Seagate starts shipping enormous 22TB hard drives to "some customers":
Whereas NVMe SSDs tend to focus on getting faster, good old spinning hard drives are intent on getting larger. Tom's Hardware reports that hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced on a recent earnings call that it is shipping huge 22TB hard drives to some of its customers. The company uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to squeeze a couple more terabytes out of its biggest drives.
The highest-capacity drives most people can currently buy top out at 20TB; the Seagate Ironwolf Pro or WD Gold are two such drives, and they both generally retail for over $600. In its NAS drives, Seagate uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which provides better random read and write speeds than SMR disks but at a lower density—this is fine for archival storage but not so much for servers where multiple users are regularly accessing and modifying data.
[...] But as of early 2021, Seagate said it was aiming for 30TB drives by 2023, 50TB drives in 2026, and 100TB drives by 2030.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 01 2022, @07:01PM (4 children)
We are preparing for the day that a Windows installation ISO 32 TB in size, and Microsoft Office is another 20 TB. Load up that bloatware!!
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @07:06PM
No, they're thinking of DannyB's CP collection.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday February 01 2022, @10:13PM
Even if Windows takes 32 TB and Office takes 20 TB, we will have tons of usable space on our computer.
By that time . . . a simple one page Word document will probably only require a measly 1 GB to save. Think how many of those can fit into all the remaining few terabytes of storage.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 03 2022, @10:24AM (1 child)
Microsoft Office? You think that will still be available as separate software package by then, instead of a web service with monthly subscription fee?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 03 2022, @12:44PM
At special enterprise prices, Microsoft will give you what you need.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by r1348 on Tuesday February 01 2022, @08:02PM (7 children)
That's basically the "some customers".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @10:03PM (2 children)
I don't work at Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Facebook or any other company with a name you'd recognize. However, we can order them from our vendor we use for some of our clusters. There is a minimum order requirement, they are quote-only, and there is a lead time but you can order them. I would think that the reason behind their decision is that they are partially customizable and the whole WD Red hubbub made quite clear that some software and some people cannot handle SMR drives.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Spamalope on Wednesday February 02 2022, @03:02AM (1 child)
WD Red + Seagate laptop/2.5 inch drives where the fact they were SMR was... not exactly disclosed. A co-worker ordered some Dells that were delivered with those. Performance is... dismal. Win10 install 1.5 hours; glacial boot time etc. - the regular drives weren't speed demons but we're talking 5x slowdown on install and a greater impact on random IO that includes writes.
The manufacturers had quietly replaced 'normal' drives with SMR drives without notice. That's the source of that hubbub.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 02 2022, @09:57AM
No argument about the cause being that WD wasn't as up front as they could have been or that SMR drives or that they have different performance profiles from CMR drives. But the issues it revealed was still made dead obvious to everyone paying attention just the same regardless of the cause.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 02 2022, @12:03AM (3 children)
The drives are most likely NSA drives not AWS drives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 02 2022, @01:57AM (2 children)
I wouldn't know if the NSA may or may not purchase them, but the commercial sales would definitely drive the market. Government sales for this kind of stuff is relatively small. If you're a chip fab, you want to tie up your equipment making hundreds of some kind of special designed chip you can't sell anywhere else, or do you want to make billions of something that goes into an iPhone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 02 2022, @02:42AM
Around the Snowden leaks, there were claims that the NSA was going to store zettabytes in its new datacenters. That was not feasible at the time, but if $/TB drops to 1/10th what it is now...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 03 2022, @02:03AM
The "commercial sales" are to government contractors running data centers... for the NSA.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Tuesday February 01 2022, @09:44PM (7 children)
If you plot 20, 30, 50, and 100 TB vs. 2021, 2023, 2030, and 2050, it looks to be exponential growth. I wonder what in their technology supports that? It certainly is more than just adding more platters.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 01 2022, @10:21PM (2 children)
Hard drive growth has been exponential for quite some time. The technology today behind a hard drive are superficially similar but there are many differences that would have sounded like sci-fi a few decades ago.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday February 02 2022, @08:04AM (1 child)
That *was* true until, say, 10 yrs ago. The HD industry kept innovating so the customer saw a smooth exponential growth of capacity. To me this is an even greater success story than CPU technology. However, that development came to a grinding halt about ten years ago with hardly any progress. Maybe, at the time, manufactures were wary of committing to new investments due to SSD market share growth. It became clear that HD are here to stay as no non-spinning media can rival re-write longevity of HDs as well as the offline durability. Since then capacity growth has picked up but more at a linear pace. I own a 5 TB 2.5" drive from ~ 4yrs ago. I still cannot buy anything larger. Using the recent past as a guide, this makes the roadmap of Seagate look quite optimistic - I don't believe it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday February 02 2022, @08:35AM
The 2011 Thailand floods [wikipedia.org] happened around that time. Although I think the real culprit was a slowdown in PMR improvements along with over a decade of delays for HAMR. It just wasn't ready to carry the torch [wikipedia.org].
The 2.5" drive category in particular has been demolished by SSDs. First it was 2.5" SSDs, then smaller drives coinciding with a trend towards thinner laptops. So I doubt you will find an HDD upgrade for that 5 TB. 4-8 TB consumer SSDs are around, just not price-competitive. Meanwhile, 3.5" chugs along, and there are some pretty ambitious roadmaps, but the consumer is entirely a second class citizen.
I would love to see something come along and beat the hard drive in capacity and price. No, not tape, some kind of holographic/optical media instead.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday February 01 2022, @11:19PM (3 children)
They have to switch to newer technologies than perpendicular magnetic recording to increase areal density and hit higher capacities like 40 TB and 100 TB. HAMR/MAMR [wikipedia.org], bit-patterned media [wikipedia.org], etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Wednesday February 02 2022, @03:10AM (2 children)
I wonder how much longer sales volumes will be able to fund the advances needed to keep them viable.
How healthy is the market now? Consumer use is plummeting, but what does the server market look like compared to R&D costs?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 02 2022, @03:42AM
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-shipments-in-q1-2021 [tomshardware.com]
Total sales are trending downwards as consumers and consoles switch to SSDs, total capacity shipped trends upwards. Enterprise use is growing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 03 2022, @09:56AM
We use plenty of drives. We could always store more data too. The limiting issue now is the interface speed. Once a drive fails, we are regularly getting at least one URE during the rebuild with drives that big and the interface speeds being what they are. Double and triple failure situations also happen with low regularity. On a few occasions, we've had to rely on the replicas for fault tolerance. Due to these sorts of concerns, I'd actually expect that the major changes in the future will be some announcement for increasing the parallel ability of drives. Even reliably maxing out a SATA 3 connection or somehow exposing multiple actuators to the driver to do the same could easily make you the de facto drive to put in large and hyper scale arrays.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday February 01 2022, @10:48PM (1 child)
We will soon be able to store all the world's knowledge onto a micro SD card smaller than your thumbnail . . .
. . . and lose it in the corner of a room, eventually to be sucked up by the robotic vacuum cleaner.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 01 2022, @11:15PM
MicroSD has stagnated... oh good, I'm not the only one who noticed:
Where are the 2TB microSD cards? [androidauthority.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]