SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:29PM
Yes, but old disks had wider tracks, and stronger fields imprinted on them. Look at things like SMR, and you see that they are deliberately packing bits close enough so that they cause interference. That is why they have to rewrite all adjacent tracks as well as the one you are writing to (hence the poor write performance).
If writing to a track in normal operation causes corruption to the surrounding tracks, I am unsure whether the bits will survive in storage powered down, especially without the firmware running to do an occasional refresh of the data. In my case it is not the end of the world, because the backup drive will not be powered down for longer than a month (at which point we checksum and copy data back to it anyway), but for long term archival, I am not sure these disks would be suited, but I am sure time will tell, as people start using/testing the technology in archival situations.
Funny you mention that. I found my old Quantum fireball 3.5 drive recently (from one of my desktops when I was a kid). 4GB and noisy as hell, but powered it up and all the data seems to be on it just fine. Not sure what to do with it, seems a waste to throw it away or break it for parts, but frankly you can get USB keys that have more storage capacity. Feels like it should belong in a museum, lol.