Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives on their way

Re:Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives ... by Duff on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @12:01PM (#3729920)

This is similar to the announcements from Intel about advances in lithography. Intel announced the 32nm process technology in 2009 -- that process gives them a platform to refine and improve their technology.

So now, a top of the line Xeon is faster, has 10 multi-threaded cores, includes AES acceleration, and uses 20% less power than it's predecessor 3 years ago... thanks to that base technology.

If you're running a business that generates/consumes alot of storage, this announcement means that you need to start thinking about how to deal with a petabyte of storage capacity with performance characteristics similar to what you have today. (for 1/30th capacity)

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Re:Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives ... by Retric on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @12:17PM (#3730032)

HDD transfer speeds do increase as storage density's increase. It might be more accurate to say 30x the space but only square root (30) times the transfer speed.

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Re:Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives ... by moe on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @09:00PM (#3732550)

Random access performance will be an issue, unless they work some magic on that, too. Same for bus-speeds.

Today you can fit about 96T into 4U if you squeeze a little. That's 48 spindles then, sharing the load.

With 60T drives that turns into 2.8P on the same 48 spindles.

At today's maximum SAS bus-speeds (roughly 10 GBit/s) it would take 33 days just to write such an array full (assuming all components can sustain that throughput).

And let's not get started on IOPS...

Anyway, it will be a while before 60T drives hit the shelves. Until then at least the bus-speed issues will probably be sorted out.

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