Grain-Based Magnetic Recording Could Give Us 50 TB HDDs

[kinggraves]

You could fit a lot of songs on it, you don't say?

How about the HD content that more and more people are demanding these days? 1080p already takes up a ton of space and that's not even the newest tech. 4k and 8k resolutions will take even more. HDD capacities are FAR behind necessity right now, and I've seen promises of 50TB for years. Mag tech needs to innovate fast or get replaced, because it's going to be holding back progress soon. This is one justification people are using for "the cloud".

 

[tomfreak]

strange enough not a lot of research has been put into improving HDD biggest weakness.

 

[Guest]

Hmmm, I think they should expedite the public release of a writable Holographic Versatile Disc (6TB capacity) so some of us don't have such a hard time archiving our "garbage."

 

[keither5150]

@ricdiculus
I am also excited about the 50tb drives. I switched 2 of my HTPCs over to Antec 1200 cases. The 1200 has room for 9 drives. I have 7 drives in each one. This would bring my current 28TB setup to 700TB. Let's just hope that the hard drive industry doesn't soak us like the sd card industry. The sd industry has the tech to make massive micro sd cards but chooses to increase storage size availability at a snail's pace. The SDXC can hold up to 2TB. But they are selling 256gb micro sd for $900. It would be nice not to have to convert my media to smaller sizes for the tablet. It is shocking that no company has brought out a tablet with more than 64 GB of storage.

This is great news for HTPC enthusiasts!

 

[mapesdhs]

[citation][nom]shafe88[/nom]Wow 50TB, and just to think my first computer had a huge 512mb HDD.[/citation]

I have an old system with 1MB. 😀

Ian.

 

[Ro0ster]

I no longer am impressed by the capacity of the magnetic drives. IMO, they've been the bottleneck of PC performance for 20 years now. We don't need more space, we need a more reliable means of data storage and access time. Spend the money to research more reliable NAND/SSD drives which also provide larger storage capacity and you'll start to get my money again. Until that time, 1TB (striped across two 500Gb drives) provide more than enough capacity to do what I feel represents a signficant portion of your average home use.

 

[CrArC]

[citation][nom]Ro0ster[/nom]I no longer am impressed by the capacity of the magnetic drives. IMO, they've been the bottleneck of PC performance for 20 years now. We don't need more space, we need a more reliable means of data storage and access time. Spend the money to research more reliable NAND/SSD drives which also provide larger storage capacity and you'll start to get my money again. Until that time, 1TB (striped across two 500Gb drives) provide more than enough capacity to do what I feel represents a signficant portion of your average home use.[/citation] Yes and no. I've migrated away from mechanical storage in all my portable computers (really, a 256GB SSD is enough for 90% of users, I'm sure). However, back at home, things can get cramped. I've got a server of about 6TB capacity and it's filling up (with real data, not rubbish).

I've been frustrated by the recent slowdown in capacity as I've been dreaming of, say, just going and buying two or more 10TB drives and knowing that will keep my data secure and spaciously stored for a few more years.

I'd rather keep the number of drives to a minimum for maximum capacity, reduces power and heat, without neglecting redundancy too much.

 

[Ro0ster]

Maybe we should just put our R&D monies into the X-Y-Z crystal data storage they were researching into back in the 90s! lol

 

[mapesdhs]

I noted quite a few articles about earlier researched forms of solid state storage in my FutureTech Headlines file, mostly
from New Scientist (sadly not updated now, don't have the time), including polymer based plastics, crystals, all sorts of
things. One of the articles, entitled, "The Trillion Bit Cube", reported moderate access times but huge transfer rates (many
GB/sec). So indeed, where did all these ideas go? More than likely bought out by the storage companies and then buried,
since they were obviously able to continue making money via meagre improvements on existing tech. SSDs have been the
only real leap ahead in recent times, but only for access time and to some extent transfer rate.

It's a commercial world we live in, so whatever tech a company creates, if they can make money producing something
that's only 10% as quick as the tech potentially can be, then that's what they'll do. This is why we don't have 10GHz
CPUs yet (not my opinion, someone at IBM said this years ago).

Ian.

 

[eddieroolz]

Long live the HDD...!

 

[Guest]

Need 2 of these just to hold all my DVD's and Blu rays, so want to rip them all but need 58 TB to hold them. 600+ DVD and 125 Blu Rays at last count.