cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24650125
Because nothing says “fun” quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.
Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives’ evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.
Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company’s proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.
We’ve come a long way:
That was my first USB thumb drive.
IIRC that was 5 mb. It weighed about 2000 lbs
If you were to ask me a year ago I’d tell you that HDD’s would be the next dead storage medium but now SSD’s cost more then I spent on my rig and HDD’s are pushing 140 TB’s
I wonder if tapes make any sort of ‘comeback’ to the consumer market.
And how much will that cost? Sounds like something fantastic for my Jellyfin server. I’ll have all the 4k HDR I can get my hands on.
I would not put 130TB on any one piece of hardware, because when it fails, it will be a very sad day.
Going by the usual trends of $20+/tb, I’d say. fuckin expensive
For now anyway, it used to be $20+/gb. I’ll settle for flooding the market with refurbished 16+tb drives.
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it 😭
Who’s Barry Badrinath?
Whats the point when the prices for 4-8TB disks are stable the last 5 years? (I think that they are getting higher even…)
Yep. It’s absurd. Who spends that much on a 4TB?
The point is that 8TB are too small, and not enough for my anime.
If the price per TB is stable you just buy 2 or 3 disks. It used to be that you buy one disk because by the time you needed more space the price per TB would be dropped a lot (halved even).
“Anime”
Retaining that much detail on tentacles takes some drive space
Okay. I want total honesty here. How many of you could actually fill that thing up?
I have a lot of Linux IOSs which are definitely not VR porn. I have 200TB total including parity disks, and 150TB usable. It’s a real pain in the ass to maintain so many disks, and the power bill isn’t fun either. I’d love to replace them with fewer disks.
Archive.org, Anna’s archive, Jan 6 footage, Epstein files, there’s plenty to back up.
No sweat, try mirroring a private tracker and you’ll very quickly run out lol. You need a couple of petabytes worth.
The real problem is the price of HDDs not going down due to lower production in light of SSDs.
I fully expect WD to drop this as some stupidly expensive SAS drives that almost no consumer will buy. They should at least apply the dual heads for speed tech so we get faster HDDs for the same price.
I remember Mac OS X having an issue with its mail app awhile back that would create massive log files continuously that would keep generating until they filled the entire drive. You would have to boot to a recovery partition or such because the OS partition wouldn’t have enough room to expand/boot and remove them and fix the issue.
Imagine having 130 terabytes of invisible log files
with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era
Can somebody do anything with a normal consumer in mind these days? 😭
Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they’ll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout.
But hey, look at the bright side. We’ve already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and “AI” boom and soon to be bust. There’s still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.
”although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world’s governments about wanting a bailout”.
Ahem… Whining? Wanting? Try instructing. They own the governments so they will just tell them to do it, and it will be done.
No, and it’s by design.
You’re gonna lease a tablet and use cloud-based storage services and like it.
The dystopia is here.
Back to the 70s and early 80s…
Yeah, adding all the surveillance technology developed in the last 40 years, so you dont dare to take your eyes out of the display, for example.
140 TB is a whole heck of a lot of movies and TV shows
It’s about the storage I have in my server right now - using 15 drives ☠️
That fuck you mean? You can use these drives for any purpose you want.
Normal consumers can install jellyfin. At some point they’ll make downloading a crime, they wouldn’t hurt people to have a decent collection of stuff ready for that day.
That point was Jan 23rd. https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-videos-can-violate-the-dmca-court-rules/
oh shit, how the hell did I miss that.
Well, that’s a target market right now. Intel GPUs are doing better than expected, I think, thanks to all the big corporations abandoning “normal consumers”.
Does data take up less room when it’s being used by AI?
I just hope smaller sized drives become cheaper. The word “hope” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Ten years from now…
Amazon search: “hard drive”
Result: 4TB $198
I think ten years from now you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone even wasting their time on something so small.
Kind of the point of my comment was that drive size/cost is stagnating despite the massive technical progress in the space. I bought my first 4TB drive in 2020 ($89). Going back to 2015, I was buying 2TB at the same price ($86). Here in 2026, what’s the ~same price? 4TB ($99). 8TB is $180.
Well this is not a tech issue at all, it’s the fact that global economics have become a dumpster fire - particularly, in America. I can’t say I’m certain there are no other factors, but economically everything has gotten out of hand.
so you say, but people still collect “antique” hardware.
Well, retro etc. but I wouldn’t consider this to be that. There’s no inherent value of a run-of-the-mill drive with merely lower storage capacity. And certainly not worth a premium.
it’s not antique yet. i still have my 5.25" diskettes with quest for glory 2 on them and they’re almost antique. i think the usb drive that reads them still works. give them another couple years.
do HDDs work better than SSDs in space? because of the cosmic rays and shit? or something about intermittent power? no, really, this is a real problem that they could be already solving, one i know jack shit about.
It depends. For anything going into space, especially microsats, the biggest concerns are space, weight, and power. SSDs are better at all of those, plus they don’t have any gyroscopic effects, and they’re much less susceptible to vibrations (e.g. the absolute earthquake at liftoff and the sudden jolts during each rocket stage). They are more susceptible to high-energy particles, but they can be hardened through shielding and parity/redundancy.
For a datacenter on Mars, you’re less concerned with SWaP, only as much as you need to be to get it there as cargo. Obviously that means space and weight are still concerns, but not power.
The other factor with using fewer larger drives is that when you have a failure, you lose a lot more data, and any recovery takes longer.
So you want to be a hero!!! I only ever played the first one but fell in love with it.
Erana’s Peace. hidengoseke. Meep’s Peep, my friend.
the second was the best in the series, but they all have their charm. i really need to buy the new game the coles made
Question: Are failures due to issues on a specific platter? Meaning, could a ZRAID theoretically use specific platters as a way to replicate data and not require 140TB of resilvering on a failure?
I’d put this in a mirror configuration tbh.
This would be a bitch to have to rebuild in a raid array. At some point a drive can get TOO big. And this is looking to cross that line.
It doesn’t really matter, the current limitations are not so much data density at rest, but getting the data in and out at a useful speed. We breached the capacity barrier long ago with disk arrays.
SATA will no longer be improved, we now need u.2 designs for data transport that are designed for storage. This exists, but needs to filter down through industrial application to get to us plebs.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
At some point a drive can get TOO big
I was thinking the same. I would hate to toast a 140 TB drive. I think I’d just sit right down and cry. I’ll stick with my 10 TB drives.
This is not meant for human beings. A creature that needs over 140 TB of storage in a single device can definitely afford to run them in some distributed redundancy scheme with hot swaps and just shred failed units. We know they’re not worried about being wasteful.
Rebuild time is the big problem with this in a RAID Array. The interface is too slow and you risk losing more drives in the array before the rebuild completes.
Realistically, is that a factor for a Microsoft-sized company, though? I’d be shocked if they only had a single layer of redundancy. Whatever they store is probably replicated between high-availability hosts and datacenters several times, to the point where losing an entire RAID array (or whatever media redundancy scheme they use) is just a small inconvenience.
Fairly significant factor when building really large systems. If we do the math, there ends up being some relationships between
- disk speed
- targets for ”resilver” time / risk acceptance
- disk size
- failure domain size (how many drives do you have per server)
- network speed
Basically, for a given risk acceptance and total system size there is usually a sweet spot for disk sizes.
Say you want 16TB of usable space, and you want to be able to lose 2 drives from your array (fairly common requirement in small systems), then these are some options:
- 3x16TB triple mirror
- 4x8TB Raid6/RaidZ2
- 6x4TB Raid6/RaidZ2
The more drives you have, the better recovery speed you get and the less usable space you lose to replication. You also get more usable performance with more drives. Additionally, smaller drives are usually cheaper per TB (down to a limit).
This means that 140TB drives become interesting if you are building large storage systems (probably at least a few PB), with low performance requirements (archives), but there we already have tape robots dominating.
The other interesting use case is huge systems, large number of petabytes, up into exabytes. More modern schemes for redundancy and caching mitigate some of the issues described above, but they are usually onlu relevant when building really large systems.
tl;dr: arrays of 6-8 drives at 4-12TB is probably the sweet spot for most data hoarders.
True, but that’s going to really be pushing your network links just to recover. Realistically, something like ZFS or a RAID-6 with extra hot spares would help reduce the risks, but it’s still a non trivial amount of time. Not to mention the impact to normal usage during that time period.
Network? Nah, the bottleneck is always going to be the drive itself. Storage networks might pass absurd numbers of Gbps, but ideally you’d be resilvering from a drive on the same backplane, and SAS-4 tops out at 24 Gbps, but there’s no way you’re going to hit that write speed on a single drive. The fastest retail drives don’t do more than ~2 Gbps. Even the Seagate Mach.2 only does around twice that due to having two head actuators.
100%. But the post i was responding to was talking about recovering a failed array from other copies, not locally.
Yeah I’m running 16s and that’s pushing it imo
I don’t get how a single person would have that much data. I fit my whole life from the first shot I took on a digital camera in 2001… Onto a 4TB drive.
…and even then, two thirds of it is just pirated movies.
Amateur 😀
But seriously I probably have close to 100 TB of music, TV shows, movies, books, audiobooks, pictures, 3d models, magazines, etc.
I need a home for my orphaned podman containers /s
I think this is better targeted to small and medium businesses.
if you run this as a NAS you could easily have all your budd s obsesses files in one place without needing complex networking.
Holy fuck can you imagine how long it would take to re-stripe a failed drive in a z2 array 😭
My Z2 had à drive failure recently, with 4To drives. Took me almost 3 days to re-silver the array 😅. fortunately had a hot spare setup, so it started as soon as it failed, but now a second drive is showing signs of failing soon, so I had to pay the AI tax (168€) to get one asap (arriving Monday), as well as a second one, cheaper (around 120€), but which won’t arrive until the end of April.
Probably still with only 1 year warranty…
And if it breaks at 10 months and they take another 2 to send your replacement back, well, they no longer need to send one that actually works this time either
As a result, will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.
Um thanks but tell us about 2026?
I wonder why current consumer HDD’s don’t have NVME connectors on them. Like I know speeding up the bus isn’t going to make the spinning rust access faster but the cache ram would probably benefit from not being capped at 550MBps
Doesn’t this sound awfully similar to the Mini disc technology? The discs were only writable when heated by a laser. They were pretty impressive for the time… But not very fast. Especially when writing.