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As operators of cloud datacenters need more storage capacity, higher capacity HDDs are being developed. As data hoarders need more capacity, higher capacity HDDs are needed. Last week Western Digital introduced its new Utrastar DC HC650 20 TB drives - hitting a new barrier in rotating data.
The drives feature shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology, which layers data on top of another much like a shingled roof, and therefore is designed primarily for write once read many (WORM) applications (e.g., content delivery services). Western Digital's SMR hard drives are host managed, so they will be available only to customers with appropriate software.
Western Digital's Utrastar DC HC650 20 TB is based on the company's all-new nine-platter helium-sealed enterprise-class platform, a first for the company. The new 3.5-inch hard drives feature a 7200 RPM spindle speed and will be available with a SATA 6 Gbps or SAS 12 Gbps interface depending on the SKU. Since the product is not expected to be available immediately, the manufacturer does not disclose all of its specifications just yet, but has stated that key customers are already in the loop.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:03PM (5 children)
With an Append-Only filesystem.
You can write new files to it. You can read the files. But that's it.
Intended as a special purpose drive for making backups.
In the case of SSD, maybe the append-only filesystem is implemented into the drive controller and accessible via some new type of API.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @05:54PM (2 children)
I remember reading about some people using LTFS [wikipedia.org] on SMR drives [snia.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 12 2019, @07:45PM (1 child)
That seems like it would not offer good random access read of files.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @08:33PM
LTFS has some kind of index for searching and seek the files you are looking for, a great advantage to just wind the full tape. As the application were store and rarely read, this approach has some advantage from a some very particular point of view. In hard drives should be much faster than on tape.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sgleysti on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:41PM
This would be true of any write once optical media or any OTPROM type memory.
I do wonder why optical tape hasn't taken off for backup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @04:34AM
It's called "tape".
https://www.overlandstorage.com/blog/?p=323&p=323 [overlandstorage.com]