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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.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:09AM (3 children)
With embedded you should be running your OS with a read-only root, and have carefully dimensioned your storage writes to last the intended life time of the device. And, you know, fail gracefully when you inevitably run out of writes ahead of time :)
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday September 14 2017, @05:24AM (2 children)
Yes. Hindsight is 20/20. :)
I'm doing so few writes to disk now that the lifetime is suitable.
How? I can make my code do that, but my impression was that there was a deeper problem in the operating system and a little corruption. Grace failure was handled by redundant devices, but when they go within hours of each other...
I'm not an expert at the underlying system, so any suggestions are welcome. I also got the impression from the other poster that SSDs can fail in different ways, some of them I can't handle gracefully :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday September 14 2017, @06:13AM (1 child)
Barring the SSD going bonkers on you, if you mount your storage partition with the appropriate options to remount-readonly on error, you can have a watch for that happening and raise whatever type alarm is applicable. In the meanwhile, your other apps will get EPERM or some such when they're trying to write, and as long as they can handle that sanely, you should at least be able to get a message back to base to say "hey, this unit is just about dead, come fix me!".
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:53PM
Thanks for the suggestions :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.