120TB hard drives are coming, thanks to new Seagate tech

I really can't see many consumers that would be interested, beyond the bragging rights. Corporations, sure for archive purposes - but many/most are going the cloud route for that type of storage.

Very few of the systems I configure for commercial/educational/public have the larger drives, most use dedupe/compression on SSD/NVMe based systems to accomplish both speed and realizes capacity. Those that don't want to go that route, 20TB is about the biggest they go with.
 
MacDaddy said:
I really can't see many consumers that would be interested, beyond the bragging rights. Corporations, sure for archive purposes - but many/most are going the cloud route for that type of storage.

Very few of the systems I configure for commercial/educational/public have the larger drives, most use dedupe/compression on SSD/NVMe based systems to accomplish both speed and realizes capacity. Those that don't want to go that route, 20TB is about the biggest they go with.
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Who could possibly come close to needing that much storage? The biggest setup I have is a computer with a 1TB C drive and an 8TB D drive. I have all my personal and business documents on it, loads of videos, many thousands of pics, and probably 40,000 songs. And I'm still only less than 4TB in capacity.
 
Guard Dad said:
Who could possibly come close to needing that much storage? The biggest setup I have is a computer with a 1TB C drive and an 8TB D drive. I have all my personal and business documents on it, loads of videos, many thousands of pics, and probably 40,000 songs. And I'm still only less than 4TB in capacity.
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Facebook, Gmail and Yahoo to mention a few. Any application that allows customers to store information on their site could use massive but compact storage devices. Keep in mind that the "Cloud" is just a hard drive somewhere that takes up space.
 
Paxilpapa said:
Facebook, Gmail and Yahoo to mention a few. Any application that allows customers to store information on their site could use massive but compact storage devices. Keep in mind that the "Cloud" is just a hard drive somewhere that takes up space.
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Yeah, I was referring to consumers, or personal use. Even small business use. I don't think I had more than 2TB D drives on any of my work computers.
 
Guard Dad said:
Yeah, I was referring to consumers, or personal use. Even small business use. I don't think I had more than 2TB D drives on any of my work computers.
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I gotcha, I was trying to point out who it was actually developed for. The drive size in this case has reached a point of diminishing returns as a day to day C drive for the average user. A drive that size would probably have a 2TB index area that would have to be scanned by the processor to retrieve anything out there. I wonder if MacDaddy knows whether or not the newer Dual Processors can handle the dedicated function of data retrieval, and if not, how close are these monster drive systems coming to being I/O bound with a single function processor?
 
Guard Dad said:
Who could possibly come close to needing that much storage? The biggest setup I have is a computer with a 1TB C drive and an 8TB D drive. I have all my personal and business documents on it, loads of videos, many thousands of pics, and probably 40,000 songs. And I'm still only less than 4TB in capacity.
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Someone with a huge collection of cat videos.
 
Paxilpapa said:
I gotcha, I was trying to point out who it was actually developed for. The drive size in this case has reached a point of diminishing returns as a day to day C drive for the average user. A drive that size would probably have a 2TB index area that would have to be scanned by the processor to retrieve anything out there. I wonder if MacDaddy knows whether or not the newer Dual Processors can handle the dedicated function of data retrieval, and if not, how close are these monster drive systems coming to being I/O bound with a single function processor?
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Not an issue with the processors handling the data. Most of the storage access is handled by the RAID controller - the processor(s) just ask for data and most of the time they are waiting on the hard drives to supply it. We use a tool that provides information on disk performance, latency, and several other performance parameters. Its almost always the disk performance and access latency that slows systems down. Processors are typically taking a nap for most of the day.

I think a lot of consumers haven't got a clue how little storage they actually need. One example could be music. Take a song, digitized using lossless FLAC, takes say 50MB of storage. Using a "small" 10TB storage device, would allow 200,000 songs. About 4 minutes per song, if you listened non-stop it would take 36 years (if my math is right). Given most people who keep music files have much smaller file sizes ... well they would need even longer to listen to them all. I have a 32GB USB thumb drive that has Christmas music on it for traveling during the holidays. We never have to listen to the same song twice. Sure, if you want to store video it takes more space - but again that much storage is more than most folks could access in their life times.

Businesses - sure. A fun aspect is how to sort/index that much storage. I think that is something that is waiting for a break-thru.
 
Yeah, most people are using mp3 format for music, that's about a 10:1 compression, if memory serves. I i believe .flac is "only" about 2:1.
 
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