http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=terabit-milestone-storage-seagate-pr&vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD

 

The maximum capacity of today’s 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per square inch, while 2.5-inch drives top out at 750 gigabytes (GB), or roughly 500 gigabits per square inch. The first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will likely more than double these capacities – to 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch models. The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never before possible, with a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch – 30TB to 60TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch drives.

 

:o :o :o :o

 

yes please...!!!

...can't wait for my one-drive UnRAID server 

...can't wait for my one-drive UnRAID server 

actually, two disks... with that amount of data on a single disk, you will want it protected by parity.

Otherwise, you lose one disk, and you lose it ALL.

...can't wait for my one-drive UnRAID server 

actually, two disks... with that amount of data on a single disk, you will want it protected by parity.

Otherwise, you lose one disk, and you lose it ALL.

True that. Also, I wonder how long a parity check will take on one of those...

Anyway, I have a feeling that, as usual, from announcement to a shipping product, many years will go by.

The larger and larger things get the longer it takes parity/checks and copying. This is why I do suggest buying performance parts these days. Drive sizes will ALWAYS get larger and larger, nothing is stopping it...so we'll need better and better hardware to keep up with the changing technology.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=terabit-milestone-storage-seagate-pr&vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD

 

The maximum capacity of today’s 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes (TB)

 

I thought they already had 4 TB drives out? Or are they doing something slightly different?

The larger and larger things get the longer it takes parity/checks and copying. This is why I do suggest buying performance parts these days. Drive sizes will ALWAYS get larger and larger, nothing is stopping it...so we'll need better and better hardware to keep up with the changing technology.

 

The problem is the speed limit is in the HDDs and not the surrounding hardware.

With how long it'd take to do a parity check on a drive that big, you'd have a fair chance of your parity drive dying during a rebuild. I wouldn't want all of my data on one drive, even with parity protection.

 

A 60TB harddrive during a parity rebuild would take a little too long for my tastes, its bad enough knowing you don't have protection for ~ 10 hours, I would hate to think how I'd feel during a 300 how rebuild. Supposing my math is right, it took me 7 hours for a 2 TB parity check, so assuming a rebuild would be a little slower, say 10 hours per 2 TB, at 60 TB's that'd be a 300 hour rebuild time. 12.5 Days of unprotected goodness.

 

The phrase "Don't have all your eggs in one basket" comes to mind. Of course, I remember my "extra large 6 GB harddrive) back in the late 90's, and thinking I'd never fill that thing up, now I have multiple drives hundreds of times larger, so once these drives hit the shelves at a decent price, 60TB may only hold what todays 1 TB drives hold. Although I see compression getting better, so we may see the file sizes go down(bar anymore drastic improvements in audio/visual technologies).

With how long it'd take to do a parity check on a drive that big, you'd have a fair chance of your parity drive dying during a rebuild. I wouldn't want all of my data on one drive, even with parity protection.

This is why monthly parity checks and frequent S.M.A.R.T. checks are needed.

 

True but if the harddrive starts failing you'd have a lot better chance of completing a 7-10 hour rebuild before complete failure than finishing a 12 day rebuild.

 

Its all a gamble with harddrives anyway, they can fail without any warning or slowly fail over a length of time, as I said its very possible file sizes go up and 60TB will be treated like 2 TB when the drives finally hit the market. Also, when I had that extra large 6 GB harddrive I never would have thought about having a single file, movie or otherwise, over 2 GB, now its completely common.

It may not be 12 days... Maybe 12 days at the current hard drive throughput.

By time hard drives are 6TB, we will probably see faster throughput, thus it may only be 9 days ( )

Maybe by that time we'll have Solomon-Reed parity protection. Who knows.

 

In any case, I would probably mirror critical drives to another server to be on the safe side.

I do that now with my music/dj drives.

 

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but if the data density is higher then throughput should increase.

Correct me if I'm wrong but if the data density is higher then throughput should increase.

correct, assuming no other factor is a bottleneck.

Which with current hardware, unless I've read wrong, throughput isn't high enough to saturate SataIII. I don't think other components will ever be much of a problem, they do a pretty good job of staying ahead of HDD throughput

Newegg is selling 3T drives for $169 and 2T drives for $119. 3T drives are clearly more cost effective (finally!). These drives are reported to sustain transfers of over 150MB/s so parity checks should not take any longer.

I've had a few drive failures, and each time, I copy important data off the drive with the array in the degraded "emulating missing drive" state and create a list of everything else (windows shortcuts).

 

Only then do I rebuild the drive using a new hard disc. That way, if there's another drive failure during the rebuild, it's not the end of the world.

 

I also run a cron script overnight that records what data is on the cache drive in case that dies:

 

0 4 * * * ls /mnt/cache/TV >/mnt/disk1/Backups/TV-cache.rtf
0 4 * * * ls /mnt/cache/Movies >/mnt/disk1/Backups/Movies-cache.rtf