News Western Digital envisions 80TB HDDs in 2030, 100 TB HDDs to follow — new HDMR tech enables record-breaking storage density

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maxx42 said:
80TB, 100TB...For home users/consumers, that's a lot of data to lose if a drive fails. Or a lot of data to mirror, checksum, etc. to back up, which will take a LONG time
Click to expand...

True this. So... that means we don't use large drives if we need the space? And if you don't need the space, clearly you don't go there.

Three in unraid including 2 parity drives would be relatively safe.

Last I checked, all data is only getting bigger. Not smaller.
 
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maxx42 said:
80TB, 100TB...For home users/consumers, that's a lot of data to lose if a drive fails. Or a lot of data to mirror, checksum, etc. to back up, which will take a LONG time
Click to expand...
My old PC had: 1TB SSD, 12TB HDD, 6TB HDD

My new PC that I built this year: 4TB SSD, 8TB SSD, 8TB HDD, 8TB HDD

It was very difficult to do full backups of the 12TB HDD. I'll probably never buy a HDD larger than 8TB in the future.

Also, it was expensive - but, I did purchase that 8TB SSD. For a home PC - it will be great when I can stop using HDDs and use only SSDs

About 12 years ago, I was a product manager for data backup for a large multi-national corporation.
Back in those days, the tape had to be re-copied every 2 years to make sure it was still readable.
The project I managed was converting all the tape backup to HDD backup.
I'm guessing all of the tape storage probably no longer exists in 2025.

I'm guessing if I still had that job today, we would be converting a lot of the data-backup infrastructure to SSDs. But, even today - there are applications for 100TB HDDs
 
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maxx42 said:
80TB, 100TB...For home users/consumers, that's a lot of data to lose if a drive fails. Or a lot of data to mirror, checksum, etc. to back up, which will take a LONG time
Click to expand...
Afaik home users haven't been a big part of the HD market for some years now.

At least not a direct part: consumer cloud storage is still spinning rust (indeed, sometimes sliding rust - tape).

The really interesting point here is the hat most data is quite cold: sometimes write-once-read-never, or at least not much is actually hot. And the fairly compact hot/warm stuff does just great on flash (which will always be several times more expensive by capacity).
 
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hotaru251 said:
concern is how large can we actually go on HDD as would you be able to rebuild it before the time limit is up?
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Think of it more like tape, and recognize that these drives will almost always be part of a bigger system which manages resilvering, and which also contains lower-latency components.
 
I am skeptical of this. 10 years ago, HD makers can only do 2TB per platter, and now it is 3. Hard drive size got bigger because they put more platters and stuffed Helium in the drive.
 
lmcnabney said:
It doesn't matter because the price per TB won't go down. HDD will be priced like GPUs.
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Price per TB has been going down forever and it will continue to do so.
Currently there's inflation mixing things up, but the trend will(must) resume.
 
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pug_s said:
I am skeptical of this. 10 years ago, HD makers can only do 2TB per platter, and now it is 3. Hard drive size got bigger because they put more platters and stuffed Helium in the drive.
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HDDs have not gotten bigger. 10 years ago, 2TB per platter !?
I did a quick search, 2016 Seagate Barracuda 10TB 7 platter = 1.4TB/platter
New technologies have been introduced. HAMR, MAMR, ePMR increase data density potential above the ordinary
 
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pug_s said:
I am skeptical of this. 10 years ago, HD makers can only do 2TB per platter, and now it is 3. Hard drive size got bigger because they put more platters and stuffed Helium in the drive.
Click to expand...
10 years ago was more like 1 TB per platter.

In 2018 I remember the biggest WD Gold drive you could buy was 12 TB. Seven years later, they now sell 26 TB.

At the exact same rate of density increase per year, it’ll take them around 13 years to hit 100 TB, which is in the late 2030’s. That’s assuming of course a linear rate of increase; most likely these new technologies will speed up the rate of increase somewhat.
 
spongiemaster said:
Building an Unraid array or running a parity check with a 100TB parity drive would take over a week. That's not very practical.
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Unlike "normal raid", the array would be usable during the entire time.

I'm not sure "not very practical" is a good description?

Perhaps not ideal... but it would work.
 
lmcnabney said:
It doesn't matter because the price per TB won't go down. HDD will be priced like GPUs.
Click to expand...
Well, they have. For example, you can get 20 TB Seagate Expansion for $230. Maybe the better way is to get refurbished enterprise drives since they are higher quality to start and have been field tested. Improvements have slowed down since 2011 but they are cheaper, especially when adjusted for inflation (GPU prices rose faster than inflation, and are reliant on ever-more expensive nodes).
 
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SomeoneElse23 said:
Unlike "normal raid", the array would be usable during the entire time.

I'm not sure "not very practical" is a good description?

Perhaps not ideal... but it would work.
Click to expand...
Performance will still be degraded while running the check, and using the array will also make the check take even longer. Those aren't really the issues. Unraid defaults to a check a month. If the check takes over a week, the drives will be running all out 25% of the time while generating extra heat and using peak power for all that time and degraded performance. When Unraid was developed 20 years ago, hard drives had only reached 500GB. They weren't thinking about 100TB drives.
 
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spongiemaster said:
Performance will still be degraded while running the check, and using the array will also make the check take even longer. Those aren't really the issues. Unraid defaults to a check a month. If the check takes over a week, the drives will be running all out 25% of the time while generating extra heat and using peak power for all that time and degraded performance. When Unraid was developed 20 years ago, hard drives had only reached 500GB. They weren't thinking about 100TB drives.
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That's valid. There's some catchup somewhere for those large drives to be realistically usable.

Maybe these drives will be 2-3x faster than "normal" drives today? I believe SATA can go up to 600MB/s, and my 16TBs are less than half that.
 
USAFRet said:
And 20 yrs ago, a typical drive was 160GB.
30 years ago, 140MB.

Technology advances.
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My first real world HDD that i used, was built into an Intel 8088 powered machine and it had 80 MB.

80 MB storage space for a spinning platter HDD the size of at least 4 - 3.5 inc drives stacked on top of each other. And it was wide as well. Big unit, and heavy. That was during the 5.25 inch floppy days
 
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Maybe ok for offline storage. But what about throughput? Guessing you get 400-500 MBs on 80TB drive? If you did a hard format it may take days...
 
maxx42 said:
80TB, 100TB...For home users/consumers, that's a lot of data to lose if a drive fails. Or a lot of data to mirror, checksum, etc. to back up, which will take a LONG time
Click to expand...
That's a very insightful and original observation. Thank you for sharing.
 
With widespread availability of flash for applications which require performance, can we assume spinning disks will only be used where performance doesn't matter, only capacity?
If so, we could pack a lot more data on a 5.25 or even 8 inch platter! An 8 inch circle has 522% of the area of a 3.5 inch circle.
 
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