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?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:19AM
Maybe Huawei will solve [huawei.com] this problem (not for the common man though).
Maybe shingles will die off once HAMR arrives, and sequential speeds (and reliability?) will pick back up.
Or maybe V-NAND or a post-NAND will start putting terabytes in postage stamp sizes and we'll consign HDDs to the scrap heap.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:22PM
Looks interesting, but I kind of doubt what they came up with is functionally any different from the ZFS striping that goes on in any RAID-Z1/2/3 scheme. It's probably an improvement on the defects of traditional RAID5/6 though, just as ZFS is.
As is pointed out in the FreeNAS thread, increasing data density just exacerbates the problem of data protection unless read/write and seek times are also improved by orders of magnitude. Random read/write and seek times are of course already quite atrocious compared to sequential speeds, even on many SSDs. Hard drives were supposed to already be dying off by now, according to some people's predictions, but I have a feeling they will still be around in the mass storage arena even beyond a couple of decades from now.
No, keeping bits from degrading and being lost is not going to be a problem with a simple solution no matter what type of storage hardware we end up dealing with in the future. And it's going to become tremendously important when each physical storage medium eventually ends up storing petabytes of data. You lose a 1TiB drive and you just lost a decade's worth of someone's personal files. You lose a 1PiB drive and you just lost the equivalent of the entire digitized Library of Congress.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ