10-60TB hard drives coming to tablets, notebooks, desktops by 2016 | Hacker News Reader

10-60TB hard drives coming to tablets, notebooks, desktops by 2016

vr-zone.com

22 pointsValentineC16 comments

It's funny how everybody's reading this backwards. It's a press release, guys, take it with a grain of salt. "Look, 1184305% increase! wow!". If you take 30 seconds to put drives capacities in a spreadsheet, you can't miss this actually announces a huge drop in the speed of HDD size increase.

From 1990 to 2005, HDD size (and density) roughly quadrupled in 3 years. From 2005 to 2012, drive size grew by a mere factor of 2.66 every 3 years. And they dare triumphally announce that in the future, the multiplication factor will drop to 1,66 every three years, that's a hell of an improvement indeed.

For those who'd point out that this is a report about platter density and not drive capacity, I'd say that 3.5" HDD have had at most 5 platters for twenty years, so platter density always reflect quite exactly maximum available drive capacity anyway.

Who exactly is reading this backwards? That's a bit of a straw man.

I think you're jumping the gun a bit ruling that storage capacity is already slowing down; I tend to agree it's just around the corner, but this chart definitely does not indicate a conclusive trend in already released drives:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Har...

I'm counting only the highest available capacity drives in 3.5" format. If you mix various physical sizes it changes the overall tendency quite a bit. Until around 1999 (availability of 50GB 3.5" drives) the biggest available drives were 5.25" (up to 43 GB). 5.25" drives were also much more common than 3.5" drives during all of the 80s. That's why I'm counting starting in 1990, which flattens the curves.

Hard drive sizes seem to be mostly driven by consumer devices which are mostly moving to smaller SSD. Not saying 60TB drives won't happen, just not sure there is actually going to be a consumer market for them.

I think the article writer is getting confused with the units. Besides making a typo at one point, using Gpbs, they use the abbreviation tB - lowercase t. Possibly in the original report, it was Tb - ie Terabit - ie 60Tb = 7.5TB which sounds more likely.

It doesn't explain why a 2.5x jump in areal density, by their own figures, will magically yield a 15x increase in drive capacity. What a useless article.

It's because iSuppli study absolutely doesn't say they'll reach 10 TB by 2016, but that 60 TB on a 3.5" is the absolute maximum attainable through the HAMR technology, in some unstated (but quite far away) future.

I think that in 2016 you will not be able to buy a tablet or notebook with a HDD, everything having been replaced by SSD.

Tablet definitely, but I suspect SSD + traditional HDD will be reasonably common, though in decline by 2016 (using the space freed up by removing the DVD drive).

By 2016 not a single tablet or notebook will have a hard drive.

There is no mention of the cost per MB. There is however a statement that the process is patented by Seagate which has me thinking the price per unit of storage will be high. Hopefully, assuming the claims made are accurate, Seagate will license the technology at a reasonable cost.

Will we need massive physical storage devices now cloud storage is becoming more accessible for all?

I'm guessing that most HDD space is used for music & video. If the anti-piracy campaigns continue (censorship, TPB blocking, MegaUpload), I expect most piracy to move "offline", to HDDs.

10 TB would be excellent, I would'n need to pick which of my favourite movies I want to save...

Right now I have 6TB of space in my desktop. I keep all my music and movies on the drive. DVDs are painful to watch, so I rip all of them to the hard drive then store the physical backup on a shelf. I have eclectic taste in music sometimes, so songs I own never get deleted for fear that they may never become available to me again.

Not to mention the massive amount of storage required for just a handful of modern video games (when they weigh in at 15+ GB each)

And take the case of a photographer who, with current equipment, can easily create 100-200GB of content per shooting day. (I'm thinking specifically of a wedding or event photog using a Nikon D800, Canon 5D Mk III, or similar class of camera. Besides the raw image files, there are the catalogs, processed/developed/retouched images, resized images for common print and display formats, album layout pages, and whatever else may be needed to provide the service offered.)

As long as network use is metered, absolutely.

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