HDD with HAMR HD Density based Platters bring 80 TB HDDs on the horizon

Those are some impressive numbers, and will surely keep HDDs relevant a bit longer. These drives would be excellent for archiving, since their sequential read/write speeds ought to be very fast and they just have so much capacity. However, the random read speeds of these must be absolutely atrocious. You might need an SSD just for dedicating indexing, and another SSD for cache.

 

I haven't touched a mechanical hard drive since 2015 and would never go back to using them. Your basic SATA SSD's are reasonably priced, plenty faster and with no moving parts inside them, less likely to skip (in a laptop) or break. And they run silent.

NVMe SSD's offer even better performance with insane speeds and now they're cheap enough to buy with decent capacities that you can use them as your main OS drive and for storage. They take up far less space too.

 

That's fine for some but for the price of a 2TB SSD, you can buy say 10-12TB HDD. If you need mass storage, SSD's are nowhere near there, price per TB anyway.

 

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The is still no replacement for large capacity spinning disks for bulk storrage.
example:
2x 16TB harddrives in raid 1 for safety.
8x 4 TB SSDs are needed to reach the same capacity and mirror backup.

I do not think "normal" of the shelf motherboards are able to run hardware raid with 8 drives, so software raid needs to be used, with all the added performance hit on the CPU required to monitor 8 drives in software.

Not everyone needs this much capacity, but a streamer or youtuber could easily reach those numbers, if they save there videos locally.

 

80TB is astonishing, considering that my first PC came with a 7Gb HDD or so. For long years to come HDD will still be the go to for mass storage and archival needs.
I've been using SSD for boot drive for a couple years now and just invested on an NVMe. I wouldn't go back to HDD, but the price just isn't there for SSD storage.
The common mortal will use maybe a fast 512Gb/1Tb NVMe as a boot drive and a 1/2Tb SATA SSD for casual storage. Then have External HDD as needed to have an offline archive to go back to.

 

my first pc came with not even 5mb harddrive i feel old, then again my body make me feel even older with all pain i have... anywho I just recently swaped over to all SSD, i would never want to go back to HDD for anything other then pure storage space, unless HDD have some huge break threw that increases here speed to near SSD speeds.

SSD are nice but there storage space to price ratio is anything but close to HDD prices, just recently 1tb ssd droped to under 100$ which still way to much.

 

RavenMaster is for sure off his rocker as small nas with will still cost you arm & leg as much new car
You forgot yes DVR and DVD/Blu-ray Movie user

 

It annoys me to no end when people claim HDDs have no purpose anymore because apparently SSDs are dirt cheap. Try finding a high capacity SSD, oh wait those don't exist. Try finding a medium capacity SSD that doesn't cost A LOT more than a similarly sized HDD. Oh wait, those don't exist. The cheapest 2TB SSD I can find on newegg.com is a Crucial BX500 for $200 USD. I can find many HDDs of a similar size for a quarter of the price, from reputable brands like WD. Mass storage still requires HDDs, unless you're made of money or don't need more than a few TB.

 

That is big. My first PC came with no usable internal space, just a cassette drive and floppy drive. 80TB is pretty amazing. At least today. Give it some years, this will be smaller than what we have in our mobile devices.

 

SATA HDD's are at a dead end.

time to move to SAS HDD's with multiple actuators

 

As an owner of several HDD's of 14TB capacity, I would say you are correct.

It takes FOREVER for the drive to be scanned or loaded with data or that data being read.

It basically reads/writes at around ~115-120 MB/s average... that's almost 120.000 seconds for accessing the drive fully filled, or 33 hours of continuous data flux. Insane !


... however that doesn't mean that the drives with this new tech in the article will be equally slow. It's already possible to hit 300 MB/s with high-end speed-oriented HDDs, and with denser bit packing, they will most likely hit the 550 MB/s limit of SATA 3.

But, the "cheap" drives for consumers (like those in External boxes) will probably be as slow as today. I don't want to imagine the amount of patience needed to fill or read a 40TB drive with just 110 MB/s...

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But on the subject of "HDD's are dead", everyone saying that is so far away from reality, it's not even funny.

You use Youtube ? Well, you're watching a video stored on a HDD.
So look at somebody's funny pic on Facebook ? It comes from a HDD.
You read your G-mail ? It's read from a HDD.

Or maybe you read an article on guru3d.com?... I can bet that the major part of this site is still stored on HDDs.

Enough said...

 

@wavetrex people so often think only about their use case thinking is the onlyway and only use case sadly , companies still back up terabytes on tape !

 

I don't think (or atleast haven't seen any evidence of) HAMR drives coming in SATA interface.

 

Nice. However, just thinking about backing-up the backup is giving me more grey hairs lol.

 

From a home user perspective :
With current drive speeds, at best it will take 4.6 days of uninterrupted copying at 200MB/s to fill 80TB, 1.1 days for 20TB.
Backing it up will be just as much an issue.
Average speed of most drives (you will copy to/from) is much lower unless in RAID. You will be lucky to have near only 10% of the drives capacity in SSDs.
I also fear for its random access speed.
This isnt meant for home users yet, the price tag will dictate that.

But progress is progress. We will learn how reliable it is in the long term before it reaches mainstream. It will no doubt evolve.
I have to hope multi head controller drives become the norm, effectively RAID inside a single drive. This will reduce the storage space any head has to address making access times and read/write faster. Multi head can be used more creatively to allow multiple reads/writes simultaneously, giving the same benefit as independent drives
Wikip says ye normal 20TB HAMR drives are expected this year.

 

These drives are seemingly designed so as not to fragment too.

 

Interesting, thanks.

 

As always it depend your use right now i have 20 To of HDD and nearly full (and no it's not p*rn lol) at work i have twice this space...
It's impossible right now to have those capacity in NVMe SSD or even Sata SSD at a descent price, it only can be used for OS or cache (what i have on both system btw).
Then you have no other choise to use HDD.

Sata might be used too, lot of user still use it and don't have SAS system.
SAS is mostly used in server or video,and there is still workstation that only use the SATA to reduce the cost despite the huge benefit of a real controler.

 

Ok, found some evidence of SMR being SATA compatible, but HAMR is an expansion of SMR

https://sata-io.org/developers/sata...ecording-boosting-capacity-and-lowering-costs