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?