cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/60059065
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.
Why are we still reading/writing 1 track at a time when we can make things that are 3nm small with precision. Can’t we make heads with multiple read/write elements to enjoy higher throughput?
With the LLM pushers driving hardware prices through the roof, will any of us be able to afford these?
Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.
The prices that have been pushed up by AI are for GPUs and DRAM (price rises which in turn possibly feed onwards to other kinds of chip done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.
I expect these things at most will only be affected in price very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).
Not that it makes much of a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).
But is LTO next? Is AI coming for my tapes??
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Let AI have them, bro. Let AI have them.
IDK man, I bought a 10 pack of cheap thumb drives on Amazon a year ago, just big enough for giving to friends full of files or installing Linux or whatever. They were microcenter brand… Not high quality.
The other day I used the last two, took them to work. Went to buy another pack? More than double the price I paid last week.
Yeah yeah it’s flash, not HDDs. I don’t think it matters. Everyone is riding the “computer get more expensive” train. And once the price goes up, it doesn’t come back down.
We’re boned.
That’s my point - it makes sense for high demand for GPUs and RAM to leak into lower supply and hence higher price for other high density microchips that use the same process and are made in the same fabs - something which your experience seems to confirm - but HDDs are mechanical magnetic storage devices were the only microchip is a pretty basic controller.
HDDs are about as related to GPUs and RAM as power sources.
44TB (SMR)
Fucking shingles? Nope.
Can’t vaccinate my ZFS pool against it…
When that thing fails, it’ll be…
Just buy 4 and put them in a RAID array. It’ll only set you back a few tens of thousands.
