HAMR HDD capacities to scale from 4GB in 2016 to 100TB in 2025

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Says Seagate's Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) development chief.

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Read more.

4gb hdds?

Well they did say they needed to start on small capacities to test the technology first.

I would take a lot of convincing that this is a safe solution given the need to heat bits to high temp to get a write. Where is that heat going to dissipate to? How can you be 100% sure that it wrote it properly?

This all sounds very interesting, and progress is a good thing, BUT...
1) How to back up such huge drives? Another of a same type drive?
2) backups and Formats will take weeks lol!!
3) What happens if you get a head crash? huge data loss, unless its part of a decent NAS system.
4) I understand that SSD's have a finite/limited number of writes, which dictates their lifespan, how does this compare to traditional HDD's? which are going to be longer lasting? What is the expected life span of each format?
5) For the average home user, individual huge drives are not required generally for daily use, but cheaper RAID/NAS solutions for storage of large volumes of digital media (Photo's and Music etc) are most appealing.

If 100TB is their aim for next 10 years, then I really hope seagate has some other tech to support them.

Wtf, a 4Gb HDD? Is that even worth building?

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Originally Posted by Kanoe

I would take a lot of convincing that this is a safe solution given the need to heat bits to high temp to get a write. Where is that heat going to dissipate to? How can you be 100% sure that it wrote it properly?

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Don't worry, it's only a 20mW laser applying heat. Since a hard drive outputs around 6W, the addition of a laser would only result in a 0.3% increase in heat per laser. There may even be an overall net decrease in heat as the areas that need to be magnetized are smaller.

But yeah, the more components that are added, the more things that can go wrong.

Sorry all, corrected initial available capacity in headline to 4TB

For consumer use this will quickly mean the death of NAS (I would still mirror for safety) and the death of media compression. No normal consumer will need 100TB of storage. What we will need is offsite back up.

My music library is lossless (just moving to FLAC from WAV), Blu-ray movies the same. Only reason for having any compressed media is for mobile use. It is a brave new world

It's Seagate. All I see is a way to lose more data, faster.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

It's Seagate. All I see is a way to lose more data, faster.

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LOL!

Looking at the proposed chart of SSD storage over the next 5+ years doesn't seem smart from a financial stand point. So in 2025 Seagate will finally have a 100TB hdd, by then if the chart holds truth Toshiba will be making 512TB SSD....waste of R&D money Seagate.

I wonder if there are problems other than the size issue. Like will it use more power and how much heat will it generate?

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Originally Posted by cjs150

For consumer use this will quickly mean the death of NAS (I would still mirror for safety) and the death of media compression. No normal consumer will need 100TB of storage. What we will need is offsite back up. My music library is lossless (just moving to FLAC from WAV), Blu-ray movies the same. Only reason for having any compressed media is for mobile use. It is a brave new world

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Erm no. A multiTB drive - especially if it's larger than the "standard" form factor just screams "NAS/SAN device" to me. And - personally speaking - if the thing's slower than current slow laptop drives then I wouldn't care if that drive was stuck in a NAS.

At the moment I could do with all the storage I could get. Actually a cost-efficient 40TB drive would be VERY handy at the moment - mainly because I've got a couple of gigs of OS ISO's, then a couple of gigs of ripped DVD content (disks I own btw), plus music and VM's. I really need to do some housekeeping, or get a second mortgage and get a wide NAS.

I won't embarrass you by labouring the point about the dangers of decade-long prediction - my PC of ten years ago was at the 60GB mark, now it's heading towards 6TB.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

It's storage device. All I see is a way to lose more data, faster.

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There, fixed that for you. :p (BTW, I've had most problems with WD, and least with Seagate - but ymmv)

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Originally Posted by HavoCnMe

Looking at the proposed chart of SSD storage over the next 5+ years doesn't seem smart from a financial stand point. So in 2025 Seagate will finally have a 100TB hdd, by then if the chart holds truth Toshiba will be making 512TB SSD....waste of R&D money Seagate.

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Hmm, depends really on target audience - and therefore cost. Plus, for those with ragbag memories, you'll/we'll remember some serious questions about the longevity of data on SSD. No point having that Tosh 512GB SSD if when you come back six months later the (expletive) thing is blanker than our current chancellor.

Personally, I'll applaud Seagate for daring to try something a little bit different - as I see it, the more approaches we have to the problem of large storage, the better. And who's to say that there's not something in someone's "bag o' tricks" to dramatically increase the data density? It's not my field of expertise, but this seems to be the way things happen. I remember folks being flabbergasted by the capacities of GMR'd disks when they first launched.

having 100TB discs is all well and good, but you need some sort of protection for power interruptions when a lighting storm passes by at the exact moment you are doing your monthly backups to external drives.
So as a consequence of that power interruption at the moment your computer is displaying the message 'please dont turn off your computer'. your computer loses power and all the files that are open in memory and the ones you are writing to your backup drive that are still in the write buffer all get heavily corrupted and you therefore lose everything on the windows drive and everything on the drive you were backing up to. :(

curse you lightning!!


at least I got to test the 'what happens if you use the windows 10 ISO to reinstall straight to win 10 and not as a win 7 upgrade method'. its pretty quick. windows update couldn't install the NVidia drivers, so had to do them manually, but everything else works.

SMART data for my SSD shows SATA R-Errors (CRC) Count 3,870. that's not that many, it'll be fine :shocked2:


good job I had another backup. only lost 1 months of emails.

so multiple backups and a UPS are needed from my point of view.

Maybe, by 2025, Microsoft will have got around to providing a file system with proper data integrity and recovery built into it.

So Seagate is working on larger than 3.5 inch HDD's to get past 10TB while Samsung has 16TB 2.5 inch SSD's sampling now.

Seagate should focus more on it's SSD's the HDD's time is numbered.

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Originally Posted by stevie lee

having 100TB discs is all well and good, but you need some sort of protection for power interruptions when a lighting storm passes by at the exact moment you are doing your monthly backups to external drives. [snipped...]

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You've either been very unlucky (in which case I can empathise - really lousy day tech-wise yesterday) or you're doing backups wrong. Thought the whole purpose of backups was that the source was effectively read-only, in which case I'm a wee bitty confused how it would get corrupted too.
You've kind of got a point though - UPS's are getting cheaper and more readily available - heck, my local Tesco's sells basic APC ones.

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Originally Posted by devBunny

Maybe, by 2025, Microsoft will have got around to providing a file system with proper data integrity and recovery built into it.

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I thought NTFS had a reasonable reputation in that area? Personally, I'd prefer it if they just stopped messing around and adopted ext4, although I've got a soft spot for JFS too.

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Originally Posted by Kumagawa

So Seagate is working on larger than 3.5 inch HDD's to get past 10TB while Samsung has 16TB 2.5 inch SSD's sampling now. Seagate should focus more on it's SSD's the HDD's time is numbered.

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Sigh Seagate doesn't have any real NAND tech, which is why it's folks like Toshiba, Micron/Crucial, Samsung and Sandisk who are making all the SSD headlines. On the other hand they do know (apologies shaithis!) about HDD's. So it makes sense to go down those roads you know, as the old cliché says.
And SSD's are - if you believe the pundits - only a halfway house themselves. We're all going to be using some kind of atom scale or holographic storage in 25 years. (apparently)

No what I'm interested in is if HAMR tech is going to make our current "large drives" a lot cheaper to get. At the moment a 4TB desktop drive is about £120 (Seagate or WD-Red), but if that's the bottom rung of HAMR tech then maybe (here's hoping) that the price of those drives will fall to the levels of the 1TB or 2TB drives, (and those smaller drives will disappear).

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Originally Posted by stevie lee

having 100TB discs is all well and good, but you need some sort of protection for power interruptions when a lighting storm passes by at the exact moment you are doing your monthly backups to external drives.
So as a consequence of that power interruption at the moment your computer is displaying the message 'please dont turn off your computer'. your computer loses power and all the files that are open in memory and the ones you are writing to your backup drive that are still in the write buffer all get heavily corrupted and you therefore lose everything on the windows drive and everything on the drive you were backing up to. :(

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That's irrelevent to drive size, and just down to backup regime.

Tao3: Separation http://www.taobackup.com/

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Originally Posted by crossy

There, fixed that for you. :p (BTW, I've had most problems with WD, and least with Seagate - but ymmv)

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I used to build a lot of NASes for customers....used to go through hundreds of HDDs per year. The failure rate on seagates (since around the 2TB size) is unbelievable.

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Originally Posted by crossy

You've either been very unlucky (in which case I can empathise - really lousy day tech-wise yesterday) or you're doing backups wrong. Thought the whole purpose of backups was that the source was effectively read-only, in which case I'm a wee bitty confused how it would get corrupted too.
You've kind of got a point though - UPS's are getting cheaper and more readily available - heck, my local Tesco's sells basic APC ones.

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was just doing a clone of C drive, to save reinstalling everything. going to an external USB3 2.5" drive. usb drive got corrupted because its usb and hadn't finished writing everything. no idea how the source drive got corrupted, could be because its the windows drive and it was doing other stuff in background, who knows, its certainly a mystery to me.
important other files go to USB drive, another computer, online and dvd. hadn't done backup of those yet this month :(


I suppose most people who have need of large scale storage will have actually thought about UPS, backup regimes and other assorted stuff beforehand. only use I have is for backing up steam/origin/gog to save downloading the games again.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

I used to build a lot of NASes for customers....used to go through hundreds of HDDs per year. The failure rate on seagates (since around the 2TB size) is unbelievable.

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Interesting, thanks for sharing that info. I'm always being told (by "experts") that I "can't go wrong with WD", yet this year alone I've had one fail completely and a second one perform like a dog and get binned.

Joking aside, the point I was trying to make was that all storage devices are eminently faliable.

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Originally Posted by stevie lee

was just doing a clone of C drive, to save reinstalling everything. going to an external USB3 2.5" drive. usb drive got corrupted because its usb and hadn't finished writing everything. no idea how the source drive got corrupted, could be because its the windows drive and it was doing other stuff in background, who knows, its certainly a mystery to me.

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Wow, very unlucky! :o As you said in your first post in this thread, if you get a lightning zap then it's going to be a lottery what damage gets done. That's one reason why I make sure that there's a surge/spike suppressor on all my data-sensitive kit. But as you said, a UPS would be a far better (although more expensive) option.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

It's Seagate. All I see is a way to lose more data, faster.

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Many many years ago, probably on the CiX bulletin board or Usenet, someone said "I would rather write my data onto burning paper". Some things never change :D

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Originally Posted by crossy

I thought NTFS had a reasonable reputation in that area? Personally, I'd prefer it if they just stopped messing around and adopted ext4, although I've got a soft spot for JFS too.

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NTFS is a basic journaling filesystem, all the rage 20 years ago. The world has moved on, with the liked of ZFS and btrfs.

Apparently Facebook are moving their storage to btrfs, so even that seems to have finally come of age.

Sounds cool but still has the problem of being Seagate...

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Originally Posted by crossy

....

is blanker than our current chancellor.

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Which, even if true, is better than having an egomaniac in power for years labouring (or Labouring) under the misapprehension that he was God's gift, when really, he made a complete Horlick's of about 90% of it.

There's is a point of view that says that, with limited exceptions, the best thing politicians can do is stay the bleep out of the way of the economy, be they ideologically left, or ideologically right.

My biggest concern with our current Chancellor is that he isn't a complete blank. If he were, it might be a refreshing change.

But, that really is going off-topic. I just couldn't resist. :D

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Many many years ago, probably on the CiX bulletin board or Usenet, someone said "I would rather write my data onto burning paper. Some things never change. :D

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That (CIX) takes me back.

Interestingly (or not) since the days of my first HD (20MB, IIRC, Seagate), and my days (years) on CIX, the ONLY Seagate drives I've had fail were three out of four 40GB drives on an Adaptec hardware RAID board, and that was due to a PSU failure. The board survived, though, which is more that I can say for a high-end pre-production graphics board in that machine. And about half of the entire system. And by failure, I mean it physically blew chunks out of chips on the HD IF board, and left my office smelling of that acrid electridal burning stench for about a month. I can't really lay even those failures on Seagate.

Admittedly, most (all bar two) are/were below 2TB in size.

RIP HDD, long live SSD

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Originally Posted by Saracen

That (CIX) takes me back.

Interestingly (or not) since the days of my first HD (20MB, IIRC, Seagate), and my days (years) on CIX, the ONLY Seagate drives I've had fail were three out of four 40GB drives on an Adaptec hardware RAID board, and that was due to a PSU failure. The board survived, though, which is more that I can say for a high-end pre-production graphics board in that machine. And about half of the entire system. And by failure, I mean it physically blew chunks out of chips on the HD IF board, and left my office smelling of that acrid electridal burning stench for about a month. I can't really lay even those failures on Seagate.

Admittedly, most (all bar two) are/were below 2TB in size.

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My first drive was a 20MB Seagate, a SCSI drive connected to my Atari STE. It went back 3 times under warranty for replacement IIRC, as some days it just wouldn't spin up.

Then one day I bought a Quantum SCSI hard drive, I think it was an entire 40MB, and my expectations changed :D