Seagate to offer 300 Tb hard drive by 2010

I really cant believe this happening. From 2-3 TB to 300 TB.


Just in time be installed in the PS4, an Xbox 720, the Wii Wii, a TiVo for masses of HDTV recording, a computer running the successor to Vista or Mac OS X, Seagate wants you to store it all on a massive 300 TB hard drive.



The way technology moves forward, 300 TB on a 3.5-inch hard drive may not seem so big in 2010. But here in 2007, it’s a lot of data, especially when Seagate’s largest single hard drive capacity is a paltry 750 GB in comparison.

-Correction- The 300 TB is actually terabits, and not terabytes. Therefore, the new Seagate drive in 2010 will store approximately 37.5 terabytes, and while that's just over 10 times smaller than a real 300 terabyte drive, it's still massive compared to the drives we are using today. And who knows what we'll have by 2011, or 2012!

The technology used today to expand hard drive capacities is called perpendicular recording, where bits are recorded to a hard drive in a vertical fashion, instead of horizontal, allowing many more bits to be recorded into the same physical space.

To pull the 37.5 terabyte (or 300 terabit) rabbit out of the hat, technology comes to the rescue once again. This time, Seagate will use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). These isn’t much detail on exactly how this works, but a single square inch of hard disk space will be able to store 50 terabits of data.

According to an online report from Joystiq, this is enough to store the entire ‘Library of Congress’ without needing to use any compression. It will also be enough to store 6,144 50 GB Blu-ray discs. That would be tens of thousands of standard DVD discs, hundreds of thousands of CDs and probably billions of photos.

There are concerns about losing 37.5 terabytes of data to a hard drive crash, but if 37.5 TB is truly the norm in 2010, buying a spare 37.5 TB to back it all up to won’t be that expensive. Defragging tools had better dramatically speed up, or a defrag might take days - unless, as has been pointed out, you're using a file system that doesn't need defragmentation like NTFS.

We don’t hear too much these days about holographic storage or where that will be by 2010, nor do we know how much capacity flash storage will offer by 2010. Still, an iPod nano sporting 1 TB of storage on flash memory may well be a reality by 2010, too.

Storage. It really is the answer to the space we need for our digital lives. Space is the final frontier, after all, although I’m sure Captain Kirk would laugh at the impossible prospect of flying the huge Enterprise starship through the 300 terabits of space contained on a 3.5-inch hard disk platter.

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/8350/532/

 

Size is great but its going to be all about cost/speed/failure rate.

I need a TON of space, I just got two more 1TB drives and want to build a Windows Home Server with atleast 16TB and I plan to do so with 1.5TB drives even though we have 2TB drives out there simply because the 2TB drives have a really high failure rate and cost nearly 30% more per GB than the 1.5TB drives.

Its possible by the time this thing comes out SSD will be taking over for mass storage. They can fit a lot more storage in a small space with SSD than mechanical HDD and it will be faster and live longer too. This makes it very appealing to people like me that want it for server/backup use, but the cost factor is the issue currently. However as the tech becomes more mainstream I think we will start to see some slower speed high capacity desktop targeted SSD tech hit the market.

 

"Never put all you eggs in one basket," is my motto. One terabyte is good enough for me.

In that case, it won't do much good to replace your current HDD since there is still a significant cost difference.

 

Exactly! It's going to be interesting to see the kind of failure rate these new drives will have. I wonder if, because of the larger storage size, if there will be more heat given off by these drives?

Regardless, there is swiftly coming a time of diminishing returns when it comes to mechanical hard drives. As an enthusiast that has yet to jump on the SSD band wagon, I can see that in a year or two the price versus capacity ratio start swinging into SSD's favor as more manufacturers race to bridge the gap between price and performance that everyone wants in SSD.

 

This isn't news, the article is from 2007 lol

I think they were too ambitious at the time, because I didn't hear about any 37,5 TB drives coming out soon. If anyone has any recent info on this or on the coming hard drives of seagate please do share.

First of all, since when do NTFS partitions don't need defragmentation?

And second.. lol@iPod nano

 

I can't really see this being any use for my uses. An 80 to 200GB drive is more than enough for me. I understand that technology keeps moving forward, but I think this is getting a bit ridiculous for home use.

 

This isn't going to happen within 15 months. That article was written over two and three-quarters years ago.

 

Yes exactly, that is why I would be using Windows Home Server with its Raid 1 like function.

Its a hell of a lot easier to fit say 8x 2TB drives in a PC for 8TB of redundancy than it would be 16 1TB drives for the same storage amount, plus all the while it would produce more heat and consume more power.

Having larger drives with redundancy trumps just having multiple smaller drives, they will still fail at some point, and having a large number of them just increases your chances of a failure.

Still despite how nice it would be to build with 2TB drives, like I said I would go with 1.5TB drives simply due to cost and the lower fail rates.

Oh yeah there is! there are a ton of reasons!

SSD is basically perfect for storage & server work, problem is the cost and capacity. We are speaking about the future when capacity will be higher and cost lower.

You have to look at things as an investment.

If we had a 10TB SSD unit that costed say 3x more than 10TB of HDD's it would be so worth it.

Why?

> It would use less power and produce less heat, this would reduce your running costs and also make having it around much easier.

> No moving parts no sound also probably a lot smaller in size, so instead of a big giant server case you may have a mini tower.

> Speed, SSD is way faster than HDD so it could do your backup and server work faster.

> Life, MLC is suppost to last like 5 years under heavy regular use? SLC like 20+ years?? Your going to be replacing those HDDs in that time period, so over time the SSD starts to pay for itself, also from what I understand a SSD does not just "FAIL" one day it knows when its cells are starting to wear and can mark those sectors as bad, so you wont lose your data and you have a chance to replace the SSD and copy the data before it dies.

This means you could have 10TB of space safe on a single 10TB SSD, but for the HDD with there sudden failure you need 20TB of HDD in a Raid 1 like config.

So you can see if you really think it out SSD really has a lot of reasons to be used over HDD and it has a lot of ways in that it pays you back for using it, but currently prices are WAY too high to make this work out as being a logical choice for backup/storage and capacity is not quite there other than some ultra expensive specialty models.

 

There has also yet to be a true low cost SSD. I would be happy with a SSD that never broke 100 MB/s as long as random and small file performance was good. Most people never break 100 MB/s in actual real-world usage, so the benefits come in multi-tasking and small file performance. OCZ's Solid 2 is a potential home run in this area and is much like Vicious is saying.

 

Yeah if SSD was ever targeted for desktop backup and home server use this is what I would like to see:

> SSD speed can be greatly reduced in the name of a lower price, the speed will not be needed in this application.

> Long life span should be a priority

> Formfactor for high capacity desktop use, no more of this dinky 2.5" laptop drive stuff. Make it something that is a single unit that fits on the bottom of the case and just has SATA connections. Or maybe better yet make an external version of it if its really big that plugs into a wall like a external hard drive and it has USB & ESATA connections.

> Cost needs to be no more than 3x or 4x the cost of the traditional HDD's that would add up to the same capacity or it would still be better to use HDD's for most people.

> Some kind of fail protection would be nice, I heard about how SSD have self testing of bad cells to prevent data loss, but my fear is if you only use one depending on that that something like the actual controller goes out on the unit and causes loss of all your data, so unless they drive cost all the way down to 1x or 2x the cost of HDD it needs to find a way to keep your data safe without RAID. I think a replaceable controller or something would be the thing I want to see, if you know your data is all safe and just stored on there, dont let a failed controller system bring down your whole drive.

 

It may or may not be. Computer manufacturers are typically upping the amount of storage they provide with their computers. Nowadays, 320GB is common; and with traditional computing applications that's more than any average person would need. However, people are now using their computer as multimedia devices, and as such, can quickly utilize every bit of that available storage capacity.

 

If you rip every bluray movie you get from netflix, it adds up very quickly. My dad used to do this with DVD's back in the day.

 

I have downloaded over 300GB of TV shows this week lol.

And yes HD stuff takes up huge amounts of space, sometimes I get SD just because SD vs HD is not too important to me most of the time and it takes up a lot less space.

Though these people that share the files could learn a thing or two about good H264 encoding, they can reduce the file size significantly if they changed there encoding settings and still retain 95% of the visual quality.

I start Dexter Season 2 today, thats the show I am most hooked on right now.

 

Scene: http://xs343.xs.to/xs343/09375/9608.png
Properly encoded x264 1080p: http://xs343.xs.to/xs343/09375/a925.png

I know they go for speed, not quality, but that's just bad.

I archive some of my DVDs in x264 and if you know what you're doing you can get source transparency at a fraction of the full size.

 

You only really need less than 1tb unless your storing uncompressed video (pretty much pointless) or 1080p videos that are hours long, like security videos or something. Some users here are junkies lol 300gb a week, dam! You must have 50 rapidshare accounts or a couple hundred thousand set aside for itunes!

 

Or your music library looks like this:

 

Isn't that what make the world grand? And why we have such a variety of computers. Nevertheless, you have a valid point\: Even high speed providers Comcast admit that these people are a small percentage of their total customers base. Still, if anything video is your computing preference, you will need upward of 300GB--and beyond--if you don't want to smack into a download wall shortly after you purchase your machine.

 

I have 2.5TB currently, I need to re-partition because my media library is growing faster than the space.

 

300TB is terabits not terabytes so it kind of misleading any way it comes out to 37.5TB from today's 2TB drives. Why the hell do Hard Drive companies mislead?

I can see a 37TB hard drive easy by 2010 where as a 300 seems a bit of a stretch.