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: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:54AM (2 children)
TPS is an issue... Not the office space report but transactions per second.
The ratio of drive size to file size is gonna be the access contention ratio for RAID stuff.
For "most people" with "most raid/SAN arrays" I think their TPS needs will be the limiter which prevents using 20TB drives.
I'm just not seeing file sizes increase to match, from the old days of 500 GB drives now to 20 TB drives. Its not so much that there's 40 times the available storage that we don't need anyway, but the issue is now because drives are bigger we'll have fewer drives (operating at constant speed) leading to 40 times the congestion and contention and slower access rates.
Even for "home use" I can't enjoy more than a couple TB of pr0n or legacy media movies/TV, there just isn't enough out there and the cost of categorization and search increase with that much raw stuff.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:01PM
You seem to be missing the primary intended applications for this drive.
It offers sufficient capacity to have usable space left after installing Windows.
It offers capacity to keep redundant copies of files on the same drive. That way if you suffer a drive failure, you're protected.
If you really must use this drive in a RAID configuration, then use two drives: one drive holds the zeros, and the other holds the ones. Now if one drive in the RAID fails, it is very easy to swap in a replacement filled with either zeros or ones.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 1) by NickM on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:05PM
They for Amazon glacier and the like, you are not the target consumer and unless someone here is purchasing drive for the cloud giants, I am sure that nobody else here is either...
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:18PM (1 child)
from wikipedia "The overlapping-tracks architecture may slow down the writing process since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten as well."
strange tech :P
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:48PM
...as a consequence, changing a single bit on the disk requires rewriting the whole thing.
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:10PM (5 children)
Never bought another Western Digital. Two of them died.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:26PM (2 children)
Nice anecdote. You just confirmed you don't know how the industry works.
(Score: 2) by Chocolate on Thursday September 12 2019, @11:23PM (1 child)
Two died in a short time. In the middle of a couple of decades of buying hard drives and knowing hundreds of people who buy them. Yes, drives die. The Deskstar aka Deathstar was notorious for just dying.
http://www.silent11.com/blog/archives/2005/05/imb-deskstar-deathstar-75-gxp.html [silent11.com]
https://goughlui.com/2013/03/01/hard-drive-disassembly-the-ibm-deathstar/ [goughlui.com]
Perhaps this was before your time.
Nice reply. You just proved that you do not know your history, and cannot or will not execute a basic search for information.
Bit-choco-coin anyone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @04:57AM
Of course I know the history. The problem is that drive failures from over a decade ago should not cause you to boycott WD today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001 [wikipedia.org]
Plenty of people swear they will never use a WD or Seagate drive again because MUH DRIVE FAILURES, and they are dumb for saying so. Specific models have issues that do not carry over to later models.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @06:12PM (1 child)
Oh those were the days, when IBM Deskstar got the nickname of "Deathstar" for a reason. However, if you look at the statistics now, HGST has had some of the best reliability statistics in the industry for quite some time. Western Digital and Toshiba is somewhere in the middle-high range. It is currently Seagate that is trying to pull themselves out of the reliability hole. However, all manufacturers are now below 1.5% in their warranted period and under 3% for 5 years and around 8% for 10 years on "desktop" drives. Laptop drives have higher failure rates and enterprise drives have lower ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 13 2019, @04:31AM
Several friends of mine back then worked in local computer stores. The return rate / failure rate was so bad they stopped ordering them switching to Seagate and other brands. Seagate had a bad reputation for some of its drive types, but nothing like the Deathstar.
You expected minimum quality for low priced consumer gear, but not for slews of hardware to die like that. DOA? Sure. 12 month 20% failure rates? OK. "Expect this device to suddenly not work probability at 70%"? No.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Thursday September 12 2019, @01:16PM
You lost me at SMR, sorry. I'll take more reliable drives that can read AND write regularly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @02:28PM (3 children)
I want a 20 TB floppy, so I can carry it in my pocket.
Oh, never mind . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @02:53PM
Just so long as you're happy to see me!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @02:54PM
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-microSD-UHS-I-Adapter/dp/B07PBY4VD5 [amazon.com]
You can fit at least 100 of these in your pocket. Just don't bend it too much.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 12 2019, @03:07PM
When discussing either a big hard di_k or a floppy di_k, don't use a typewriter with one broken letter.
It would not be possible to infer which letter was intended until the discussion shifts to the subject of a micro _D _ard.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(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 server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(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 server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(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]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @09:20PM
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(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12 2019, @09:43PM
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