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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the defrag-with-windex dept.

Using a glass substrate instead of aluminum could allow 12 platters to be crammed into a 3.5" hard disk drive enclosure:

Even if many modern systems eschew classic hard drive storage designs in favor of solid state alternatives, there are still a number of companies working on improving the technology. One of those is Hoya, which is currently prototyping glass substrates for hard drive platters of the future which could enable the production of drives with as much as 20TB of storage space.

Hard drive platters are traditionally produced using aluminum substrates. While these substrates have enabled many modern advances in hard drive technology, glass substrates can be made with similar densities, but can be much thinner, leading to higher capacity storage drives. Hoya has already managed the creation of substrates as thin as 0.381mm, which is close to half the thickness of existing high-density drives.

In one cited example, an existing 12-terabyte drive from Western Digital was made up of eight platters. Hoya believes that by decreasing the thickness of the platters through its glass technology, it could fit as many as 12 inside a 3.5 inch hard drive casing. That would enable up to 18TB of storage space in a single drive (thanks Nikkei).

When that is blended with a technology known as "shingled magnetic recording," 20TB should be perfectly achievable.

Toshiba is reportedly planning to release a 14 TB helium-filled hard drive by the end of the year.

Also at Network World.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:44PM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:44PM (#567379)

    These will never survive mail order from NewEgg.
    Does any anyone still buy from them? (Curious)

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:48PM (13 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday September 13 2017, @06:48PM (#567381) Journal

    The article speculates that these would be primarily used by data centers.

    ... so you would have to use neweggbusiness.com instead heheh.

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    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:17AM (12 children)

      by Reziac (2489) on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:17AM (#567580) Homepage

      Yeah, just like those multi-terabyte HDs are all being used by datacenters right now!

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:33AM (11 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:33AM (#567587) Journal

        I don't know what you're getting at, but the primary customers for today's helium-filled 10-12 TB (and soon 14 TB) hard disk drives are data centers. And they are priced accordingly.

        http://www.anandtech.com/show/9955/seagate-unveils-10-tb-heliumfilled-hard-disk-drive [anandtech.com]
        https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2016-12-06-western-digital-introduces-advanced-devices-to-manage-evolving-data-center-application-demands.html [wdc.com]

        If you are trying to make a point about NAND/SSDs, it's still too early for most to switch to all SSDs. Cheap and dense QLC 3D NAND could help change that, but there is still a place for spinning rust right now.

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        • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:38AM (4 children)

          by Reziac (2489) on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:38AM (#567591) Homepage

          No; referring to all the mutli-TB drives suddenly on the consumer market. I remember when they were all "datacenter drives" too.

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          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:47AM (3 children)

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:47AM (#567598) Journal

            I'll be really impressed when I see a helium-filled consumer HDD. I don't think there has been a helium-filled drive intended (and priced) for consumers to date, but it's entirely possible that we will see that (helium allows you to increase platter density/count).

            AFAIK all of the capacity points above 8 TB are paired with helium.

            With WD, Seagate, and what's left of Toshiba all offering helium-filled drives, one of them should be able to make the jump to consumers. And I think some consumers would buy it.

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            • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:45AM (2 children)

              by Reziac (2489) on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:45AM (#567641) Homepage

              I just saw a 10TB offered ... ah, hell, I don't remember which retailer but one of the consumer outlets. I rather doubt consumer and enterprise are different under the hood, at that level.

              And my first thought was... considering the *gasp* price of tape libraries, how exactly are we supposed to back up that much data without growing our own server farms??

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        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:55AM (5 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:55AM (#567623) Journal

          I don't trust QLC as far as I can throw it until there's some good, repeatable benchmarks out there for the stuff. Bear in mind for nLC SSDs there are 2^n values each cell has to store.

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          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:43AM (3 children)

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:43AM (#567640) Journal

            If it doesn't reach a certain level of endurance, it simply won't be adopted by enterprise customers. They are going to be the first ones to get their hands on QLC NAND, not you. And they have more demanding workloads (full drive writes) than typical consumers. Facebook is particularly thirsty for QLC NAND [tomshardware.com] (alt [techtarget.com], note: "We asked for QLC flash a few years ago, and we ask for it again").

            Toshiba has suggested that QLC could have a similar endurance to TLC [soylentnews.org]. A full 1,000 write cycles instead of the 100 write cycles that had been predicted. That sounds unbelievable, but then again we've heard of labs working on methods to try to get endurance something like a million times better [ieee.org]. Or maybe the endurance problem doesn't scale exponentially like the 2^n states do, and 1,000 write cycle QLC is believable.

            If you meant speed, most consumer PCs don't really need super high transfer speeds beyond 500 MB/s. It was the increased random IOPs that really made the difference for people switching from HDDs to SSDs. Even a crappy SSD should be able to do 2-3 orders of magnitude better than an HDD on random IOPS.

            There are also tricks to make the QLC SSD perform better, especially in consumer or enthusiast drives meant to hit higher speeds/IOPs. For example, QLC could emulate SLC/MLC (using 4-8 of 16 states to pretend to be 1-2 bits per cell). Or you can include SLC/MLC as a cache, DRAM as a cache, Intel 3D XPoint as a cache, etc. You can do extreme overprovisioning to help boost speed and endurance since QLC drives are going to have high capacities.

            When QLC SSDs do hit the consumer market, review sites will be all over them on day 1 if not before. So unless you preordered your SSD, you should at least have an idea of what you are getting.

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            • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:11AM (2 children)

              by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:11AM (#567648) Journal

              Where *is* 3D XPoint, by the way? I remember them wittering on about how it was going to eat SSDs alive, but all that's out there isn't even bootable. Just some Optane cards that are basically the SSD portion of "hybrid" SSHDs on massive amounts of 'roids.

              When they can make a 10 TB hunk of 3D XPoint at a reasonable (well, reasonable by datacenter standards...) pricing, *then* we'll see some fireworks.

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              • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:46AM (1 child)

                by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:46AM (#567660) Journal

                3D XPoint [wikipedia.org] a post-NAND technology [theregister.co.uk] (also referred to as storage class memory [tomshardware.com]) along the lines of Crossbar's RRAM or HP's Memristors. It occupies a memory/storage tier in between DRAM and NAND. It is denser than DRAM, cheaper than DRAM, slower than DRAM, and non-volatile unlike DRAM. It is less dense than NAND, more expensive than NAND, and anywhere from somewhat faster than NAND to order(s) of magnitude faster, highly dependent on the type of workload. This article explains it pretty well [arstechnica.com].

                Now you have had several companies working on post-NAND for years. Crossbar [wikipedia.org] has been hyping [theregister.co.uk] their shit for years. They have promised all around better specs than NAND and the ability to store multiple terabytes in a postage stamp-like form factor [theregister.co.uk].

                So Crossbar, HP, Micron, IBM, Crocus Technology, Unity Semiconductor, Samsung, Toshiba, Spin Transfer Technologies, and other companies have all FAILED to get a legitimate post-NAND technology onto the market outside of some megabyte-sized cache products. Intel comes along with their concept and has apparently rushed it to market (although it has been delayed somewhat). It's in the post-NAND category, but it's not a true replacement for NAND since it doesn't try to compete with NAND on capacity/density and cost per bit. Intel is definitely not giving us terabytes of this stuff in postage stamp size anytime soon.

                I will say this much for XPoint. They have 16 and 32 GB modules at reasonable prices [soylentnews.org]. They can be bought today - the 32 GB one is around $75-$80. So if your motherboard happens to have an M.2 slot, and you wanted to try this out as a kind of non-volatile boot drive, it would seem like you can do it fairly cheaply. Here are benchmarks [legitreviews.com]. DRAM prices have increased in the last 2 quarters, btw.

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                • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:11PM

                  by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:11PM (#567870) Journal

                  LOL, riiiight after posting my last post I went "hmm, maybe I should Google this..." and found all that information. It's odd how the 16 and 32GB devices have worse sequential write than an NVMe NAND SSD, but the read speed looks good. And the 4K, low-queue-depth reads especially. I have only a 20GB root partition, so this would be viable for a Linux boot drive.

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          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:57AM

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:57AM (#567643) Journal

            About the consumer drives, capacity/$ and higher capacity is the draw rather than speed. I think 20-30% reduction in cost per bit has been typical for each new generation of 3D NAND. I don't know if anybody has estimated a % for the first upcoming QLC SSD products yet. Obviously, you get 33% more capacity over the equivalent TLC NAND, but that could be offset somewhat by higher manufacturing costs.

            Speculation: What if a move to QLC (or 8 bits-per-cell [theregister.co.uk] in the future) results in a slight performance boost simply from making cells more similar to bytes? In QLC, 1 byte is stored in 2 cells. For TLC... it's 2 and 2/3 cells?

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:03PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:03PM (#567388) Journal

    As to your question, I haven't bought from Newegg in the last year but I have had pretty good experiences with it. Rather than searching on their site, I would check SlickDeals [slickdeals.net] first.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:14PM (#567396)

    Microcenter's price is competitive with all the online shops, or better when on sale. If there is one near you, you can go and pick it up right away. Also, if you run into defective units, replacement is quick and easy.