New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
5tb HDD on the Horizon?
According to Seagate, its latest 1TB platter 3.5" drives have shrunk read/write heads as small as they can physically go. Similarly, tracks on those platters are placed as close together as physically possible. Pushing areal density is important to increase overall capacities (no one wants to see more platters per drive), but if we're at physical limits today then it's time for some architectural changes to push capacities going forward.
Seagate's solution is something it calls Shingled Magneting Recording (SMR).
Comments
venturebeat.com/2013/08/05/crossbar-says-it-will-explode-the-60b-flash-memory-market-with-resistive-ram-which-stores-a-terabyte-on-a-chip/
tl;dr
Watch out for newer cheaper SSD drives!
I read this a little while ago and it seems that flash memory may be getting a long needed upgrade.
I entered IT world when IBM/360 was still very popular and PDP/11 was a real beauty. The first really personal PC I had had a huge disk of 20Mb and it was more than enough for whatever I could imagine.
Now my smartphone has computing capacities more than all the computers I used to perform non-empirical calculations for my graduate papers. So no, I am not surprised to expect 5TB in real future.
"It takes less than month to fill the disk of any capacity with data you would feel sorry to part with".
RRAM has been talked about for decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory
Nothing has come of it as yet. edit: Well ok not nothing. They've found a million and one ways that don't work.
@Abdussamad It has been but this seems to me like like they may actually be doing something with it. Could just be me being hopeful
I think the physical limitation is not so much with heads as with magnetic materials reaching quantum effect size phenomena. Thats why they used perpendicular and later preheating and now sonic waves to prepare surface before magnetizing.
I think NSA does not care about physics, if they need bigger drives, they will make it happen one way or the other. If you have unlimited access to taxpayer's money in a rich country, you will invent other storage technologies if necessary.
"I summoned you, gentlemen, to this meeting in order to announce my decision. We launch our Unlimited Capacity Transphasic Storage Drives in two weeks. To hell with physics!"
I think the fact that writes on these disks will be significantly slower is the biggest draw back...
@Master_Bo i will peraphrase - he who has the money printing press can't be bothered with trivial limitations In this case they can buy as many drives as they want.
It all depends on the physics beside it. If there were means to store arbitrary number of information within reasonable small device, it wouldn't be too hard to devise a proper controller to address data unit of arbitrarily big number.
More interesting question is how would one devise file system able to span across arbitrarily big addressing space.
@Master_Bo - According to their press release they've made their platters layer data like singles to increase capacity. The downside to doing this is once the data changes in a specific block the entire track has to be rewritten. That means at a minimum your going to have 25% slower writes.
And they will be introducing new methods of increasing performance to make up. Usual story. Same with ssds.
Perhaps a hybrid-drive system? SSD/Flash memory onboard to do caching with while it's writing the block?
It wont make sense. Will just wear off the ssd/flash since writing will most probably be a one-off operation and if a lot of writes occur, will likely be more of a burden than speed up things. Maasive disks are for massive data bursts, not running things off them, so I expect big back-ups to be dumped there making any caching at writing redundant.
Momentus -XT right?
Correct.