News Seagate: 100TB HDDs Due in 2030, Multi-Actuator Drives to Become Common

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This is not good for the future of storage devices . HDD should die out by 2030 and SSD should replace them entirely .

Imagine trying to backup a failing 100TB harddisk. Such high capacity demands speed.
 
MarsISwaiting said:
This is not good for the future of storage devices . HDD should die out by 2030 and SSD should replace them entirely .

Imagine trying to backup a failing 100TB harddisk. Such high capacity demands speed.
Click to expand...
  1. This is a business use case, not for the typical home user.
  2. You build your backup plan around what you're going to use. A failing drive would just fail over to its mirror, which is not failing. Replace the dead drive whenever.
  3. HDD still has a place alongside solid state. Ny NAS has 12 drives in or attached to it. 11 of the 12 are HDD. ~51TB space..
  4. Not so very long ago, people were saying the exact same things about 1TB drives. "OMG! That's too much."


If I were to replace my NAS HDDs with SSD:
SATA III = $5000
NVMe = $8200

I'd rather buy another car.
 
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Yes, absolutely... making full-backups of HDDs had and has become problematic.
I was a data-storage product manager at a multi-national corporation.
Before I retired, we had given up on performing full-backups of HDDs on the weekends.
We had to use mirroring to off-site storage as the new data-recovery process.
Also, because of legal requirements, some of the mirrored HDDs had to be moved to Iron Mountain for long term storage.
When I retired the corporation was trying to get rid of the Iron Mountain requirements because it was becoming too difficult to create copies of the mirrored drives.
For my home PC, I have a 12TB HDD that stores multi-media files such as video, audio and pictures.
I use eSATAIII for backups to local external HDD storage and I have given up on full-backups.
I perform incremental backups only.
My PC was built in 2012. When I get around to building a new PC (probably early 2022) I will definitely need to have some type of mirroring set up for HDD backups with some type of automatic file-versioning built in.
 
I use Macrium Reflect, and Full/Incremental/Differential, as the particular system dictates.

Somewhat modified since this was written, but it works for me:

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...
forums.tomshardware.com forums.tomshardware.com
 
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Multi-Actuator drives is just 2 HDDs (or more) as far as I'm concerned. I'm assuming putting 2 HDDs in 1 HDD enclosure saves space and power. Performance would be about the same?
 
USAFRet said:
If one of a pair fails, the RAID software should notify you immediately.
No matter what the size.
Click to expand...
Notifications are instananeous, but his other points are valid. I run an Unraid server at home and the parity drive is 16TB. All drives are 7200rpm Seagate Exos drives. Solid performance drives by mechanical standards and it still takes over a day to complete the monthy array verification or rebuild the array if I replace a drive. 100TB drive would take almost a week without a significant speed up which no one is predicting.
 
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spongiemaster said:
Notifications are instananeous, but his other points are valid. I run an Unraid server at home and the parity drive is 16TB. All drives are 7200rpm Seagate Exos drives. Solid performance drives by mechanical standards and it still takes over a day to complete thr monthy array verification or rebuild the array if I replace a drive. 100TB drive would take almost a week without a significant speed up which no one is predicting.
Click to expand...
Right.
That's why you have it fail over to an identical array.
Replace the 1 failed drive in Array 1 as needed. The system is still running 100% from Array 2.

100TB drives will happen.
Just like 1TB, 10TB drives were considered "large" at the time.
 
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USAFRet said:
Right.
That's why you have it fail over to an identical array.
Replace the 1 failed drive in Array 1 as needed. The system is still running 100% from Array 2.

100TB drives will happen.
Just like 1TB, 10TB drives were considered "large" at the time.
Click to expand...
And if a drive fails in the 2nd array during the week long repair of the first? Have your lucky rabbit's foot handy.

Sure, we'll see 100TB. No one is arguing that. It won't be 2030 though. Those long term predictions never prove accurate. In 2018, Seagate themselves predicted 100TB drives by 2025. 36TB by 2022 and 48TB before 2024. Not going to make any of those targets. Heck, in 2019 Seagate said they would be releasing 20TB drives in 2020. They didn't even make that prediction.
 
USAFRet said:
  1. This is a business use case, not for the typical home user.
  2. You build your backup plan around what you're going to use. A failing drive would just fail over to its mirror, which is not failing. Replace the dead drive whenever.
  3. HDD still has a place alongside solid state. Ny NAS has 12 drives in or attached to it. 11 of the 12 are HDD. ~51TB space..
  4. Not so very long ago, people were saying the exact same things about 1TB drives. "OMG! That's too much."

If I were to replace my NAS HDDs with SSD:
SATA III = $5000
NVMe = $8200

I'd rather buy another car.
Click to expand...

In 2030 Nvme should not be $8200 ...

Remember that Some technologies disappeared and were replaced by better ones . I dont want punch cards today , nor floppies nor cassettes , sorry .
 
MarsISwaiting said:
In 2030 Nvme should not be $8200 ...

Remember that Some technologies disappeared and were replaced by better ones . I dont want punch cards today , nor floppies nor cassettes , sorry .
Click to expand...
The home markets and enterprise markets have different needs. Tape storage is still actively developed for the enterprise market with no end in sight. In 10 years, home users are unlikely to need mechanical storage any more, but the spiraling storage needs in business will likely not allow any type of transistor based storage to be an option. There is no storage medium in development that any of us are aware of that is going to scale to 100TB's in 10 years that will be able to replace where mechanical hard drive development is heading.
 
How much space do you lose to formatting a 100tb hdd?

Every few years its a new "Imagine backing up that much" figure. I can remember in 1999 thinking 500mb of hdd space was too much, and in the days where the biggest files were database records, not movies, that made sense. More space just gives people new ways to waste it,
 
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In last 10 years i dont know why HDD and RAM capacity doesnt improve much.
I still have 1TB hdd produced @ 2011 and the price alsois still the same when i bought it
 
I think soon spinny disks will be like ICE engines. As SSDs and EVs become cmmonplace, spinny disks and ICE engines will only be needed in edge cases, but not by the typical consumer.
 
spongiemaster said:
100TB drive would take almost a week without a significant speed up which no one is predicting
Click to expand...
exactly.
there is a point where the mechanical speed limitation outweighs capacity.

not a "huge" risk, but potential is not zero. In time it takes to rebuild you "could" have another failure (and depending on the raid could potentially lose data)

understand mechanical drives are cheap for the capacity, but they need to innovate ways to speed it up to make it less risky.
MarsISwaiting said:
Remember that Some technologies disappeared and were replaced by better ones .
Click to expand...

remember Kodak trying to delay digital photos because they knew it would be what kills their main profit (film)
 
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hotaru251 said:
exactly.
there is a point where the mechanical speed limitation outweighs capacity.

not a "huge" risk, but potential is not zero. In time it takes to rebuild you "could" have another failure (and depending on the raid could potentially lose data)

understand mechanical drives are cheap for the capacity, but they need to innovate ways to speed it up to make it less risky.


remember Kodak trying to delay digital photos because they knew it would be what kills their main profit (film)
Click to expand...

This is a very different story than Kodak. Companies are not trying to delay the move to SSDs. The reason development money is still being poured in to the HDD technology, is that they don't expect SDD to be a viable and competitive solution on large capacities for many years to come. SSD has it's own problem trying to scale to large capacities at a reasonable price. NAND prices continue to increase as it scales higher in capacity and in to smaller manufacturing processes, which will slow adaptation for big data centers.
 
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hectorsm said:
This is a very different story than Kodak. Companies are not trying to delay the move to SSDs. The reason development money is still being poured in to the HDD technology, is that they don't expect SDD to be a viable and competitive solution on large capacities for many years to come. SSD has it's own problem trying to scale to large capacities at a reasonable price. NAND prices continue to increase as it scales higher in capacity and in to smaller manufacturing processes, which will slow adaptation for big data centers.
Click to expand...

Actually it is delaying SSD large capacity development and lower prices . It is not about the research alone , it is about replacing hundred of millions HDD hardware in servers across the planet ... if they continue making HDD and R&D them until 2030 , the total move to SSD will never happen until like 2040 ...

Also , With HDD around SSD makers will keep their prices higher than HDD and there will never reach HDD price per TB if HDD are still around.
 
MarsISwaiting said:
Actually it is delaying SSD large capacity development and lower prices . It is not about the research alone , it is about replacing hundred of millions HDD hardware in servers across the planet ... if they continue making HDD and R&D them until 2030 , the total move to SSD will never happen until like 2040 ...

Also , With HDD around SSD makers will keep their prices higher than HDD and there will never reach HDD price per TB if HDD are still around.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if that's actually happening. A lot of money is being invested in increasing chip capacity as well as R&D all over the world for NANDS and other chips. Increasing production will only help drop SSD prices to some degree, but it will not be enough to compete with HDD. SSD will still be much harder and expensive to manufacture than HDD, specially as they more move to smaller manufacturing processes. The reality is that SSDs cannot reach the cost per GB of HDD with current tech no matter what you do now or in the next 10 years. Only some new and major breakthrough in technology will change that reality. Therefore, no, HDD will continue to be replaced with HDD in big data centers across the world for some time to come. However, I can see HDD completely going away in desktop PCs fairly soon. Maybe within the next 5 years or so. HDD will become obsolete eventually, just not as soon as some us us would like.
 
USAFRet said:
  1. This is a business use case, not for the typical home user.
  2. You build your backup plan around what you're going to use. A failing drive would just fail over to its mirror, which is not failing. Replace the dead drive whenever.
  3. HDD still has a place alongside solid state. Ny NAS has 12 drives in or attached to it. 11 of the 12 are HDD. ~51TB space..
  4. Not so very long ago, people were saying the exact same things about 1TB drives. "OMG! That's too much."

If I were to replace my NAS HDDs with SSD:
SATA III = $5000
NVMe = $8200

I'd rather buy another car.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. I run just over ~60TB of storage space via 11ish drives. Though I spilt it up between my primary rig and and a NAS so I have my redundancies in place for all my files. I could never afford to switch to SSD and have such a large pool of drives at my disposal. Until SSD can match HDD in price per gigabyte they will always have a place for warm/cold storage of files.
 
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