from the we-can-make-our-tech-sound-funny dept.
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
Related Stories
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.
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
Seagate has launched three new 12 TB helium-filled hard disk drives containing eight perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters:
These are not the first 12TB drives in the market, as enterprise versions from both Seagate and Western Digital have been around for some time. However, Seagate is the first vendor to bring down the prices and ship 12TB drives in the consumer market.
From a hardware viewpoint, the three drives are similar to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v7 drives launched in March 2017. All of them features eight PMR platters with a 923 Gb/in2 areal density in a sealed enclosure filled with helium. That said, the Barracuda Pro Compute, meant for desktop use, doesn't come with rotational vibration (RV) sensors or dual-plane motor balancing hardware. The RV sensors and the dual-plane balance / AgileArray features enable reliable performance in multi-drive enclosures. The other important differentiation aspects include firmware features, warranty / workload ratings, and value-added services like the Seagate Rescue Data Recovery.
Two of the drives come with 5 year warranties.
Previously: HGST Announces 10 Terabyte PMR Hard Drive
AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
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 HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
Western Digital is planning to use Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) instead of Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) to produce hard drives with capacities of up to 40 terabytes by 2025:
WD has selected MAMR (Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording) as its new HDD recording technology, which the company claims can enable up to 40TB HDDs by 2025. WD's rapid transition to MAMR is somewhat surprising, but the technology has been in development for nearly a decade. It certainly stands in contrast to Seagate's plans for using the laser-assisted HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) as the route to higher storage density.
The transition to the new recording process isn't immediate, but WD plans to have initial products shipping by 2019, and it had working demo models this week at its event in San Jose. The improved recording technology is needed to keep HDDs cost-competitive with the surging SSDs, but economics dictate that SSDs will never replace HDDs entirely, especially as the volume of data continues to grow exponentially; WD predicts that HDDs will account for ~90% of data center storage in 2020.
The technology announcement reportedly took the storage industry by surprise and MAMR doesn't have the same issues that have delayed HAMR:
WD pointed out that MAMR requires absolutely no external heating of the media that could lead to reliability issues. The temperature profiles of MAMR HDDs (both platters and drive temperature itself) are expected to be similar to those of the current generation HDDs. It was indicated that the MAMR drives would meet all current data center reliability requirements.
Based on the description of the operation of MAMR, it is a no-brainer that HAMR has no future in its current form. Almost all hard drive industry players have a lot more patents on HAMR compared to MAMR. It remains to be seen if the intellectual property created on the HAMR side is put to use elsewhere.
Will we have 100 TB by 2032?
Also at BBC, PetaPixel, and Engadget. WD Technology Brief.
Previously: AnandTech Interview With Seagate's CTO: New HDD Technologies Coming
Seagate HAMR Hard Drives Coming in a Year and a Half
Glass Substrate Could Enable Hard Drives With 12 Platters
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 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.
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
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: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:21PM (8 children)
Why not 10,000 RPM speed instead of 7,200 RPM?
With helium being such a tiny atom, how can they effectively seal the drive for long duration without the gas escaping? If the gas escapes does drive performance degrade or suffer in some weigh?
Wow 14 TB, that ought to be enough for anybody!
If I record my voice in an mp3 file and play it back will it sound funny due to being helium filled?
If we sing a slaying song tonight, what tools will be used for the slaying?
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:26PM (2 children)
Whoa, whoa there. Calm down. Take a breath. Step away from the keyboard. Take a nice calming walk outside, then come back and re-assess.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:32PM
It's why I try to avoid posting high.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:34PM
Alternatively, consume all 14TB of porn therein, then come back and re-assess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:29PM (1 child)
Price?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:45PM
That question is answered in TFS:
Translation: A lot.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:39PM (1 child)
Probably reliability although you would think the helium could counteract. Also 10K makes much less sense because SSD has taken over speedy applications and this is for bulk, mostly cold storage.
Economics of high RPM HDDs discussed here and it ain't a pretty picture for the 10-15K RPM spinning rust:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/10/128tb_ssds_signal_coming_armageddon_for_disk_drives/ [theregister.co.uk]
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/13/about_the_real_price_of_flash_and_disk/ [theregister.co.uk]
I would have to look it up but I think it still works after seal failure. Both WD and Seagate spent years developing the technology. Warranties are like 5 years so they must be confident in it.
No your voice will not sound funny and how dare you make a joke out of this srs bznss.
~t
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday November 03 2017, @01:46PM
I would never make a joke on Soylent.
If we sing a slaying song tonight, what tools will be used for the slaying?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:24PM
Former employee at an HDD company:
10,000 RPM burns too much power, customers prefer slower to more power hungry.
Helium is kept in with laser welds. Yes, I'm unsure as Helium wasn't my thing, but it could actually be a catastrophic failure, hence the laser welds.
I heard that same thing said of 1GB long ago.
No, no it will not.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 02 2017, @10:49PM (3 children)
How long do these drives last? Lately, I have had too many HDDs die young on me. I'd rather have a 4TB drive that lasts 10 years (if there is such a thing) than this if it's going to fail in 3 years. The "TB years" is nearly equivalent: 4*10 = 40 vs 14*3 = 42.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @10:53PM (1 child)
"the Ultrastar Hs14 is rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and comes with a five-year warranty."
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Sunday November 05 2017, @06:32AM
The MTBF number is marketing bullshit, the actual MTBF is likely well below that. However, should it fail within 5 years I would trust them to honor the warranty.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday November 03 2017, @12:39AM
Most folks using something like this will have a very large number of spares on hand to swap into their RAID arrays or zPools or whatever. It won't really be targeted to people who are going to buy one and notice if it fails.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:29PM (4 children)
Given that SMR records one thing partially underneath another underneath another, and all those others have to be moved out of the way to re-write something old, saying that it "can slow down" rewrites is sort of like saying that filling your car with lead "can potentially result in lower top speeds and possibly lower gas mileage."
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Friday November 03 2017, @12:41AM (1 child)
Also, SMR really, really sucks when used with a regular filesystem. Without specific tuning for SMR, f2fs fares best by a good margin despite having been designed for a completely different use case (flash with weak FTL). In theory, btrfs should shine as well but this is not the case -- and no one implemented such SMR tuning yet.
You want random writes (even to structs like inodes) be converted into a long linear write, appending only within a specific zone.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @12:47AM
This is an enterprise bulk storage product. Although WD implies that this could be used to replace non-shingled 10 TB drives.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @12:52AM (1 child)
I strongly hedge when writing summaries. "which can slow down re-writes" replaced something like "which has lower write speeds" in draft 1. In fact, initial sequential writes for this product are up by a lot from the Ultrastar Ha10.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday November 03 2017, @11:27AM
Ah, my post was part clarification, part silliness. No criticism intended--and you're right, rewrites are the case where SMR doesn't shine (not writing in general).