Anyone else drooling over...
Kendall Sears
Posts: 2,995
in The Commons
... Seagate's new SAS 60TB SSD drive? Wow!
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/08/10/seagate-steps-on-storage-gas-unveils-60tb-drive.html
No prices given, but SAS speeds and 60 Terabytes...
Kendall
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Comments
I have a sneaky feeling price is irrelevant... It's way out of my budget!
(But wouldn't that be a sweet piece of hardware to have, along with a computer capable of taking full advantage of it!)
Can you imagine defragging that thing, or the sheer amount of data you'd be potentially losing if that drive fails? Not to mention a 60 Terabyte drive would require a 60 terabyte back up.
The only people I could see really benefiting from that are film editors working in 4 and 6K who could eat up 60 terabytes like you'd give out Halloween candy.
That is exactly what people said when the first 1TB drives were announced.
If a drive that large fails and you have it full, you'd pay to have the data recovered. The last time a client paid for professional data recovery it cost $1500 to recover a 2TB SATA Western Digital (the cost of the replacement drive was included). That was about 2 years ago.
Regardless, this thing is SAS which is significantly more reliable than SATA and the drive is targeted at the data warehousing market. BUT.... it is only a short matter of time before that becomes commonplace.
Kendall
I am amazed at how much crap data I keep installing, LOL. My last PC build was 6 years ago and I had 3 500 gb drives installed and over the last couple of years I was putting more and more data on my externals because they kept getting full. Well I built a new rig a couple of months ago and installed 2 3 TB drives thinking it would tide me over till the next build, but it's filling up pretty fast, LOL.
Having memories of my first computer in the late 80s, with 64 MB of disk space. Partitioned into 2 drives because the OS couldn't handle that much data.
Lol... I still have one from that era that I was planning to see if I could use to run Linux-8086 on.
My first computer had a cassette tape! It took several minutes to load up a program that could run on it's 16K RAM (or whatever it had). But, that was a lot faster than retyping it all in like I had to do before I got the tape drive, lol.
You come here and post stuff like this in a community replete with compulsive digital hoarders??
You sir are an enabler....
The one scene file containing the "Optimus Prime" rig in "Tranformers Revenge of the Fallen" was 30 terabytes
over at Industrial Light & Magic.
My current animated film project has consumed a mere 370 gigs of data and we are a little under 35 minutes of finished
Footage
Most of this space is being taken by thousands of uncompressed raw targa frames and MDD data files that drive my genesis meshes in Maxon Cinema4D.
I have a smart search script on my production mac that hunts down and deletes all of the targas that I know have been post produced, color graded and compiled from after effects as HD movie files for the video editing stage.
I guess its time to run that script again.
How the heck did you afford a drive with 64 MB of data storage? Those were OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive back then.
No, but maybe that would make the cost of two 2TB SSDs in my price range. Although I can't manage to fill them up...even with using one of them for backup. If HW and SW ever gets to the point that I could make 4K animations with Blender, Unity, Cararra...maybe that would change.
I try my best
That's RIB for you. I routinely have RIB files that exceed 20GB for some of the stuff that I've done and that's NOT big by standards. RIB can blow up in any of a million ways, and the more parts(meshes) that are exposed, non-procedural shaders that are used, and stored generated atmospherics that are included can REALLY destroy disks. A dirty (pun intended) little secret about dynamic atmospherics is that it all has to be pre-generated before being sent out to the render farms because even with the random keys being stored there are unknown random noise hits that may be called in shaders several levels down that the seeds cannot be stored/anticipated and one can end up with MASSIVE differences in clouds/dust clouds/explosion patterns/etc from frame to frame. If one creates a integrated RIB file, then ALL of the assets needed for the scene will be included into the singular RIB file. If using a render farm that may distribute the individual frames to nodes that are disconnected from the main asset storage, or are on a comm link that is too slow, integrated RIBs are the only choice.
Kendall
Now that I think about it that's what we said back in the days of Commodore 64s and the Mac II line. Amazing how fast you can fill up a gig these days. "Those that don't remember history. . " and all that.
I remember when the first Single Sided Single Density floppies came out (8 Inch). We were ecstatic: "Who could EVER use 80 Kilobytes of storage!" Then the 5.25's came out: "WOW! A whole 144KB of storage! I'm in heaven! Maybe we can move off of paper tape now...." (nope).
Kendall
Remember Zip drives? Man. One thing I adore about Dropbox (and similar) is never having to fret over backups again.
And it's funny, current computer is 128 GB SSD + 1 TB HD, and I'm like '128 sounds pretty good.' Everyone says 'oh no, get more.' I didn't really have a choice (since buying this computer was rather a sudden thing and finances are what they are).
And yeah, wow, 128 GB goes fast. Having to make extra sure stuff gets installed in the regular HDD.
I don't think you're supposed to defrag Solid State Drives.
Couldn't believe it when my husband told me about that 60TB SSD. I was driving and he was reading the tech blog on his phone. Conversation pretty much went like this:
"You mean 16?"
"No 60."
"Sorry, did you say 16 or 60?"
"60."
"Holy crap! Didn't they just come out with 6TB hard drives?"
It really is crazy how much computers have advanced since the hey day of the good old C64.
Not using defrag tools for HDDs. SSDs are better at mitigating the issues of fragmentation, that being head movement/settle latency, but most may not be aware that many SSDs have burst transfer modes when the data are contiguous. There are certain filesystems that are particularly bad about fragmenting and those can start to show some serious performance hits relative to unfragmented data.
Kendall
Yeah 16K is what I remember too when I got my first computer in the late seventies. There weren't even any programs to buy (maybe a couple games) and no books to read--not even a computer section in bookstores yet. Of course you had to write your own programs and that was so much fun. The one I did I'm most proud of is Othello. But yeah only tape to load and save. And compare to today. Gosh.
I remember when we got rid of the 1401 (finally) and went from 4K to the 7080 with 40K... and paper tape? I still have some.. we used a lot of it, one of the few ways back then to get train movement data from the field from a telex network into the mainframe.. 8 inch floppies, yeah, mostly saw those as the boot disk for 3174/3274 controllers.
Not really:
http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm
Ha!
I was drooling over these a week or so ago:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10533/samsung-expands-its-pm1633a-lineup-as-1536-tb-ssd-hits-retail-for-10k
Lots of holes in that chart (as to be expected) especially in the mid-70's to mid-80's region. Most drives were not available (easily) to the general consumer. For instance, I had a 10MB drive with replaceable platters (12" diameter, I believe) that had to be put in an enclosure the size of a small chest-freezer with the same style lid as a freezer. You needed to press a large button (.75 inch or so) to unmount the drive, then another to spin the platters down, then a 3rd to unlock the top. Then you opened the top, put a circular plastic case over the platters, turned the handle in the middle to release the platters, then you could remove them. Replacing them was the opposite procedure. As the drive got older, we had to use a chopstick to press the lid switch (to make it think the lid was closed) and use a car's scissor jack crank handle to start the platters spinning because the motor was getting weak. These drives were very popular, and I don't see them in the list. With the right card, these were usable on S100 bus machines all the way down to the Commodore PETs. At one point we got one working with a VIC-20 using a "user port" card designed to allow PET peripherals on the VIC.
Kendall
Damn I loved my Vic20; didn't even consider a hard drive for it; they were science fiction stuff back then. Although, it was only a few years before I got one.
Just because we got it attached, doesn't mean it was particularly useful. It only worked with very specific software (written in VIC-Forth). Also, the processing on the VIC (and the C64) went faster when you turned off the screen. I had always wanted to try the drive on the C128 since it had the user port as well as CP/M, however, the software support for the CP/M side of the C128 was weak and the motor on the drive failed before we had the chance.
Kendall
60Tera? Wow, can't imagine filling that soon... But I've been surprised before... :)
IBM 3330, the keyword was make sure the platter cover (aka cake lid) was firmly attached before removing the disk assembly, and don;t drop it!
4TB/w power consumption, most enterprise SSDs tend to sit at around 2W-per-TB at idle.I'm thinking it'd still need some decent cooling in a non-rack setting..I'd guess at $40K per unit, based on about $.65 per gb, which is about where most enterprise SSD's sit..
Dropping would be grounds for termination.
I never had one with that many platters in my direct control. 4 platters was the largest I can remember handling. All of ours were opaque white plastic.
Kendall
Yeah, you could really get into some serious trouble for dropping one.. Cool thing about some of the old mainframe DASD was they were hard plug addressable as well as plater interchangeable - you could pull some neat hardware tricks with that if needed. We had quite a few banks of those 3330's, eventually upgraded to 3350's
Some pics from my collection.. trying to remember the disk make and model, but there's probably no more than 20-30GB in that pic..
Behind the covers of a 3380 disk unit.. 1.2GB per unit..
Tape units...
and yes, we had lots of tape..
IBM 370 master console