HDD data density to hit 2.4Tb/in² 'by 2014'
15TB 3.5in drive, anyone?
World+Dog may have its eye on solid-state storage, but hard disk engineering isn't going to run out of steam any time soon. Disks capable of holding an amazing 2.4 trillion bits in each square inch of their surface are coming within the next five years, an industry executive has forecast.
Speaking at Japan's Information Terminal Festival this week, Hitachi Global Storage product planning chief Tetsuya Kokubo said we'll see 2.4Tb/in² HDD data densities in 2013 or 2014.
Today's 3.5in hard drives have a data density of around 400Gb/in². According to Kokubo, that'll rise to 600Gb/in² over the next 12 months or so, then double to 1.2Tb/in² in 2011-2012.
Less than two years later, we could see 3TB-per-platter drives on the market - 15TB of storage with a five-platter drive.
Delivering that capacity will be the job of new techniques for recording bits on each platter's surface. Kokubo pointed to the use of "patterned media" and "discrete track media", Nikkei's Tech-On reports.
The former involves creating a grid of holes on the disk's surface, each holding a discrete amount of magnetic material storing a single bit of data. The discrete track technique establishes concentric or spiral rings of recording area separated from other rings by grooves.
That's just the storage - reading and writing the data will require ever smaller, more accurately positioned read/write heads, with the current single-pivot actuator arms on which the heads are mounted replaced by multi-joint arms. ®
COMMENTS
@ frank
"If they are using 2 SSDs striped, that would be for access speed. Striping is for speed, mirroring is for data recovery." ... yeah I know ... it was more the technology exists to hide it (which I hadn't seen in action before). Personally I suspect it was to keep the price down and use smaller SSDs for the same capacty tbh ... not seen it mentioned anywhere in their literature and not before I bought it either (not that im complaining its there tho).
not sure how there gonna backup 15TB though ... new usb speeds and the like maybe ... but even so ... a 15TB backup would make most give up I suspect.
Hard disks are increasingly going to get use for near-line archival use
=pr0n collection.Need improved collection manager.
NFTS volume limit is 2^64-1 clusters, though Windows implementations so far (upto WS2003/XP at least) work with a lower maximum of 2^31-1 clusters.
Dosent apply with EXT or ZFS tho. I can see a case where XP luddites will eventually have to move ...possible hardware war on the horizon between FOSS and M$ fanbois?
Sinclair Microdrive
They were rated at 100kb but normally only gave <up to> 90kb.
They worked fine for me!
I actually thought after adding the third drive to my Sinclair QL as <excessive>
Think about the IOPs...
The fundamental problem with increased areal density is that performance relative to the capacity takes gets ever worse. Unless disks can be spun faster (and they are pretty well at the physical limits now) and the heads moved more quickly then things only get worse. The number of random IOPs on HDDs has barely changed since 15K drives are available and there is absolutely no sign of any major move in that area. Sequential access speed goes up only linearly whilst capacity goes up to the square. Broadly, quadruple the capacity and you only double the transfer rate - os it takes twice the time to read all your data.
Access density is going to get ever worse with these beasts. Hard disks are increasingly going to get use for near-line archival use. Essentially they are going to head more the way of tape. A good SSD will slaughter an HDD on IOPS performance, low latency and so on. In 5 years time HDD will get consigned to budget systems and near-line semi-archival purposes. I'll use them to keep my photos on, but I don't want my system disk or high throughput OLTP services to be one of these in 2014.
@Henry Wertz
MBR partitioning has a 2TB per partition limit. Switch to GPT (supported today) to surpass this.
NFTS volume limit is 2^64-1 clusters, though Windows implementations so far (upto WS2003/XP at least) work with a lower maximum of 2^31-1 clusters. This gives 16TB (-4KB) with the default 4k cluster size, rising to 256TB (-64KB) at 64k clusters today, with scope to raise the limit to 1 YB(-64KB), which is more than an order of magnitude more storage (per volume!) than currently exists across all HDD in the entire world (according to Wikitrivia anyway).
