Moore's Law will catch up with hard drives. You'll either have to increase the drive's height for more platters, or you'll have to go all solid state for more memory per square mm...
Reminds me of full-height HDD's of 80Mb in storage size...
Seagate has unveiled a 14TB helium-filled disk drive in the Exos line. The range appeared in November when various Enterprise Capacity and Enterprise Performance drives in 3.5 and 2.5-inch form factors were rebranded. The range topped out with the Exos X12, a rebranded Enterprise Capacity 12TB helium-filled spinner. Now we …
Not even close to DNA, which packs about 3 billion base pairs* into every cell in your body. 2 bits per base is 6 Gigabits or 0.75 Gigabytes. About 20,000 of these will be over 14TB which using blood cells would be about 2,000,000 cubic micro metres or 0.002 cubic millimetres. So not even close to a drop of blood yet.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome
**http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-human-cell/
Meanwhile, in SSD land, 30TB in a 3.5" drive. However, I expect I wouldn't see much change out of my mortgage for that kind of nonsense...
Still, it appears that the sweet spot for SATA is still 4TB (although I see Ebuyer listing 8TB at £173).
I remember my friends marvelling at my 540MB drive that I got for only £153+VAT. And it feels like yesterday.
I'm going to guess that at late 1994 / early 1995.
Not far wrong. Christmas 1993. I think it was from Admincure. P90 with 16MB of RAM. People thought I was mental.
Then in 1994 I put OS/2 Warp on it, and people thought I was mental.
Later I got a 2x CD writer that took caddies, gold CDs at £10 a pop at the time, and would fail if the screensaver cut in, and people thought I was mental.
Then I bought an Orchid Monster 3D (<click>) - that showed them!
That truly was mental at the time. Good show.
I was the only person I know who could play Magic Carpet in 640x480! Worth every penny.
Also, a few months later I found that the "reserved" jumper on my Intel Plato board cranked it up to a mind-blistering 100MHz!!!
Kids these days - they'll never understand the efforts we went to for an extra 10MHz...
Yes 4TB is the current sweet spot but the 6TB WD red drives are going for £169.04, by my reckoning that gives a £28.17 price per TB - only marginally more than the £27.39 per TB that the same 4TB drive gives
(been looking to upgrade the NAS drives this morning)
"I remember my friends marvelling at my 540MB drive that I got for only £153+VAT"
Try a 120 for double that.....
And I won't even mention how much I paid for a 2 speed CD-Writer, but the discs cost around £15 each and had about a 20% failure rate. THAT'S how you stop piracy....
Every time I read about the latest increase in disk drive capacity I'm reminded of the state-of-the-art disk drives when I first got into computing. The disk drives were about the size and shape of a washing machine (top loader) and a disk pack comprised platters each about the size of a 12" LP stacked about a foot high. The capacity?
200MB
-sigh-
"lol I wouldn't trust 14mb of data to a Seagate drive let alone terabytes..."
Same here, used to only buy seagate years ago, moved to HGST, out of all the drives in my home NAS, the 22 x 4TB HGST drives I have only 1 has failed in the last 3 years. Out of the 6 x 1.5TB seagate drives over a 3 years period all 6 died. Out of 7 (plus 4 of the replacements) x 2TB segate drives over 4 years, 9 have failed.
At work out of 50 of the 2TB seagates, only 10 are left working over 4 years also.
HGST started as a merger of HItachi and IBM, who made the infamous "Deathstar" drives, some of the worst ever. Manufacturers have bad runs and good runs, and it's hard to draw any overall conclusions, in my experience.
Personally I liked Western Digital, but I recognized even at the time that this was mostly superstition on my part. Now that they've merged with HGST I have yet to form a new preference for rotating drives. For SSDs I tend to feel like Intel is the best bet, Samsung is a budget choice, and everyone else isn't worth trusting my cat pictures to...
I know they are and I know they do. I had the deathstars also. Had 2 x 75GXP's when the first one died the click of death, they replaced it with a 60GXP, how nice, giving me a smaller drive. When the second died, I complained, they gave me a 120GXP. They both died just over a year later with the click of death.
Right now, until data proves otherwise (been using backblaze hard drive stats). I will use HGST for now, if other drives improve and I am unable to get more of these drives when I need more storage (or my experience of the drives change) I will change to another manufacturer.
The helium is in there because it's less dense than air, reducing friction and hence heat and power consumption. Since the whole point is low density, I imagine it's at 1 atm or less, so the worst case would be air mixes in and makes the drive gradually run hotter. For cleanliness reasons drives are normally sealed anyway, so I don't see this being a big problem.
The helium shortage has been wildly overstated: https://www.wired.com/2016/06/dire-helium-shortage-vastly-inflated/
Most helium comes from natural gas wells, and until recently prices were so low that most gas producers didn't bother to separate it out -- even though removing the non-flammable helium improved the heating value of the gas. It just wasn't worth enough to be worth the trouble. The reason for the depressed prices was the US selling off its massive, 1920s-era helium reserve. So when the reserve started to get low, people worried that there was no production capacity in place to replace it -- and then the blockade of Qatar precipitated a minor panic because it temporarily cut off about 30% of the worldwide supply.