News Seagate hints at 8TB, 10TB hard drive launch plans

Should have called it MOAR.

Hey, it would work: Magnetic Orientation Assisted Recording.

 

I wonder how reliable these hard drives are going to be...

 

Boy, oh boy. That's one hell of a lot of p0rn

 

spinning-rust drives?

 

The platters are coated with Iron Oxide (rust) to store the magnetic charge.
It's also why cassette tape was brown.

 

Impressive amount of storage data. A few years ago (make that more then four) we had a lot of discussion here on BT about SSD going to overtake HD's in a couple of years. Still there is no sign whatsoever in large amount of storage increase and price drops on the SSD part. HD drives are still pretty reliable too even more so then SSD.

The only big problem for HD's still is performance.

 

From my personal experience, SSD's are more reliable than HDD's.

More specifically Samsung SSD's (the whole range) are more reliable than Seagate HDD's (not including their latest SSHDD but time will tell).

I wont go into too many details but this is across multiple thousands of drives, in all sizes over the period of ~1 year in a whole host of real world scenario's.

 

I must have missed it, but SSDs are continuing to come down in price. In the last couple of years SSDs have moved significantly closer to HDD in terms of price per GB. HDDs still lead by close to a factor of 10, but it used to be a factor of 100.

You can now sometimes get 256GB SSDs on sale for around $110-120. $.45-.50 per GB. Current best deal I can see is on 3TB HDDs that you can sometimes get for $100. .$033 per GB, about 15x better price per GB.

In the last year that went from 256GB for around $160-180 to $110-120 (sales prices and YES, low end SSDs, but you can say the same with HDDs as high end HDDs run 30-80% more). 3TB drives, the best price per capacity generally, have gone from around $120 to sometimes $100. 40% reduction in SSD prices, around a 15% reduction in HDD prices.

Unless the move to 6, 8 and 10TB drives really depresses the price of 3/4TB drives, I think it is unlikely that HDDs will move the bar to better price per capacity in comparison to SSDs, ratio-wise.

I think it is unlikely SSDs will have the price per capacity crown any year soon. Maybe not ever (using NAND Flash), but they are creeping up on being affordable for enthusiasts with moderate storage needs.

Right now I couldn't grok getting a couple of 1TB drives to replace the storage in my server (I am currently utilizing 1.7TiB of 3.6TiB total (pair of 2TB drives in RAID0)), as that would run around $1,000. In 2-3 years though? That might be $400-500. I could wrap my head around that, even if it isn't likely I'd be willing to spend that much (and I'll probably need closer to 3TB total storage).

In 5-6 years though, following trends, even if I need 4-5TB of storage then, that might only cost me $500 or so...that just might be worth it for the low power and much greater speeds (and I'll probably have a 10GbE link between my server and desktop, making it doubly worth it). Also in someways easier to do an SSD storage space through windows than relying on RAID0 (or 10, or 5/6) for extra speed with spinning disks and can just keep tacking on SSDs, which is harder to do with RAID and basically impossible with different sized and speed HDDs.

SSDs you can just keep adding to the storage space as you need capacity, low failure rate with low to modest writes (file server) combined with fast individual drive speed and its really perfect for the job. At least once it is a little more affordable (closer to $.10-.20 per GB).

 

Well duh, everything mechanical is automatically less reliable than it's solid-state counterpart (when used under the proper conditions).

Today, the purpose of mechanical HDDs is massive storage. If they make a consumerist version of these 10TB drives, it will likely cost less than $300. Nearly all 0.5TB SSDs start at $300.


Anyway, I feel like if drive manufacturers want to discourage from consumerist purchases, SAS is a good way to do that.


@jrs77
I know what you mean. I have a 64GB SSD that I use for linux and 2 250GB HDDs in RAID for Windows and both sets of drives are more than 70% empty. The appeal to these drives (for consumers) is being able to store all their media. HD content takes up a LOT of disk space. Also, some people have a stupid amount of music. And by stupid I mean they have songs they added to their collection that they never heard before.

 

They have to be reliable though imagine filling it then it dies !!

10TB that's a lot of data to lose..unless you buy 2 and back up at least with 5 2TB's you still have the other 4.

 

For me personally it's media, my internet connection isn't amazing so streaming isn't an attractive option.

 

Depends on how you intend to fill it. If you're filling them up with just games, all you have to do is backup your saves. The rest of the content you can get back fairly easily (it'll just be tedious). Some people use hard drives as an archive for their optical disc movies too. Thankfully, Seagate has pretty a pretty picky SMART so you should know well ahead of time if you're about to lose data.

In the server world, you MUST have redundancy. 10TB is a lot to back up but you have to do it anyway.

 

8TB is my magic number for my emulation station. Covers every system Wii and under.

As my HTPC can only hold 1x 3.5inch (and 2 x 2.5inch) drive I want a single drive with all that storage. My NAS can back it all up across multiple drives it would just make loading times much faster if I had everything on an internal drive.

 

20Mp cameras with1080p video, no doubt 4k in the near future.

Those lolcatz files are getting bigger every year.

 

When I was still in high school and I started building my own machines I remember HDD's breaching the Pound per GB barrier.

I remember thinking I was the **** for having a 120GB HD!

The development pace is rapid, this conversation about SSD density will look silly in 5+ years!