Tuesday, August 26th 2014
Seagate Ships World's First 8 TB Hard Drives
Seagate Technology plc, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is shipping the world's first 8 TB hard disk drive. An important step forward in storage, the 8 TB hard disk drive provides scale-out data infrastructures with supersized-capacity, energy-efficiency and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry for cloud content, object storage and back-up disaster recovery storage.
"As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world's first 8 TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage."
A cornerstone for growing capacities in multiple applications, the 8 TB hard drive delivers bulk data storage solutions for online content storage providing customers with the highest capacity density needed to address an ever increasing amount of unstructured data in an industry-standard 3.5-inch HDD. Providing up to 8 TB in a single drive slot, the drive delivers maximum rack density, within an existing footprint, for the most efficient data center floor space usage possible.
"Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content," said John Rydning, IDC's research vice president for hard disk drives. "Seagate's new 8 TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data center, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically."
The 8 TB hard disk drive increases system capacity using fewer components for increased system and staffing efficiencies while lowering power costs. With its low operating power consumption, the drive reliably conserves energy thereby reducing overall operating costs. Helping customers economically store data, it boasts the best Watts/GB for enterprise bulk data storage in the industry.
"Cleversafe is excited to once again partner with Seagate to deliver to our customers what is truly an innovative storage solution. Delivering absolute lowest cost/TB along with the performance and reliability required for massive scale applications, the new 8 TB hard disk drive is ideal for meeting the needs of our enterprise and service provider customers who demand optimized hardware and the cost structure needed for massive scale out," said Tom Shirley, senior vice president of research and development, Cleversafe.
Outfitted with enterprise-class reliability and support for archive workloads, it features multi-drive RV tolerance for consistent enterprise-class performance in high density environments. The drive also incorporates a proven SATA 6Gb/s interface for cost-effective, easy system integration in both private and public data centers.
Shipping drives to select customers now with wide scale availability next quarter.
"As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world's first 8 TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage."
"Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content," said John Rydning, IDC's research vice president for hard disk drives. "Seagate's new 8 TB HDD provides IT managers with a new option for improving storage density in the data center, thus helping them to tackle one of the largest and fastest growing data categories within enterprise storage economically."
The 8 TB hard disk drive increases system capacity using fewer components for increased system and staffing efficiencies while lowering power costs. With its low operating power consumption, the drive reliably conserves energy thereby reducing overall operating costs. Helping customers economically store data, it boasts the best Watts/GB for enterprise bulk data storage in the industry.
"Cleversafe is excited to once again partner with Seagate to deliver to our customers what is truly an innovative storage solution. Delivering absolute lowest cost/TB along with the performance and reliability required for massive scale applications, the new 8 TB hard disk drive is ideal for meeting the needs of our enterprise and service provider customers who demand optimized hardware and the cost structure needed for massive scale out," said Tom Shirley, senior vice president of research and development, Cleversafe.
Outfitted with enterprise-class reliability and support for archive workloads, it features multi-drive RV tolerance for consistent enterprise-class performance in high density environments. The drive also incorporates a proven SATA 6Gb/s interface for cost-effective, easy system integration in both private and public data centers.
Shipping drives to select customers now with wide scale availability next quarter.
29 Comments on Seagate Ships World's First 8 TB Hard Drives
That said, while the number of sectors per cylinder is increasing (which results in increased transfer rate), the number of cylinders per drive is also increasing as areal density increases. Since the drive can only read from one cylinder per platter, that means the time to empty a drive increases as the number of cylinders increases.
I fear that at some point writing or reading an entire drive will become a day-long affair. This would make most types of RAID worthless because the chances of the array failing due to a second drive failing during a rebuild would be very high. I remember having a 40GB drive back in 2000 that wrote at 30MB/s, which meant I could read the whole drive in about 22 minutes. Now the 4TB drives in 2014 transfer at ~180MB/s, which means that reading the whole drive takes about 370 minutes. By this logic we only need ~250TB drives before reading the entire drive takes longer than a whole day.
The RAID controller is dissociated from the file system. Without knowing which sectors are relevant data and which are deleted data, the RAID controller has to reconstruct every sector, deleted files and all.
Yes, that does mean that sectors that are occupied by deleted file data will be rebuilt/mirrored, since we know deleting a file doesn't actually delete the file from the drive just the pointer in the file table. But that is why it is a good idea to run a tool like the Wipe Free Space tool in CCleaner to wipe the free space on the volume. That way time isn't wasted rebuilding/mirroring data that has been deleted.
But, again, you don't write the entire drive during a rebuild, just the part with data on it, even if that data is garbage data.