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 ChuckMcM on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @07:19PM (#3732202)

Sadly, if you look at the mean-uncorrectable error rate you will notice that for a 2.5TB drive, the chance of getting an error when reading it all the way through is 100%. Or, basically you can't use 'mirror' RAID to protect your data because you can't reliably read the entire drive.

New and more interesting error correcting bits are going to be needed here. I could imagine a device with 60TB of raw capacity providing 20TB of data you could read reliably though.

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Re:Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives ... by Jetlag on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @02:28PM (#3735737)

A couple of thoughts.

WD lists their 2.5TB drive as having "Non-recoverable read errors per bits read" as "<1 in 10^14" and the drive has about 2 x 10^13 bits, so while the chance of an error in one whole disk read is non-trivial, it's not 100%.

Mirroring will still work fine as long as the error is detected. The chance of read errors in the exact same sector of two disks should still be small. Silent errors were always a problem for mirroring.

At what point do we as consumers start considering drives to be defective? Is the underlying ECC suffering because of the need to hit greater storage numbers?

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