Seagate Announces 16TB HDD • Hacker News Board

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#161

Post by wtallis » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 1:30 AM UTC

opencl wrote: post #150

wtallis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is about DRAM, not NAND. Any article that talks about SK Hynix as a major player but doesn't mention Toshiba is clearly not about flash memory.

Ah yes, my bad. The lawsuit in that article is indeed specifically about DRAM. A lot of the reporting on this mixes them up for some reason. But the DRAM and NAND industries are largely the same companies and both have been under investigation for price fixing recently. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261330-china-investiga...

The DRAM and NAND markets are similar, but there are important differences. The NAND market has several more major players and is significantly more competitive.

And the Chinese accusations of price fixing need to be understood in the context that they're trying very hard to get their own NAND fabs up and running, almost certainly using at least some stolen tech. Even without Chinese influence, NAND prices have fallen dramatically since that article was written, due to ordinary healthy market forces.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#162

Post by stretchwithme » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 1:44 AM UTC

The Library of Congress is only 10 terabytes.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#163

Post by InclinedPlane » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

combatentropy wrote: post #2

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and ther…

The big difference is that the overall performance of spinning disks is not much different than what it was 10 years ago. However, a best-in-class 2018 SSD is an entirely different beast than a 2008 model. They are somewhere around 5-30x faster now with significantly better write endurance, wear leveling, and capacity (you can get up to 4TB in consumer models for reasonable prices). The market hasn't pushed for solid state drives replacing bulk hard drive storage, instead it's pushed for much, much faster drives (yielding 1-2 orders of magnitude improvement over just the last decade alone) along with small form factor portable storage (SD cards and USB drives). The technology is there for someone to manufacture slow SSDs with the same capacity as hard drives at around the same cost, but the market demand isn't.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#164

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#165

Post by blattimwind » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:04 AM UTC

combatentropy wrote: post #2

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and ther…

> but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture.

Fun-fact: The "head fly height", i.e. the distance from the underside of the R/W head to the platter surface, is less than a handful nanometers in most hard drives; this makes the gap not just smaller than any production transistor, but also smaller than any production feature size.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#166

Post by blattimwind » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:06 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #157

pmoriarty wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD)." Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end. Data centers don't want to be swapping out…

Maybe an SSD under a heavy datacenter I/O load is indeed less reliable than an HDD. But in a laptop , a device that you lug around, move around while working, and sometimes even drop, a precise mechanical device has a much larger chance to misbehave, to my mind. Its I/O load is way lower than in the datacenter, too.

Used to be that whole series of SSDs had data corruption problems (which in one case ultimately lead to the demise of the manufacturer). Still happens. Recent example: Apple.

Power failure behavior of most consumer oriented SSDs is also data corrupting.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#167

Post by blattimwind » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:14 AM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #134

As a professional storage-system developer, my reaction to every announcement of larger disks is something close to horror. Capacity keeps increasing while performance remains darn near constant, so the gap between the two keeps getting wider. Yes, we can use flash to absorb the I/O demand, treat disk more like tape, yadda yadda, but all of that takes significant effort. You do want your storage system to be correct…

> Capacity keeps increasing while performance remains darn near constant,

The recent capacity increases seem to be mostly driven by stuffing more platters in, so as long as they don't have independently servoed heads (used to be a thing, maybe it becomes a thing again? Perhaps not fully independent, but still "ganged up" with some sort of micromechanics in each head to servo it to nearby tracks?) or increase data density (bits/cm^2), throughput must plateau.

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#168

Post by anoncoward111 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #162

The Library of Congress is only 10 terabytes.

Disagree, I sold them tape cartridges by the PB

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#169

Post by anoncoward111 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

votepaunchy wrote: post #138

djsumdog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a drive from every major manufacturer fail at some point. Brands don't matter, backups do. Buy hard drives in pairs and put an item on your calendar to pop the other one in once a month, sync it, and put it back in a fire-resistant safe.

> Buy hard drives in pairs and put an item on your calendar to pop the other one in once a month, sync it, and put it back in a fire-resistant safe. Alternatively, buy one hard drive and keep a copy in Amazon Glacier Deep Archive for $1/TB-month.

And then wait weeks and pay real money to pull it all back if you have 8TB :)

Re: Seagate Announces 16TB HDD

#170

Post by iamgopal » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 2:25 AM UTC

blattimwind wrote: post #165

combatentropy wrote: post #2

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and ther…

> but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. Fun-fact: The "head fly height", i.e. the distance from the underside of the R/W head to the platter surface, is less than a handful nanometers in most hard drives; this makes the gap not just smaller than any production transistor, but also smaller than any production feature size.

How?