why I offered a suggestion of something that can be cheaply grown as his storage needs grows yet still offers great resilience.

Four disks is the minimum to achieve RAID 10. What you are suggesting is that he either put up with much less storage or spend much more money on disks. He ruled both those out.

Which goes back to my question. Why limit yourself to 4 disks. If you have ZFS then you can grow your storage as your storage needs grows. There's no limit.

RAID 1 = Two redundant disks

RAID 0 = Two striped (aggregated) disks

RAID 10 = RAID 1 + 0 = A stripe of two RAID 1 volumes

To get 7TB of storage as RAID 10, you need 14TB as he said.

Well done for reiterating a point which nobody was arguing against to begin with Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Laurence) Comments RE[2]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511458 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511458

Perhaps we will start to see consumer level systems using RAID (or RAID like) multi-platter storage with SSDs (or even RAIDs of them) acting as a kind of cache.

I have mixed feelings about these hybrid drives with SSD caches (which already exist). On one hand, they offer an interesting compromise between HDD capacity and SSD speed. On the other hand, can the drive fallback nicely to "pure" hard drive operation when the SSD fails ? Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments Comment by maxsideburn http://www.osnews.com/thread?511461 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511461 about time. hard drive capacity has always grown exponentially....except for the last few years.

I've now got a plethora of 2TB hard drives laying around with stuff on them and that drives me insane. I like having ONE drive and ONE backup drive. thank you seagate. Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (maxsideburn) Comments RE[3]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511495 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511495 I'd be very concerned about the reliability of the SSD cache for critical data. I've recently lost data on a 16GB flash drive, it lasted some 5 months before dying without warning. We might have had a month of media on there that we weren't prepared to loose.

I keep automatic copies of computer data, but the flash cards weren't part of that backup strategy. We inquired about data recovery, it was $500+/-100. Also, though the card was still under warranty, amazon refused to give any option of both honoring their warranty and allowing us to send the defective card for data retrieval (shame on you amazon, your warranty is an utter disgrace).

Anyways, I couldn't justify $500 on a one time data recovery, so I purchased a nand flash chip reader instead. I desoldered the flash chips using a heat gun, and low and behold I was able to read the raw flash data off the chips. However I'm still in the process of finding a way to make the raw data usable. I've been researching the issue diligently and though it's not easy hopefully I'll find a way to crack it.

As a warning, I discovered that the nand chips used on the amazon brand card were rated by the manufacturer for only 10,000 erase/program cycles whereas most chips are rated for 100,000 cycles. I have no idea how one would be able to find this info before purchasing the cards though.

[end tangent] Thu, 22 Mar 2012 02:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Alfman) Comments RE[4]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511516 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511516 That's what I've heard frequently on the web too. Flash SSDs seem to fail completely and without warning after a short and highly random time, even if it's only one single NAND chip that is damaged. After that, good luck for the recovery...

Until this kind of issue is fixed, I would not trust an SSD that is not at least mirrored on another SSD (hello, prohibitive costs !) to hold important data. As a cache, why not, but only if it can be bypassed. Which is why I wished HDD manufacturers focused a bit more on seek times and throughput rather than always more bits per square inch...Edited 2012-03-22 08:10 UTC Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments RE[5]: Faster now ! http://www.osnews.com/thread?511530 http://www.osnews.com/thread?511530 Yea, in my quest to restore my data, I've discovered alot about flash. NOR flash is much more reliable and is directly accessible like RAM and has greater write cycles. The disadvantage is expense/capacity. NAND flash uses far fewer gates and must be addressed in larger blocks. Permanent physical bit errors are a normal occurrence with NAND when brand new, therefor many sectors are shipped as bad and ECC is mandatory. Additionally there are fewer erase cycles, so wear leveling algorithms are mandatory. This introduces the need for a logical/physical mapping between the normal file system and the raw flash sectors through the use of a proprietary NAND flash controller, all of this is typically unnecessary with NOR flash, and I'm inclined to believe these extra components make NAND less reliable.

Another factor is that older SLC NAND flash stores 1 bit per cell, but greater densities has driven the industry to adapt MLC NAND cells with 3 bits each (by storing 8 distinct voltage levels). One might hope they wouldn't do this unless it were safe, but it turns out MLC is far less reliable across both read and write operations, and hence requires significantly more error correction per sector. Another issue with MLC, is that (for reasons I don't understand) the cells are divided across unrelated sectors, so botched operations in one sector will always trash other sectors as well. The voltage levels are so fragile that the controller has to keep track of how many times a cell is READ before needing to re-flash it.

So reflecting on all this, one must ponder if SDDs are becoming cheap and practical only because of the engineering compromises with data integrity, or if we'll eventually be able to manufacturer cheap flash which doesn't compromise data integrity.

Regarding seek time, I found this to be relevant:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-harddrive,8279.html

"Will manufacturers like Seagate ever bring back hard drives with dual actuator heads? Unlikely, given that the focus is now on increasing capacities and SSDs."

Edit: What about using battery backed RAM for caching? The TI-8x calculators didn't have any non-volatile storage after all and could last a couple years on a cell battery.Edited 2012-03-22 10:33 UTC Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Alfman) Comments