Electronista: Seagate To Ship 37TB Hard Drives By 2010
Quote:
Seagate may achieve an exponential increase in hard disk storage limits in as little as three years' time, according to Seagate researchers speaking with Wired. The storage device maker has revealed that a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording, which uses a laser to temporarily heat the platter and store more information in a given area, could increase the density of hard drives to just over 6TB per square inch -- allowing full, 3.5-inch wide desktop hard drives to store 37.5TB of data. The increased space would hold the entire Library of Congress catalog in raw form, according to Seagate.
The magazine also reports that Seagate is working on a small, magnetic form of storage codenamed "Probe" that would compete directly against flash memory. No details of its capacity or performance have been revealed, though it too should become available in the next few years.
Seagate may achieve an exponential increase in hard disk storage limits in as little as three years' time, according to Seagate researchers speaking with Wired. The storage device maker has revealed that a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording, which uses a laser to temporarily heat the platter and store more information in a given area, could increase the density of hard drives to just over 6TB per square inch -- allowing full, 3.5-inch wide desktop hard drives to store 37.5TB of data. The increased space would hold the entire Library of Congress catalog in raw form, according to Seagate.
The magazine also reports that Seagate is working on a small, magnetic form of storage codenamed "Probe" that would compete directly against flash memory. No details of its capacity or performance have been revealed, though it too should become available in the next few years.
Comments
It'll be damn expensive though, and by that time, solid state drives (which, aside from capacity, have many more advantages) will be widely accepted, so it probably won't see too much use.
Do you really want to entrust that amount of data to a single piece of hardware?
But you could always Time Machine it off to another ginormous capacity drive.
Do you really want to entrust that amount of data to a single piece of hardware?
Heh, throw 2 of thise in a RAID 0 array and fill 'em up. Ouch.
I just had another though though. Think of the read/write times for something with that kind of platter density.
How about setting up the thing as a RAID-in-a-box? Keep the capacity at 10TB or so and have redundancy built-in.
That's actually not a bad idea. It would be a clean and safe way, with a much smaller risk of lost data.
The write speeds I've seen are about 60 Mb/sec tops. For ease of use, lets assume it becomes 100 Mb/sec (real world, not 'in theory' write speed).
37 X10^12 B/ (100 X 10^6 B/sec) = 0.37 X 10^6 sec or 370,000 seconds.
So what...about 4 days, assuming you are just adding data all the time at its max speed, just to fill the thing up.
My math could be wrong, I did not write it out on paper.
That's actually not a bad idea. It would be a clean and safe way, with a much smaller risk of lost data.
If you know anything about server redundancy its a horrible idea. Its like saying "oh ill make two copies of one file on my hardrive this way im safe".....wrong if that drive fails it dosent matter if you have a million copies on it your pretty much out of luck. If you want to back up something it must be done on another physical drive.
From the perspective of the sub-gig drive user, just a few short years ago, all the caveats about a multi-terabyte drive applied to what is today an average size drive of 80 GB or so.