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from the now-you-CAN-take-it-with-you? dept.
Seagate has launched the world's first 5 TB 2.5" hard disk drives (HDDs). However, they won't fit in most laptops:
The new Seagate BarraCuda 2.5" drives resemble the company's Mobile HDDs introduced earlier this year and use a similar set of technologies: motors with 5400 RPM spindle speed, platters based on [shingled magnetic recording (SMR)] technology with over 1300 Gb/in2 areal density, and multi-tier caching. The 3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs that come with a 15 mm z-height are designed for external storage solutions because virtually no laptop can accommodate drives of that thickness. Meanwhile, the 7 mm z-height drives (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are aimed at mainstream laptops and SFF desktops that need a lot of storage space.
Seagate has also launched a 2 TB shingled solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) with 8 GB of NAND cache and a 128 MB DRAM cache buffer. The 1 TB and 500 GB versions also have 8 GB of NAND and 128 MB of DRAM. These are the first hybrid drives to use shingled magnetic recording.
Seagate press release (for "mobile warriors" only).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Wednesday October 26 2016, @11:00AM
Seems like they've hit a pretty hard barrier in data storage density for laptop drives. I used to be able to significantly upgrade my notebooks' storage every couple of years, but for at least 3 or 4 years or so the largest capacity that will fit in even my 17" MacBook Pro (which handles up to 12.5mm drives) is just 2TB. I check every few months and sometimes stumble across a 3TB 2.5" drive but then realize it's 15mm and won't fit. There aren't even 2.5TB drives in the meantime. It's like they've just completely hit a wall, at least in the 2.5" form factor. It won't be too much longer before there are affordable SSDs in larger capacities than any sub-12.5mm laptop hard drive on the market. Other World Computing has a 2TB SSD now for $650; that was the price of the 1TB SSD until just a few months ago, then it suddenly dropped by half to $330. I'd expect the 2TB to follow suit within a couple of years.
I wonder if regular laptop spinning drives are really at a dead end at this point. Not that that's a bad thing, necessarily.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2, Interesting) by WillR on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:25PM
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:40PM
I'm not sure that it's practical to have SSDs that size. People on laptops are probably not working with that amount of data and people who are working with that kind of data tend to get pissy when the disk goes bad taking all the data with them. Not to mention that they'll usually be using a big tower and can have RAID arrays and the like to handle both the issue capacity as well as redundancy.
So, they're market is most likely people with huge amounts of money and the need for faster data access. I'm guessing that they'll eventually get larger, but I wouldn't expect them to get multiple terabytes any time soon as the market isn't really there and might never get there. There's not much point in larger capacity if the largest things people generally store are hidef video and that's not likely to get to 4k for typical users.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday October 26 2016, @04:54PM
I've got a 640k hard drive to sell to you.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday October 27 2016, @12:25AM
Ah, this chestnut again. I take it you're not aware that nobody ever said that at the time. They were referring to the break up of the first 1mb into 640kb of low mem and the rest being separated. They did it at the time because they lacked the address space for all of it. And yes, at the time, 640kb of low mem was enough for anybody, it just required some hackery at times to get things loaded into high and extended memory by the end of the DOS era.
In this case, if you're using a laptop and you're needing more than 1.2tb of space, you're very much in the minority and you're certainly going to want to back that stuff up even more regularly than usual. More likely, if you need that much data you're going to be using a desktop and have options for RAID in place.
I suppose there's somebody out there that needs more than that space for a laptop, but it's crazy to suggest that there's a market for that at this time. Eventually, I'm sure people will need that, but that's not going to be for years. Even a large game is less than 25gb in most cases and they tend to destroy laptops with the excessive heat.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 27 2016, @12:45AM
While my primary desktop has been happy with 300GB for quite some time, my new pro laptop has a 4k screen and all the oomph to do some 4k video or 3D editing. Those files do take an enormous amount of space. How many people really need that much storage? few. How many people will buy the biggest anyway, just in case they want to backup all their useless "this is my appetizer, in 4k because my phone can do it" video? More than should...
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:18AM
In other words, you didn't actually read my post and would rather post some nonsense.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:18PM
Or you have no clue about the growth of storage requirements and the hoarding people do.
My first 1G drive seemed huge, but barely held a CD's worth of data.
My first 40G drive was enormous, but only fit so many games after a while, and not too many HD videos.
My current 300G drives are gigantic, but it turns out you need more than 10% of that for each AAA game...
So, is there a market for a 2TB drive? Sure, because that will seem only so-so in 3 to 5 years when 4k videos and 250G games are the norm.
Back to my original comment: 640GB ought to be enough for anyone... right?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Geotti on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:26AM
Ok, so just the Vienna Symphonic Library [vsl.co.at] alone weighs over 960GB. Komplete [native-instruments.com] requires another 155 gigs, add up a few sample archives and other instruments and plugins and you're at well over 1.5TB just for your production rig. Then, of course, you need space to for recordings, conversions, your files, etc. And this is just music.
What if you do Music, Video, DTP and 3D (which is not that uncommon)? What, if you also need Matlab & Co., several IDEs and a few virtual machines?
If I could fit all of that on a laptop, I'd be one happy camper... Unfortunately, Apple fucked me over by eliminating the optical bay and any ability to add a second drive, so my next laptop will probably be a hackbook pro that does have space for a second (and maybe a third and fourth "drive").
Oh and I know enough people that have a multi-terabyte video and/or music collection, be it for on-stage or home purposes.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:45PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:40PM
It's physics. We can not write at any higher density w/o worse comprises.
- Helium filled (get the read/write heads closer to the media and more stable)
- Heat assisted (probably requires a low duty cycle or a seriously problematic heat-sink for laptops): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recording [wikipedia.org]
- Bit patterned instead of film (Isolate the Fe to pre-positioned bits that can be more written/read individually): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_media [wikipedia.org]
So helium may get your 2TB to 2.4TB.
The 10-20% extra cost for .2TB isn't going to entice any sales.
Adding SMR may get you to 3TB, but the dramatic drop in write performance (treating it as a conventional drive) means that there has to be a large amount of effort put into re-architecting the storage sub-system and/or switching to log-structured file systems which all have different tradeoffs that nobody really seems happy with.
For SSDs in laptops the density limit is probably in the 16-32TB range today, the only limiting factor is really cost and the fabs to make it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:05PM
I haven't seen evidence that HAMR will create an extremely hot drive that will require some problematic heat-sink in laptops. We are talking about high temperatures focused by a laser on nanoscale areas on the disk platter. If anything kills HAMR, it will be the economics required to switch from PMR, while competition from SSDs "heats up".
Some SSDs run 10x hotter than other SSDs for whatever reasons.
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