Yousuf Khan wrote:
Sadly This 10TB Hard Drive Is Designed For Servers, Not Your Laptop
http://gizmodo.com/sadly-this-10tb-h...not-1691245306


Hitachi Global Storage Technologies—aka HGST, aka a subsidiary of
Western Digital—was recently showing off its gigantic new 10TB hard
drive at the Linux Foundation Vault tradeshow in Boston. But
unfortunately you won't be packing 10,000 gigabytes into your laptop
anytime soon because the drive is designed for use in servers, and
mostly because it requires special software to work.

Originally revealed back in September of last year, HGST will finally be
shipping its 10TB SMR HelioSeal HDD sometime in the second quarter of
this year. But the drive will require special updates to an OS like
Linux in order for a server to actually be able to read and write to it
thanks to the radical new storage technologies it employs.

The HelioSeal technology simply means the drive is actually pumped full
of helium to help reduce friction between the read/write heads and the
platter which allows HGST to squeeze more platters inside since there's
less heat to have to deal with. It's the SMR technology that poses the
software problems.

SMR stands for Shingled Magnetic Recording and it basically describes
how data is written to the platters. In a traditional hard drive the
data is written in thin lines with a tiny gap in-between each one to
help minimize corruption. It's similar to how grooves of music are laid
out on a vinyl record. With SMR those data tracks slightly overlap
instead, like waterproof shingles on the roof of a home. There are no
longer any gaps in-between each track which allows more data to be
stored on a single platter, but at the cost of more complicated software
on the OS to properly read, write, and over-write data without
destroying neighboring tracks.

It sounds complicated, and it is, which is why HGST's new 10TB drive has
been slow to come to market. Everyone involved wants to make sure the
technology and supporting software works perfectly to avoid disastrous
data loss. But there's no reason to think the technology won't be ready
for desktop PCs and eventually laptops in a few years. Who needs that
cloud anyways?

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate...hdd_review_8tb

"SMR drives are not designed to cope with sustained write behavior"

"We found large sustained backup tasks to take longer than a traditional
PMR HDD, averaging about 30MB/s"

"The SMR drives took much longer for a traditional full backup,
averaging 30MB/s.

However we saw sustained read speeds during a 400GB VM recovery
in excess of 180MB/s, which is really the core metric.
"

It's possible the slightly smaller drives are not affected
like that. Some of the 6TB ones are OK. I saw a review comparing
a few products in the 6TB range, and they had decent sustained
numbers (for home users who care about such things).

This isn't that review, but it'll have to do. It's for a
Seagate 6TB drive, with numbers over 200MB/sec for large
enough block size operations.

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...4_review/4.htm

If you have external disk enclosures, some of the new disks
have a different hole pattern on the bottom, so for drives
that are held into place with screws from the bottom,
only two screws will mate.

I think home users will be staying "one step behind the curve",
to get the best possible secondary storage. SSD for C:,
conventional (non-SMR) secondary storage.

The flying height, the last time I checked, was 3nm. HGST is
experimenting with zero flying height. If you thought your
old drives seemed to have a "wear phenomenon", we're just
getting started. The experimental zero flying height setup
HGST used, lasted one month before the head was ruined. But
they'll figure it out eventually.

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping my current set of
drives last a long time. I'm very happy to not have
30MB/sec writes.

Paul