back to article Cleversafe CEO: We would tell you about the 8TB drive, but...

Hot on the heels of the light-on-details announcement about Seagate's 8TB hard disk drive, The Register pressed Cleversafe CEO John Morris on whether his firm would be using the enormo capacity drives. Morris answered: "We are happy to help you whenever it’s possible, but we can’t comment on this subject.” Seagate …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    C'mon Moore's Law, Hit The Wall.

    No matter what the HD size is people will fill it.

    When will users stop buying cameras with higher definition images when 2.2MP is the most that the human eye can see. 48-bit color when 27-bit tests the limit of the best eyesight. 4K TV's where there is nothing wrong with 1080 displays.

    Corporations are inventing bigger and better devices that use more storage to no advantage. Technology has passed the point where our biology can discern the differences.

    A limit to storage might force programmers to be more efficient as well. Windows patches and service packs are pushing hundreds of MB now. WTH?

    Technology needs more elegance, not performance.

    1. Dave, Portsmouth

      Re: C'mon Moore's Law, Hit The Wall.

      While I agree about colour depth, 4k vs 1080p on TVs (I'm still watching mostly SD content on my HDTV), etc, I can't agree about photography. That all comes down to what you want your photos for and how big you're going to view them! 2.2MP is probably fine for Facebook, Twitter et al, but I wouldn't want a 2.2MP photo printed on my wall, or even as my desktop wallpaper - it'd look crap!

      1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

        When 2MP is or isn't enough

        If you are looking at the whole picture, 2MP is fine. If you step up close to the picture, ideally the part you are looking at should be about 2MP, so the full image should be bigger. 4k TV is pointless because you look at the whole screen. A 4k monitor can be pointy if you like to have 4 x 2MP diagrams in front of you at the same time.

    2. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Re: C'mon Moore's Law, Hit The Wall.

      You're mixing up intermediate formats and final formats. The intermediate format of photos and videos needs a LOT of dynamic range because appropriate tonal curves aren't applied until post-processing. Tonal curves are mostly an artistic effect so they can't be pre-computed while recording.

    3. Rebecca M

      Re: C'mon Moore's Law, Hit The Wall.

      ... higher definition images when 2.2MP is the most that the human eye can see. 48-bit color when 27-bit tests the limit of the best eyesight. 4K TV's where there is nothing wrong with 1080 displays.

      24-bit colour is all that is needed in the final result but you do lose at least a bit channel with a lot of post-processing. Adding on a layer on top of the image? No longer true colour. Adjusting brightness and contrast? No longer true colour, and so on almost ad infinitum. That's without even considering that not everyone is simply taking and viewing pictures of their cat but might be doing something productive. I have a friend who does astrophotography and he commented a while back that his CCD is supposedly rated for 16 bits per channel but in practice it is more like 12 bits plus noise, even with all the cooling and advanced trickery needed for the very best images. He's NOTICED that and shown me - are you really going to tell him or me that he's imaging it?

      As for coming up with a supposed resolution of the human eye, it's a mug's game that shows complete ignorance of how the eye actually works. The overall resolution is fairly low in pixel count terms but nowhere near uniform - i.e. you have a comparatively high resolution in the very centre of view and very low resolution in the extreme periphery of view. Since you don't know where the viewer is looking ALL of the image needs to be good for that very high centre resolution.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: C'mon Moore's Law, Hit The Wall.

        "he's imaging it?"

        Yes, he certainly is. But I won't say he's imagining it :-)

  2. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Hm. I don't know why they don't go back to the full-height standard and fill them with a buttload of platters. This would help latency as well as capacity.

    My rather plain-jane case has a dozen full-height-capable bays in the front, for absolutely no reason. Might as well put some of them to use.

    1. Mage Silver badge

      The 5.25" twice CD /DVD drive height?

      Or something smaller, later.

      Or something bigger (8" maybe 14"?)

      Stability, yield, power consumption, heat/thermal issues/calibration. For larger diameter you have poorer random access time and also a lower spin speed. DVD drives in data mode are limited in speed due to desire of the disk to turn into shrapnel.

      Power consumption is perhaps linear vs number of platters, but possibly a cube law on rotational speed, hence 4800 rpm laptop drives and "Media drives" (PVRs) are often 5400 rather than 7200 so that they can record / replay without having to stop and do thermal recalibration.

      15K rpm 3.25" was pretty much fastest. I think more than twice the 10K rpm disks consumption. Very old drives have wider tracks and thus didn't have built in thermal calibration. But a low level format at -1C in an unheated warehouse was a bad idea!

      1. P. Lee

        Tech details

        Not too relevant?

        We already don't use high capacity drives (2-3TB) in many arrays because you can't get the data off them fast enough. The contention for the data is too high. That's why enterprise arrays have smaller, faster disks.

        So its an archive/media drive? Great for the home market where I just want to mirror to drives in a small space to keep all my photos and er, DVD backups, and I really don't care too much about access speed. It would be nice to consolidate the 8 disks in my home server down into a much smaller box. Perhaps all those over-priced dual-bay "NAS" systems are now an option.

        1. Jason Ozolins

          Re: Tech details

          A quote attributed to the late Jim Gray: 'Disk is the new tape'. Read and write sizes should be going up to at least maintain the ratio of time spent reading/writing to time spent in seeking as disks get denser. Seagate don't quote seek specs for their 6TB drive, but if you guess at 8ms for a random seek, plus 4ms average rotational latency, you'd like to spend a decent amount of time transferring data in return for that 12ms of latency.

          Sat the media transfer rate is around 200MB/sec; then that's 1.6MB going by in one revolution. If you have these drives in, say, an 8+2 RAID-6 group, then multiply by 8 data disks and that's ~13MB you need to read in order to get one revolution (==8.3mS) worth of throughput from all the disks before moving the heads to the next I/O.

          This was a real concern for a system I worked on where virtual tape RAID sets were being read in multiple sequential streams by our SAM-QFS HSM, but each read was only 1MB in size. For an 8+2 RAID set, that's only 128KB of data transferred per spindle. The disks spent most of their time seeking instead of reading when there were a few streams running to a single RAID set. I partially fixed this by patching the HSM stage-in binary to read in bigger chunks (I had the source to know what to patch, but it wasn't buildable from that source)... but most of the improvement came from controlling the file recall workload so as not to read files concurrently from a given virtual tape.

      2. pierce

        15k disks aren't 3.5" platters anyways, they are 2.5", thats why all the new enterprise stuff is 2.5" form factor.

  3. phil dude
    Boffin

    genome...

    well you need somewhere to store the copy of your genomic information...

    Any idea how long it will take to zero this drive...?

    P.

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: genome...

      Human genome is about 3 Giga bases - four possible values for a base (A,C,G,T) so that's about 6 Gigabits without compression. Amusingly, that's about the same capacity as a CD! I'd expect an 8TB disk to hold the genome of at least 10,000 people - maybe 100,000 or a million with clever compression.

      1. phil dude
        Boffin

        Re: genome...

        Well yes, but I was thinking of all the other information that is going to get tagged *onto* the genome, when medicine finally gets organised. For example, methylation data, any MRI's you've had etc... It is so hard to know what will turn up...!

        And there is redundancy...many copies. Hence, my original question ;-)

        How long to zero the drive, and make sure every bit is read/writable?

        P.

  4. Larhten

    For a minute...

    I thought I was reading an article on Metro by mistake....

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