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

[HEXUS]

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

Read more.

[outwar6010]

4gb hdds?

[Kanoe]

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?

[Vorlon99]

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.

[aniilv]

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

[KillerCoati]

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

[blackima]

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?

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.

[mtyson]

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

[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

[shaithis]

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

[HavoCnMe]

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

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.

[Waswat]

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

[crossy]

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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


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.

[devBunny]

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

[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.