Western Digital has announced a 12 terabyte helium-filled hard disk drive, as well as an upcoming 14 TB shingled magnetic recording HDD. The 3.5" 12 TB drive contains a whopping eight 1.5 TB platters, and does not use shingling:
HGST's Ultrastar He12 HDDs use speedy PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology in tandem with eight platters to provide a beefy 12TB of capacity. The 7,200-RPM HDD provides solid performance measurements of 243 MiB/s of sustained sequential performance and 390/186 read/write IOPS at QD32. The helium-infused HelioSeal design allows the drive to scale to eight platters and provides a 2.5 million hour MTBF. [...] The hits don't stop at 12TB; the company also has a 14TB SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) HDD on its immediate roadmap.
WD also announced an Ultrastar 8TB SN200 SSD, and confirmed that it is working on QLC NAND SSDs that store four bits per cell. Micron also announced an 8 TB (7680 GB) SSD this week.
Also at The Register.
Related Stories
Seagate claims that it has had 12 terabyte hard disk drives "in the field" for "several quarters", and that 14 TB and 16 TB drives are coming soon. The company has a goal of producing 20 TB hard drives by 2020:
The enterprise is also moving en masse to speedy SSDs for high-performance workloads, which recently led the company to halt further development of 15K HDDs. Many analysts opine that 10K HDDs are next on the chopping block. In response, Seagate shifted its production might to more lucrative high-capacity enterprise HDDs, which now account for 37% of its revenue, to leverage the shrinking HDD price-per-GB advantage over SSDs. Seagate recently closed its Suzhou, China manufacturing plant to reduce manufacturing costs, but it simultaneously increased its investments in other facilities to address the challenges of moving from six platters per drive to eight. The net effects of its maneuverings total $300 million in savings per year.
Seagate is essentially retreating into the high-capacity segment, and the company announced that its new 12TB HDDs have already been shipping to key customers for several quarters. Seagate CEO Steve Luczoalso noted that the company would offer 16TB drives within the next 12 to 18 months. Seagate's new high-capacity offerings are destined for data centers, NAS, DVRs, and a booming surveillance market.
Also at Ars Technica and The Verge.
Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Western Digital is shipping 12 TB helium-filled hard disk drives containing eight 1.5 TB platters:
Western Digital on Wednesday announced that it had begun to ship its HGST Ultrastar He12 hard drives with 12 TB of capacity. The HDDs are the first drives to employ eight platters, so the fact that Western Digital is now shipping them is important not only for its datacenter customers who need massive storage capacities, but also because the drive represents a significant step forward from a technology point of view.
The HGST Ultrastar He12 is based on Western Digital's fourth-generation HelioSeal technology, which uses eight perpendicular magnetic recording platters with 1.5 TB capacity each. To add the eighth platter, Western Digital had to redesign internal components of its HDDs (including arms and heads) significantly. In addition, the company increased areal density of the platters, which improved the sequential read/write performance of the new hard drives. In particular, Western Digital claims that the HGST Ultrastar He12 has a sustained transfer rate of 255 MB/s, an average latency of 4.16 ms, as well as an average seek time of around 8 ms.
Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Western Digital is now shipping 14 TB hard drives. The products use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which can slow down re-writes:
Western Digital has started to ship its new HGST Ultrastar Hs14 hard drives, promoted as being suitable for cloud datacenters and for hyperscale developments. The capacity increase from its predecessor, the Ultrastar Ha10, from 10TB to 14 TB offers a significant performance improvement. The new 14 TB HDD is based on shingled magnetic recording technology, which is a system that naturally focuses more on sequential write performance. These drives will only be available with host management, which means it will not be available to general consumers, but only to select customers of HGST.
The HGST Ultrastar Hs14 relies on Western Digital's fourth-generation HelioSeal enterprise platform which integrates eight platters and features various internal components specially designed for such hard drives. The new helium-filled HDD has a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 512 MB cache. and numerous enhancements when it comes to reliability and durability of the drive. As with other HGST enterprise-class HDDs, the Ultrastar Hs14 is rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and comes with a five-year warranty.
Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Western Digital Begins Shipping 12 TB Helium-Filled Drives with 8 Platters
Seagate Launches Consumer-Oriented 12 TB Drives
Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025
Toshiba is sampling a 9-platter, 14 terabyte hard disk drive that uses "conventional magnetic recording", aka the traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) with no shingling:
The new series comes with both 14TB and 12TB disks that wield nine and eight platters, respectively. Toshiba also becomes the only company with a nine-platter drive with 18 heads. Each platter packs 1.56TB of data storage.
Competing HDD vendors (WD and Seagate) have used helium designs for several years, so Toshiba has largely been considered late to adopting a helium design. Toshiba fills the 3.5" drives with helium instead of air and uses a laser sealing process to contain the gas. The helium reduces internal air turbulence from the spinning disk. In turn, it reduces vibration and provides power, performance, and reliability advantages. It also allows the company to use thinner platters, which facilitates the additional ninth platter.
While Toshiba may be the last HDD vendor to market with a helium HDD, the company did it in style. The MG078ACA, which carries a tongue-twisting name because it is destined for the data center, currently weighs in as the densest HDD on the market using conventional recording techniques. That represents a 40% increase in density over Toshiba's previous-gen 10TB models.
[...] Toshiba currently has 24% of the HDD market share according to Coughlin and Associates, which comes in third to Seagate (36%) and Western Digital (40%). The company has been surprisingly resilient and has clawed back market share over the last year. The addition of a class-leading 14TB model should help it gain even more market share over the coming year.
Both drives have a 5 year warranty.
1.8 TB 9th-generation PMR platters are possible and could be used in a 16 TB Toshiba HDD late next year. Will we see 2 TB per platter without the use of HAMR/MAMR or shingles? Combine that with 12 platters (using a glass substrate), and suddenly you can have a 24 TB HDD.
Also at AnandTech. Previous article.
Previously: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
Seagate Launches Consumer-Oriented 12 TB Drives
Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025
Western Digital Shipping 14 TB Helium-Filled Shingled Magnetic Recording Hard Drives
Seagate to Stay the Course With HAMR HDDs, Plans 20 TB by 2020, ~50 TB Before 2025
Seagate has announced a 14 terabyte helium-filled hard drive that uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) rather than shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Toshiba announced a similar drive in December:
Seagate this week formally introduced its first hard drive with 14 TB capacity aimed at cloud datacenters that does not use shingled magnetic recording. The new Exos X14 HDDs are filed with helium and are based on the latest-generation PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) platters, running at 7200 RPM.
[...] The Exos X14 is Seagate's response to Toshiba's MG07ACA HDD with 14 TB capacity announced last year, although until we recieve further information, we cannot do a direct comparison. The major benefit of both drives is their increased capacity that enables datacenter operators to store 3360 TB of data per rack (compared to 2440 TB with 10 TB HDDs), which is a key advantage for companies that need to maximize their storage capacity per square meter and per watt, while meeting other TCO objectives. Another indisputable win of 14 TB hard disks from Seagate and Toshiba (vs. HGST's Ultrastar Hs14) is their conventional magnetic recording technology, which ensures predictable writing performance and permits drop in compatibility of the HDDs with existing storage applications.
The author guesses it will have nine ~1.55 TB platters, like Toshiba's version. 9th-generation and beyond PMR platters that can store 1.8 TB or more may be seen before the technology is phased out:
[November 2017's] top-of-the-range enterprise-class 3.5" HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital can store up to 12 TB of data. They are based on eight 8th generation PMR platters featuring ~1.5 TB capacities. Toshiba is a little bit behind its rivals with their 10 TB units featuring seven 8th gen platters with 1.43 TB capacity. With the arrival of the 9th gen PMR platters in 2018, hard drive makers will be able to increase the capacities of their eight-platter models to 14 TB, while designs with seven platters can go up to 12 TB.
Related: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Western Digital to Use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording to Produce 40 TB HDDs by 2025
Western Digital Shipping 14 TB Helium-Filled Shingled Magnetic Recording Hard Drives
Seagate to Stay the Course With HAMR HDDs, Plans 20 TB by 2020, ~50 TB Before 2025
Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB HDD Review: Massive Storage for Desktops
The exponential increase in data storage requirements over the last decade or so has been handled by regular increases in hard drive capacities. Multiple HDD vendors supply them to cloud providers (who get the main benefits from advancements in hard drive technologies), but, Seagate is the only one to also focus on the home consumer / prosumer market. In the last three generations, we have seen that Seagate has been the first to target the desktop storage market with their highest capacity drives. The 10 TB BarraCuda Pro was released in Q3 2016, and the 12 TB version in Q4 2017. Seagate is launching the 14 TB version today.
The Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB is a 7200RPM SATAIII (6 Gbps) hard drive with a 256MB multi-segmented DRAM cache. It features eight PMR platters with a 1077 Gb/in2 areal density in a sealed enclosure filled with helium. The main change compared to the 12TB version introduced last year is the usage of two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) heads, allowing for higher areal density (1077 Gb/in2 vs. 923 Gb/in2 without TDMR).
Launch price is $580.
Western Digital has announced a 15 TB hard drive, beating the current crop of 14 TB drives before the release of 16 TB drives by itself or others (Seagate had planned to release a 16 TB drive by the end of 2018). The drive uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and is helium-filled:
Western Digital notes that its new 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD is the industry's highest capacity hard drive, and the company is aiming it at those who want to pack the most storage into as small a space as possible. The Ultrastar DC HC620 uses shingled magnetic recording to increase density, and while Western Digital notes that SMR requires some extra work on the part of the end user, that's worth it when it comes to overall cost per terabyte and total cost of ownership.
[...] Release date is another unknown at this point, too. Western Digital says that it's currently shipping qualification samples to some of its enterprise customers and that the HDD will become widely available later this quarter, but that's as specific as the company got with today's announcement.
Also at The Verge.
Related: Western Digital Announces 12-14 TB Hard Drives and an 8 TB SSD
Seagate's 12 TB HDDs Are in Use, and 16 TB is Planned for 2018
Western Digital Shipping 14 TB Helium-Filled Shingled Magnetic Recording Hard Drives
Toshiba Announces its Own Helium-Filled 12-14 TB Hard Drives, with "Conventional Magnetic Recording"
Seagate Announces a 14 TB Helium-Filled PMR Hard Drive
Seagate Launches 14 TB Hard Drive for Desktop Users
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Friday December 09 2016, @07:33PM
How many electrons are they down to on those multi-level floating gates?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @08:02PM
If it doesn't work, then they can't sell it with a significant warranty. If it does work, they can.
SSDs are nowhere near the limits. They could probably hit 5000 TB in 3.5" within the next 20 years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @07:38PM
I mean how much do you need?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @07:43PM
16 TB, and additional 16 TB drives for RAID?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snotnose on Friday December 09 2016, @07:49PM
Hell, 16 TB can't even hold the porn starring your mom.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:54PM
Dammit, my mother is not on the cover of crack whore magazine!
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:09AM
Damn, my funny comment got modded funny. I was expecting insightful.
Soylent needs to tell us who modded what how, cuz it's a crapshoot now.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday December 11 2016, @01:36AM
Heh, somebody modded this +1 informative. I'd like to know who the soylenter is who's mom has been in 16 TB of porn.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday December 09 2016, @07:51PM
8K 3D porn does take a lot of space. I'm glad they're saving room by making easily-compressed audio.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @07:54PM
You need at least 8K-16K res (4320p/8640p) to do an accurate characterization of the physics of cum droplets.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:24PM
And diagnose what those sores are. I once saw a porn with this woman who had open sores all around her pussy. So yea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:38PM
You'd think they would at least airbrush over what I hope are pimples on a number of the women's buttocks/thighs.
I mean who watches porn to be reminded of what actual sex with average people is like? :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:05AM
And yeast, don't even mention yeast!
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday December 10 2016, @09:32AM
It's not just about pixels, you need a high framerate also.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:10PM
I heard they compress the plot and the story line. You wouldn't believe how small it can get.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday December 09 2016, @10:37PM
You gotta feel bad for today's teenagers, in a sense.
Old porn set up expectations at realistic-if-big sizes and 5-to-10-minutes romps in shaded areas, while newer porn mandates pro-grade stamina, skills, and aryan-dreams physical attributes. And looking good while doing it under bright lights needed for high resolution.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Friday December 09 2016, @08:25PM
Well in neuroimaging with functional analyses on large projects? Alot. My little projects with 200 subjects gets close to 3 Tb on its own. So for a server cluster hosting a whole department's analyses, for example, you might need 50Tb or more.
subicular junctures
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @09:39PM
I currently have about 35 TB in movies. (bluray/DVD) ~3k in ripped discs. That is 10 4TB HST drives. With about 4TB remaining in usable space.
With the 8TB SSD I could have half that and 1/10th the power usage, one less synology box, and 1000x the performance.
With the 14TB drives I could have 56TB usable in half the space or 112TB usable in the same space.
Yes there are use cases out there for this. Not all of them porn.
I do however like how they neatly did not say the price. Meaning it is retarded.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 10 2016, @03:13AM
If it follows the pattern of previous helium-filled drive releases, it is for datacenters and not the general public.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @01:45PM
I currently have about 35 TB in movies.
(...)
Yes there are use cases out there for this. Not all of them porn.
Right, right, of course. Is your movie folder named "Definitely not porn"?
:)
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday December 09 2016, @07:42PM
Western Digital got into the SSD market late, by buying SiliconSystems for their first (largely ignored) offerings, and then buying SanDisk [anandtech.com] for this offering.
I'm not sure I'd be comfortable investing that much money into a four bits per cell technology due to the performance and longevity issues. [techtarget.com]
They only offer a three year warranty as long as you keep the writes under some fairly small multiple of the total capacity. (Some others offer 10 years and vastly larger write endurance).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @07:47PM
Toshiba and others are investing in QLC. Like with MLC/TLC, 3d/vertical NAND allows you to blow past the endurance issues like they are nothing (larger nm sizes, ability to scale by adding more layers, and massive overprovisioning). 3D/vertical NAND has saved the NAND industry and put it on a collision course with HDDs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 12 2016, @06:13PM
3D vertical simply allows a smaller package. it has nothing to do with durability or read/write errors. (It literally means they are stacking discrete chips on top of each other in a single package - no magic there).
Bits per cell speaks to the actual storage technology. More is NOT better. Its cheaper, and less reliable, and less durable. Two bits per cell is what the 10 year warranty products are all using.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 12 2016, @06:39PM
I already explained how 3D/vertical allows better drive endurance despite the use of TLC. Reread the post.
More bits per cell can be cost effective despite reliability issues, or there would be no attempt to move past TLC. Now we can see that several companies are developing QLC (and not just for low write scenarios like camera SD cards). Obviously, the drives will end up being 3D QLC.
A 5 year warranty should be more than good enough for most users. A drive with that kind of warranty could last much longer than that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by compro01 on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:20AM
Testing suggests that the longevity concerns about TLC are overblown [techreport.com].
Granted, the sample size of 1 is way too small to be conclusive, but even the point before the wear indicator even starts to move, is well beyond typical use. My own 840 (also 250GB) is sitting at 7.5TB after just over 2.5 years of daily use. Their test unit didn't start retiring sectors until past 100TB, which would take me 40 years at this rate.
(Score: 2) by hamsterdan on Saturday December 10 2016, @01:46AM
Agreed. My OCZ Agility2 is now at around 20TB writes after 7 years (half of that without TRIM), I expect to retire that drive because it will be too small/slow before it even touches reserve blocks. I've had many mechanical drives fail in the same amount of time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Friday December 09 2016, @08:07PM
8 TB (7680 GB)
So which is it?
In Base10 8TB would be 8 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes, or 8000 GB, or 8,000,000 MB, or 8,000,000,000 KB, or 8,000,000,000,000 Bytes
In Base2 8TB would be 8 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes, or 8,796,093,022,208 bytes
If we assume that's 8,000,000,000,000 bytes, in base 2 that would be 8000000000000 bytes, or 7,812,500,000 KB, or 7,629,394 MB, or 7,450 GB.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @08:12PM
The way I wrote this is that the first number is the lie and the number in parentheses is the truth. The article headline refers to it as an 8 TB drive but it is in fact 7.68 TB.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:40PM
Remember your i next time takyon :)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:18AM
It's not that either. If the slides are right, it's exactly 7.68 trillion bytes or 7.5 billion KiB.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday December 10 2016, @05:14AM
The first number is the truth, the second is the lie. But, really, they're both "lies" in that the filesystem takes up some of the space.
This whole "controversy" is why units like mebibyte and gibibyte were invented. The base 10 numbering is the correct one, as that's what those prefixes mean. The use of Giga and Mega to mean something other than billion and million respectively was never the correct terminology. You can sort of get away with that in the US where we don't generally use SI prefixes, but in the rest of the world, it was blatantly wrong.
(Score: 2) by bryan on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:30AM
Read the article about the SSD, it is a TLC drive with user adjustable over-provisioning. So, you get to choose if you want the full capacity of the drive (with lower write endurance) or set a lower capacity (and get higher lifetime from the drive.)
So their three models (ECO/PRO/MAX) are the same drive with different settings.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Friday December 09 2016, @10:54PM
Any estimate of cost ? ...quickly googled the models ..no clue if if it is $10 or $10000.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @10:08AM
"If you gotta ask the price you can't afford it."
The best guess is these will be eye-wateringly expensive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @05:28AM
...for someone who had chicken pox as a child.