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HGST Announces Delivery of First 10 TB Helium/Shingled HDDs

posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the remember-when-they-said-spinning-drives-were-finished? dept.

takyon writes:

Western Digital subsidiary HGST has announced the Ultrastar Archive Ha10, a 10 terabyte helium-filled shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drive. It rotates at 7,200 RPM and has a 256MB cache.

HGST has also released libzbc, "a simple library providing functions for manipulating disks supporting the Zoned Block Command (ZBC) and Zoned-device ATA command set (ZAC)."

The new drive is intended for enterprise bulk storage that is infrequently accessed. SMR tracks are partially overlapped which can hurt drive performance. The Ha10 has lower sequential write speeds than the He8. Seagate has already released 8 TB SMR drives.

What's next? 12 TB? 16 TB? HAMR?

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:02AM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:02AM (#194762) Journal

    The SMR access process is handled by the host application (host-managed SMR) instead of by the drive itself, as drive-managed SMR can exhibit unpredictable access latency – as shown by Storage Review [storagereview.com].

    As this is a host-managed drive, application software will need to be changed to make use of the drives and it is envisaged that hyperscale archive software providers will do this. Study the chart [regmedia.co.uk] to see how HGST classifies the level of host software change needed.

    HGST says it's working with both PMC-Sierra and Avago-LSI for HBA support. The product can be expected in the second half of the year.

    There is an open source developers' kit at github [github.com] which ensures new command sets flow through the HBA and also emulates a host-managed SMR drive on non-SMR (perpendicular magnetic recording or PMR) drives.

    To have a look at the drive request access through HGST's design registration program [wwwhgst.com].

    This 10TB drive is undoubtedly a watershed but doesn't signify broad availability of 10TB drives as it uses shingling, which slows write performance and requires host software changes. HGST anticipates that hyperscale archive service providers is the market to go for, the ones needing to archive social media, online content and backup, medical records, and scientific and digital assets.

    Deep archives on disk with data that is read only occasionally (the "last copy") will need another disk drive tech advance to get the costs down to make it preferable to tape – if such an advance can ever be made.

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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:31AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:31AM (#194784) Homepage Journal

    I've done quite a lot of storage work, and so have some connections.

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