News - Toshiba demonstrates 2.5Tb per-square-inch magnetic storage

[HEXUS]

Future of hard drives just a few years away?

Read more.

[AdamAnubis]

Could mean for some nice and beastly storage setups. I hope so anyway

[bennyjh]

Wouldn't the read/write times on a 10tb drive be abysmal?

[Biscuit]

I should think speeds would be faster however the seek times might suffer. Im not sure though, the article is too vague as to how it all works to take any conclusions with regards to performance difference away.

[Funkstar]

Wouldn't the read/write times on a 10tb drive be abysmal?

Well despite hard drives constantly increasing in density and rotational speeds staying about the same (7,200rpm normally) transfer rates have steadily increased.

I think Access times have stayed roughly the same, but I could be wrong on this.

[jim]

The higher the data density, the better the drive performs. Not really understanding why they would be abysmal.

[kalniel]

Welcome to Hexus!

Wouldn't the read/write times on a 10tb drive be abysmal?

No.

[miniyazz]

ueou

[cordas]

Wouldn't the read/write times on a 10tb drive be abysmal?

Doubt it, they should actually improve as the heads need to move less far to cover more 'data' as the data is more condensed. However the time taken to write or read 10TB of data would probably be fairly horrific but thats simply because its such a colossal amount of data....

Anyway I hope they hurry up and bring this to market.... my 2TB of HDD space (and 1TB external 'backup') seems unbelievably small.... As far as I am concerned there is no such thing as too much storage space, just people without the imagination to fill it.

[miniyazz]

Anyway I hope they hurry up and bring this to market.... my 2TB of HDD space (and 1TB external 'backup') seems unbelievably small.... As far as I am concerned there is no such thing as too much storage space, just people without the imagination to fill it.

Very true. Unfortunately I think there may be more considerations than just "Ooh 10TB HDDs". The chances of HDD failure (from e.g. hitting an unrecoverable bit error) become higher and higher as the disk become larger. For example.. I believe most consumer drives are rated at a 1 in 10^14 bits rate - which is to say 1 bit in every 12.5TBytes read will be unreadable (probably on the conservative side, but still). This is a pretty low chance of a 2TB drive going pop for most consumer workloads - but certainly enough to warrant a backup - and the chances of the backup going pop when restoring are pretty slim.
With a 10 TB drive, you would only need to read all the data from it just over once and you're likely to encounter an unreadable bit. This has implications not only for drive usability but also as a backup - chances are, when restoring from a backup, you'll encounter another unreadable bit error, and suddenly your backup is no more.

What I'm saying is that drive reliability needs to be improved for these larger drives. Enterprise class drives are rated as a factor of 10 or 100 more reliable in that sense - and that might well be needed as standard for these larger drives, with higher reliability still for enterprise class. This is going to push costs up - so it's not all plain sailing with more capacity being as simple as having an HDD with more space - it has to have greater reliability too.

[this_is_gav]

The 'Magnetic Recording Conference'. How much would I pay to avoid attending that...

[miniyazz]

Nah, it sounds like it has magnets

[cordas]

Very true. Unfortunately I think there may be more considerations than just "Ooh 10TB HDDs". The chances of HDD failure (from e.g. hitting an unrecoverable bit error) become higher and higher as the disk become larger. For example.. I believe most consumer drives are rated at a 1 in 10^14 bits rate - which is to say 1 bit in every 12.5TBytes read will be unreadable (probably on the conservative side, but still). This is a pretty low chance of a 2TB drive going pop for most consumer workloads - but certainly enough to warrant a backup - and the chances of the backup going pop when restoring are pretty slim.
With a 10 TB drive, you would only need to read all the data from it just over once and you're likely to encounter an unreadable bit. This has implications not only for drive usability but also as a backup - chances are, when restoring from a backup, you'll encounter another unreadable bit error, and suddenly your backup is no more.

What I'm saying is that drive reliability needs to be improved for these larger drives. Enterprise class drives are rated as a factor of 10 or 100 more reliable in that sense - and that might well be needed as standard for these larger drives, with higher reliability still for enterprise class. This is going to push costs up - so it's not all plain sailing with more capacity being as simple as having an HDD with more space - it has to have greater reliability too.

Sorry but the same argument has always held true... the first time I heard it expressed was when i told PC engineer I was working with that I had bought a 500MB hdd....

[miniyazz]

Which argument?