Computer technology has reached unprecedented heights and the most voluminous hard disks exceeded the capacity mark of 60 TB. This is shocking because the average user has a maximum of 1-2 terabytes of storage and still can't get full. The professionals understood what kind of 60 TB equipment we were talking about - this is the so-called Lacie STFK60000400. In essence, it is a modular box, inside of which 6 hard drives of equal capacity are placed, but the convenience is that the device clearly regulates their operation. There is somewhere in the world the largest HDD of 100 TB, but it is excessively bulky, comparable to the first punched card processors. But what should ordinary people do who don’t really understand the issue and get bogged down in various buses, spindles, and caches? It’s simple: you need to read this material and put everything in order, defining the selection criterion for yourself. The study was conducted to identify the volume/price/functionality ratio, so some manufacturers were not included in the list. It is worth noting that manufacturers have modular systems, ready-made home cloud storage, etc. - all this was also ignored.
This review includes standard 3.5” drives and external drives in HDD format (not to be confused with SSD), which are commercially available and acceptable for home use. If something is really worthy of attention, it is mentioned in inserts in the text without participation in the rating.
Best price/quality ratio
Country: China, Thailand
Average price: 27,500 rub.
Rating (2019): 4.6
Third place is again occupied by Toshiba, and it is here for a simple reason - price. Of all the most capacious 12 TB drives, without division into server and home ones, the MG07ACA12TE model is the cheapest. 1 TB of this device will cost a little more than 2,000 rubles, with a difference from the previous ones of only 2 TB. Server hard drives are more reliable, work according to a different algorithm, and are able to warn of the onset of a crisis in order to save data. One question: why is the data of an individual user less important than the data of a corporation?
There is nothing special about this product - the same equipment, which is an order of magnitude better than a regular disk for personal use. By the way, the closest model in terms of price, which is positioned for the home, costs more than 32,000 rubles. Perhaps this is the most acceptable option among large HDDs.
The most reliable and safe
Country: China, Thailand
Average price: 39,500 rub.
Rating (2019): 4.7
Toshiba MG07ACA14TE does not use the latest technology, so it ends up in second place. No, he's no worse. Why is this so: the manufacturer paid attention to the reliability and intentional destruction of data in the product, but the technology for reading data is previous. Relatively speaking, Toshiba convinces with great caution, while Seagate tries to test everything new as quickly as possible. The disk is convenient for quickly hiding information: Sanitize Instant Erase technology allows you to instantly delete all data from the drive. It should be noted that the probability of an uncorrectable bit error occurring is 1 * 10 16, which is 10 times more than its main competitor, Seagate, but the differences are still negligible. For greater reliability, the “Persistent Write Cache” function has been introduced into the disk; when working together with “Power Loss Protection”, it can ensure the safety of data in the event of a computer power failure. Additionally, if the buyer was able to purchase the product under review with a SAS interface, then it may be worth reconsidering this rating, provided that the home computer also supports it. If needed automated security, you should pay attention to MG07ACA14TE. You will also be pleased with the energy consumption (lower by ~15-20%), but this is already important for those who are building large infrastructure.
Disadvantages include: high price, lack of firmware for home use. However, even under such strict conditions, the model received approval from ordinary consumers and professional testers. The following products are slightly less capacious and here it is necessary to explain the nuances of purchasing and using those already listed. Both models have a high price, at which you need to pay almost 2800 rubles for 1TB of memory. With the same success, for the Euro-Asian territory you can buy 2 disks of 8 TB and pay only 2000 rubles for 1 TB, and get a total of 16 TB. In addition, it is difficult for the average user to obtain objective information. So, the Toshiba website is basically not for quality choice, and Seagate is mostly in English and without details.
Most modern
A country:
Average price: 39,500 rub.
Rating (2019): 4.7
If the average buyer does not distinguish between noise of 2 dB, if for him there is no difference between an operating life of 115 years or 289 years, then the Seagate ST14000VN0008 hard drive has surpassed everyone. A similar drive from a competitor is also good and gets second place in the rating, but here’s why the one in question HDD is better. First of all, it is adapted to work with other drives in a NAS scenario, in which up to 8 similar instances can be combined, for example, for home station. A total of 112 TB is reached. The next leading feature is the IronWolf Health-Managment system, which scans almost 200 parameters. It notifies the user about violation of operating standards: too high a temperature, shock, shaking, etc. Other advantages include a maximum temperature of 70 degrees (suitable for Sochi, Gelendzhik) and is better suited for single use on a home computer, thanks to the separately supplied firmware. There is no point in comparing with capacious predecessors of 8-12 TB, and given that there is only one competitor for the next 3-6 months, other characteristics will become standard rather than an advantage technical parameters, like: access speed to a block with information - 7200, disk RAM capacity (cache) - 256, form factor - 3.5”. For Russia and other CIS countries, slightly increased energy consumption plays practically no role. This parameter is more sensitive for Europe and large businesses, such as Sberbank, Aeroflot or Yandex.
The only disadvantage of the device is its high price. At the time of writing the review, the device was difficult to find for general sale, but it had already been tested on specialized sites, where it received a high rating. If the reader prefers to wait until 2019, then Western Digital has planned to release a disk with 16 TB of memory, as well as the following manufacturer. Now the bulk of the volume is being bought by data centers and, as soon as they satisfy their demand, the retail price will drop and some will begin to flow to the mass consumer.
Best price
A country: China/Malaysia (assembly), Ireland, USA, Thailand (parts)
Average price: 14,000 rub.
Rating (2019): 3.8
The last place among the drives should have been taken by the WDBWLG0100HBK from Western Digital with a capacious memory of 10 TB, but it is not on sale in Russia. Therefore, the Seagate STEL8000200, which was mentioned earlier, comes here. The computer community gives a good rating because the product has been tested by time and users, has best ratio price/terabyte, and is also accompanied by detailed documentation and software.
The disadvantages include, like the entire product range, a high design and small legs, which do not at all reduce sensitivity to shocks. Reviews note heating and slowness. If the goal is backup data storage on external media, then this is the best option.
Optimal set of features
A country: China/Malaysia (assembly), Ireland, USA, Thailand (parts)
Average price: 19,000 rub.
Rating (2019): 4.0
The Seagate STEL10000400 model is positioned as an external drive for backup data storage. In this regard, full compatibility with the Time Machine program for creating backups is provided. The product does not have particularly outstanding characteristics among analogues of the same capacity: interface speed 160 MB/s, USB 3.0 A, plastic case. As users correctly note, this disk costs much less than its internal counterpart by as much as 6,000 rubles. Therefore, savings can be made if volume is more important than speed.
Among the shortcomings, the lack of anti-vibration feet is noted. Instead, they have 3 mm racks and a high design – it’s not difficult to hit them with your elbow and drop them. Older brother STEL8000200 with average price will be a more suitable option for a computer, since the manufacturer has thought of a built-in hub for it and developed software for copying.
The fastest
A country: China/Malaysia (assembly), Ireland, USA, Thailand (parts)
Average price: 33,000 rub.
Rating (2019): 4.6
If you need all the power, speed and latest advancements in one drive, then you can't overlook the LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 3 10TB STFY10000400 external hard drive with 10TB of space. Its price is incredibly high - at 33,000 rubles. Suitable for those who care about interface bandwidth and shock protection. However, if you take away 2 TB, you can buy the same technologies at half the price. Why choose this device: Thunderbolt 3 speeds up to 40GB/s, handles 4K video and 3D graphics, comes with a metal casing, shock-absorbing struts and vertical stability.
The disadvantages include: it only works with systems above Windows 8.1. and Mac OS X, heavy weight of almost 1.5 kg, the highest price per 1 TB. If the criterion for choosing an external hard drive is thoughtfulness and the best technology, then it’s worth taking. There are no analogues among single-disk systems. It’s worth passing by: a 12TB external hard drive is the most spacious of all its counterparts, but overly expensive - more than 50K rubles. At the same time, according to reviews, it is very heavy and slow - instead of the stated 15,000 rpm, it produces only 7,200.
Every year the flow of information to Internet users increases, so consumers are interested in larger data storage devices. Manufacturers of computers and peripherals are developing this direction, competing in the market.
Fierce competition for buyers in the IT sector is the engine of progress - if in 2015 the limit was an external hard drive of 8 terabytes, then today the most big hard a disk for ordinary consumers can hold 2 times more. If we talk about hard drives for corporate needs, the capacity of such devices is tens of thousands of times greater.
Today, the record holder for memory capacity among data storage devices for personal computers is the 15.36 TB SSD from Samsung; Such pleasure costs $10,000. Achieving such a record was made possible thanks to the development of NAND chips capable of storing many times more information than standard 128 GB modules. Progressive NAND chips accommodate 48 layers of V-NAND memory.
Just 4 years ago, 24 layers were considered the capacity record, but Samsung engineers showed creative thinking and placed the silicon elements not in one plane, but placed them on an edge - this orientation of the silicon elements allows the hard drive to work faster. NAND chips are three-dimensional, their concept is similar to the three-dimensional transistors in processors latest generation, since the developers also optimally used the available chip area.
An innovative approach to chip design made it possible to increase the memory capacity in gadgets, and the South Korean company was an order of magnitude ahead of its main competitors Western Digital and Seagate. By the way, the 15.36 TB SSD solid state drive was announced for the first time back in 2015 at an IT exhibition, but capacious ones are available in stores external drives appeared only at the end of 2016 and caused a revolution in the market. The fact is that external HDDs with solid-state drives (SSDs) have traditionally had the following advantages:
As for the minuses, previously external hard drives of the SSD type, compared to external HDDs with traditional memory (HDD), were distinguished by a relatively small amount of information storage, but as of 2017, this statement is no longer true. Samsung's capacious 15.36 TB SSD is already in stores. Naturally, the gadget is not intended for storing movies and toys - the price level of such a drive is too high.
The target audience the largest external hard drive - professional photographers, engineers and other professionals who use “heavy” professional programs in their work. Competitors are breathing down Samsung's neck - most manufacturers are already able to offer customers external drives with a capacity of 10 terabytes, and therefore another record is possible in the near future, which will update the high bar in the portable hard drive sector.
For those consumers who want to keep intellectual property out of reach of hackers, a hard drive with a capacity of 100 petabytes is available - that's 100,000 terabytes, or 1,000,000 gigabytes. Such a device is portable, but you can’t put it in your pocket - the dimensions of the mega-gadget mean transportation using a sea container or a Snowmobile truck.
However, such storage facilities are not available in stores. The Amazon company, which owns the cloud storage Amazon Web Services (AWS), uses special 18-wheeled trucks to transport information - archives of companies, film studios, libraries, information databases of government agencies or the army, scientific and research institutes. The truck is filled with hard drives and equipment and is considered the largest storage capacity.
The Amazon Snowmobile service is available to those interested - files and file cabinets from mobile storage are delivered to the customer’s or AWS data center and transferred to the customer’s server or Amazon cloud storage via high-speed optical lines. The Snowmobile service is used to reduce the load on the fiber optic lines through which Amazon cloud storage users upload information to their 80 terabyte personal cloud. The transmission speed over optical fiber is not infinite and is 10 gigabits/second. So, to save time, the client transfers hard drives to Amazon, from which information will be uploaded to the cloud, bypassing the network.
Amazon has 10 such trucks at its disposal, which save time for the company's users. Cloud storage recycles giant information flow, and it takes 26 years to transfer 1 exabyte of information. AWS machines can transport this amount of information in 6 months - the difference is noticeable! How does information move using Snowmobile? Such a truck drives to the customer's home or office and connects to the network using several cables with a transmission speed of 40 gigabits/second. If you use a group of cables, the drives in the truck will be filled at a speed of up to 1 terabits/second. So 100,000 terabytes are loaded onto a truck in 10 days.
The truck, called Snowmobile, is designed to transfer (or transport?) data from a client's server to Amazon Web Services cloud storage. Do you really need such an archaic method to move data to the cloud? The fact is that with a volume of an exabyte or, as often happens, hundreds of petabytes, downloading even through a high-bandwidth channel can take quite a significant amount of time.
For example, uploading one exabyte of data to a cloud storage with a connection of 10 gigabits per second will take... about 26 years. That's why Amazon offers AWS customers data trucking services. 10 of these “Snowmobiles” can transport an exabyte in less than six months, that is, the data transfer rate will be about 514 gigabits per second. Another thing!
Transferring data to cloud storage is quite simple. A truck arrives at the home or office of a client who has ordered data transportation and connects to the network using several cables. Each cable provides data transfer at speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second, and the total throughput speed of data transfer to the Snowmobile can reach up to a terabit per second. With such a connection, it will take about 10 days to fully load a container of 100 petabytes (about 100 thousand terabytes!).
The Snowmobile is a waterproof, refrigerated container 13.7 meters long and 2.9 meters high, which is attached to a semi-trailer and moved by a tractor-trailer. The container requires a 350 kilowatt power source, is protected from physical hacking, encrypts data, and is also equipped with a video surveillance system and GPS. If this is not enough for someone, for an additional fee Amazon will provide armed guards when transporting data.
Hard drives are the most predictable of all computer components. They are slowly growing in volume, and in our annual final review we report on what indicators the products of a particular company have achieved. However, 2016 was a surprisingly active year for the magnetic storage industry. As you know, sales of hard drives have been steadily falling and reached their peak in the summer. The reasons for this are the declining demand for ready-made computers as such and the growing popularity of SSDs. Manufacturers responded to the challenge by focusing their efforts on the class of HDD that is now most in demand - large-capacity disks, primarily server disks.
The latest innovation that has had a major impact on the performance of enterprise HDDs is helium. For a long time Since the advent of this technology in commercial devices, it has remained the preserve of drives from one company - HGST. But over the past year the situation has changed. Seagate released its first server model in a sealed 10TB case, and then the helium expanded to client offerings.
The new record for HDD capacity was 12 TB based on perpendicular magnetic recording, and the next milestone will be 14 TB using SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). In addition, Seagate, as part of the reorganization of its consumer line, introduced 2.5-inch drives with capacities up to 5 TB in 15 mm high cases (and these are also SMR). Let's talk in more detail about the changes that have occurred in each category of hard drives.
3.5-inch nearline class hard drives (from near online), designed for storing large amounts of data with moderate access speed requirements, remain the only class of HDD that generates stable demand in the market. Thanks to development cloud services and the proliferation of user data, they will be in demand for many years to come and will be the last to fall under the onslaught of SSDs. Information density and power consumption per server rack are the defining parameters of data center storage, and sealed helium-filled drives have no equal here.
HGST has broken another capacity record by releasing the Ultrastar He12 series helium HDD with a capacity of 12 TB. With platters with a usable capacity of 1.7 TB and a spindle speed of 7200 rpm, it also achieved an impressive sequential access speed of 255 MB/s for a magnetic drive.
However, SMR technology has once again come to the rescue to increase HDD capacity beyond the limits set by Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology in its modern form. HGST will soon begin selling the Ultrastar He14 series with tiled recording capacity up to 14 TB. It is easy to see that the capacity gap between gel drives and HDDs in a standard ventilated case is greater than ever: the latter have not yet even crossed the 8 TB mark.
As for Western Digital, the ongoing integration of HGST's management and production structures into the combined enterprise following the historic transaction has allowed the company to more clearly delineate which segment of the HDD market is served by each brand. Since WD's products are mostly aimed at individual consumers, their server range has been reduced, retiring nearline drives such as WD Se, WD Ae, WD Re+, and in the mission-critital category, WD Xe has fallen victim. The main Re series remains in service and includes drives with a capacity of no more than 6 TB. At the same time, WD released its own helium HDDs for data centers, built on HGST designs, under the WD Gold brand - first in a volume of 8 and then 10 TB.
Seagate, which in recent years has been increasing recording density faster than its competitors, but neglected helium, nevertheless recognized this technology. First came the Enterprise 3.5 HDD helium model with a capacity of 10 TB (plates with a usable capacity of 1.43 TB), which we found this summer and found a number of design advantages over the competing sealed HGST platform. Then, based on it, the company prepared a number of consumer devices for desktop and NAS, which will be discussed below, and a new enterprise model with a capacity of 12 TB was sent for testing to selected Seagate partners and will appear on the mass market in 2017.
The most capacious drive with SMR in Seagate's arsenal remains the 8 TB Archive HDD. Considering that standard 3.5-inch drives, even without helium, have already reached this volume, this area does not yet seem to be a priority for Seagate, although the company promises to expand the use of SMR in the future and has begun to implement it in client devices.
High-speed hard drives of the SFF form factor (2.5 inches) with a spindle speed of 15 thousand rpm are gradually becoming a thing of the past, since SSDs can offer incomparably higher performance for critical services. At the same time, 10-thousandth drives will be in demand for some time as an intermediate option between SSDs and nearline drives.
Nevertheless, there is still a noticeable demand for drives with 15 thousand rpm, and Seagate has introduced the updated, sixth version of the Enterprise Performance 15K HDD line. Thanks to the increased recording density, the drive has a volume one and a half times larger than its analogues (900 GB) and highest speed sequential read/write among hard drives - 315 MB/s. Additionally, some Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 configurations include dual cache—256 MB DRAM and 16 GB NAND Flash. The latter is used both to duplicate frequently read information and to speed up recording. Bandwidth Enterprise Performance 15K HDD v6 in random block writing, according to Seagate, has increased by 100% compared to previous generation drives (also equipped with Flash memory).
For 2017, Seagate has planned an upgrade to the Enterprise Performance 10K HDD series, which has already gone through eight iterations. But Western Digital does not share its competitor's enthusiasm for mission-critical drives. The company has no further plans to develop this area, and the WD brand, as we have already noted, completely left this market when the merged enterprise closed the WD Xe line. The portfolio of Toshiba drives with spindle speeds of 10/15 thousand rpm has remained unchanged since the end of 2015, and we do not know whether new models will be released.
This year marks the first time we've seen sealed helium-filled enclosures in consumer drives. WD, using the mechanics of the HGST Ultrastar He8, has released several new products for network storage under the WD Red, Red Pro and Purple brands. The drives have seven 1.42 TB platters with a total capacity of 8 TB. At the same time, only Red Pro retained the spindle speed of 7200 rpm, characteristic of the HGST He8, while in others the plates rotate at a speed of 5400 rpm.
The WD Blue and WD Black desktop series, as well as the drives for Purple NV video surveillance systems, remained at the 6 TB mark.
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Seagate's customer portfolio, on the other hand, has been completely redesigned. All new products for 2016 and previous offerings that remain in service have been reorganized under four brands. Desktop drives are now sold under the familiar name BarraCuda (BarraCuda Pro), which was once inextricably associated with Seagate drives, but for several years gave way to the more formal name Desktop HDD and served to distinguish different series of devices in documents. In addition to BarraCuda, the brands FireCuda are presented - disks with a Flash memory buffer, IronWolf (IronWolf Pro) - for NAS and SkyHawk - for video surveillance systems.
The core of the BarraCuda, IronWolf and SkyHawk lines was formed by the models presented in previous years from the Desktop HDD, NAS HDD and Surveillance HDD series, respectively, but Seagate added to them 8 TB configurations in a ventilated case (six 1.33 TB platters), which use mechanics , previously tested in Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD and Enterprise NAS HDD drives. The pinnacle of development was the 10 terabyte helium models (1.43 TB per wafer). The BarraCuda series is characterized by a spindle speed of 7200 rpm, the rest - 5900 rpm.
But FireCuda drives are the only ones among all new Seagate products in the 3.5-inch form factor that have decreased in volume. These are completely new hybrid HDDs, introduced to replace the Seagate Desktop SSHD line. Like their predecessors, the drives are equipped with an 8 GB Flash memory chip, but the maximum storage capacity has been reduced from 4 to 2 TB (two 1 TB platters spinning at 7200 rpm).
HGST, barred by antitrust regulators from OEM supply of consumer HDDs after its merger with Western Digital, still sells desktop and NAS hard drives in the form of boxed upgrade kits. The most capacious model among them is the 8 TB HGST Deskstar NAS, which has a spindle speed of 7200 rpm and, we assume, comes with six platters with a usable capacity of 1.33 TB. The HGST Deskstar line, on the contrary, has not been updated for a long time and can only offer a 4 terabyte model based on five 800 GB platters (7200 rpm).
Toshiba client magnetic drives remain limited to 6 TB (7200 rpm).
750 GB per platter within the framework of traditional PMR technology remains the limit for 2.5-inch HDDs with a spindle speed of 5400-7200 rpm, and even then only Toshiba uses such platters in the MQ03ABB line. Other products from all manufacturers continue to use 500GB wafer sizes.
Previously, Seagate attempted to overcome this limitation with tiled recording, which allowed the platter capacity of the Mobile HDD series to be increased to 1 TB, and the disk capacity to 2 TB. However, the manufacturer did not stop there and released a new series of hard drives with SMR under the BarraCuda brand.
In addition to drives in 7 mm cases, it includes models with a height of 15 mm, reaching a capacity of 5 TB. Maximum speed sequential read/write is 130/140 MB/s for thick and thin drives, respectively, at a spindle speed of 5400 rpm (compare with the 145-169 MB/s figures available for the company’s mobile HDDs with PRM platters).
In order to reduce the performance degradation when overwriting sectors that is typical of SMR, Seagate uses several tricks. Sections of overlapping tracks on the wafer are organized into stripes. In addition, the plate has an area formatted using standard PMR technology. Finally, the BarraCuda is equipped with a large DRAM buffer (128 MB) and 8 GB of NAND Flash memory. When under load, the controller logic tends to write blocks to the solid-state cache or PMR areas in order to place information on the SMR tracks in the free time.
Hybrid FireCuda hard drives in the 2.5-inch form factor, unlike their desktop counterparts, are also based on SMR technology and are identical in basic characteristics to BarraCuda models in 7 mm high cases, with the exception of slightly higher plates (although the difference is negligible and does not affect the usable capacity) recording density. The difference from BarraCuda is that the solid-state cache is used here to speed up not only write operations, but also read operations. Like Seagate's previous offering in this category, the Seagate Laptop SSHD, the new product determines the access pattern for the most popular data and copies it to Flash memory.
By the way, Seagate no longer has 5 mm high Laptop Ultrathin HDD mobile hard drives in its arsenal. Only Western Digital has similar offers in its WD Blue line.
Helium made it possible to install one more platter in HDD cases than before, and to increase the accuracy of positioning of heads on the track. On the other hand, tiled formatting makes it possible to use the platter area more economically due to the mutual overlap of the tracks. However, these methods only bring the industry closer to the fundamental limitations of perpendicular magnetic recording, and the next leap in capacity will bring bolder technology solutions that will likely be used in combination with both helium and SMR.
There is a so-called superparamagnetic limit, which determines the minimum size of a single “grain” of several hundred that make up a domain storing one bit of information. For a sufficiently small grain, the difference in the energy of the “zero” and “one” states is already comparable to the energy of temperature fluctuations, which entails an increased risk of charge loss.
The most promising solution to this problem is thermomagnetic recording - HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording). As part of this technology, instead of cobalt alloys (as now), other materials (for example, an alloy of iron and platinum or gold-based alloys) will be used in HDD plates, which have a higher coercive force - the magnetic field strength necessary for demagnetization. And to temporarily make the substrate more susceptible to charge changes, it needs to be heated by a laser or microwave source as it passes through the recording head.
The theoretical limit for recording density when using HAMR is estimated at 50 Tbit/in2, which gives a capacity of 80 TB per 3.5-inch hard drive platter. HDD manufacturers have been conducting research in this area for many years, and in 2017, HAMR technology will bear its first fruits. The company plans to begin trial deliveries of a new generation of hard drives with twice the recording density compared to existing devices, and in another year, if all goes well, they will hit the mass market. Of course, for HAMR to find application in client HDDs, additional time will be needed.
Another technology, TDMR (Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording), is aimed not so much at increasing the recording density as such (although it will allow this to be done by 5-10% when using standard PMR), but at making it more reliable to read information from plates when dense markings, and this is especially important for SMR and HAMR. If the track width is sufficiently small, the read head collects noise from adjacent tracks. Engineers propose to combat this by using an array of heads that process one or more tracks simultaneously. The first such devices will be Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K HDDs of the ninth series, planned for release in 2017.
Other hard drive manufacturers are also showing interest in HAMR and TDMR technologies, but we do not yet know anything about the specific plans of the joint venture of HGST and WD, on the one hand, and Toshiba, on the other.
We've long recommended installing operating systems on SSDs. No matter what HDD you use, SSDs offer better performance. But it’s too early to scrap magnetic hard drives. Their advantage is their huge capacity and relatively low cost. And as users demand more and more storage space, manufacturers are looking for increasingly sophisticated technical ways to increase it. According to forecasts by the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium, which brings together storage manufacturers, by 2025 the capacity of magnetic hard drives should increase to 100 TB.
Test winnerAnd today we have what we have. The capacity of traditional 3.5-inch drives is limited to 10 TB. So, Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10TB is a measure of all HDDs not only in terms of capacity. It ranks first in the 3.5-inch internal HDD category in CHIP's rankings and hence emerges as the winner in the 8TB and 10TB HDD comparison tests. It would seem that eight or ten terabytes means, first of all, only more capacity. But no, both figures also indicate interesting changes regarding data storage and recording: after all, conventional technologies cannot provide more than 8 TB, because the basic principles of operation of drives are magnetic disks have not changed over the past decade.
Today's hard drive cases contain thin platters of magnesium or aluminum alloy coated with a very thin layer of magnetic material. Movable read/write heads magnetize microscopic areas of the platters that spin at breakneck speeds, delivering data transfer speeds of 200 MB/s. But this technology has its limits. Up to six magnetic plates can be installed in one 3.5-inch case, placing them one above the other. Each of them can currently store up to 1.33 TB of data. That is, if you do nothing, the maximum capacity will be 8 TB.
If you follow the example of our test winner and the devices that took second and third place (HGST Ultrastar He10 and Seagate IronWolf) and fill the case with helium, you can achieve a capacity of up to ten terabytes. The advantage of using an inert gas, which is lighter than air, in the sealed area of the hard drive is to reduce the turbulence that occurs during the rotation of the plates and reduce the power consumption of the spindle motor. As a result, manufacturers were able to reduce the thickness of the magnetic plates, increase their number in a 3.5-inch case to seven and achieve a capacity of 10 trillion bytes - in binary terms this is 9.3 TB.
The highest-capacity hard drives we've tested read and write the fastest. We used the CHIP Diskbench benchmark, which shows the data transfer speed when reading and writing, as well as access time to hard drives. We pay more attention to read speed because in typical desktop or network-attached storage usage, data is read more often than it is written.
Three hard drives with a capacity of 10 TB showed excellent results in terms of read and write speed. The test winner, Seagate Enterprise, achieves speeds of 201 MB/s and a very short access time of 12 ms - results that no other device can challenge. In terms of write speed, the HGST Ultrastar He10 is slightly faster, showing 200 MB/s and an access time of 6 ms. The reason for such high performance of ten-terabyte hard drives is the use of proven perpendicluar magnetic recording (PMR) technology instead of the new shingled magnetic recording (SMR). Tiled magnetic recording is another way to increase the capacity of hard drives.
Unlike helium filling technology, SMR does not require any special costs. High storage density using SMR technology is achieved by reducing the distance between tracks on magnetic plates: each subsequent track partially overlaps the previous one, like a tiled roof. The width of the read head is smaller than the width of the write head, so a narrow part of the tracks is sufficient for the read head. But writing data using this technology becomes more difficult and much slower, since the wider recording head overwrites data on an adjacent track each time.
Therefore, before changing, all relevant data is read and temporarily stored, and only then can the recording head update and rewrite it. Of the tested devices, only Seagate Archive uses SMR technology. In terms of write speed (157 MB/s), it lags significantly behind top models, and the access time of 284 ms makes it impossible to compete with hard drives that can be used to store system files. But it costs about two to three times less than ten terabytes with helium - the price of a gigabyte is 2.2 rubles.
Speaking of prices. Top-end 10 TB drives turn out to be the most expensive hard drives on average. Eight-terabyte models tend to be cheaper than their larger counterparts - with the exception of the Seagate IronWolf. From a purely economic point of view, larger drives are only beneficial if the large space is used regularly. For the home, the best price/quality ratio are disks with a capacity of 4 to 6 TB. More capacious HDDs are currently relevant primarily for data centers, since a six-terabyte disk takes up exactly the same amount of space as a ten-terabyte one would require.
If financial issues are not an issue, then a good option would be to purchase the leader of our testing. Seagate Enterprise 10TB with a price of 3.2 rubles per gigabyte will cost even less than the top-end drive HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB with its 6.1 rubles per gigabyte - one of the most expensive drives. Moreover, both devices come with a five-year warranty. Seagate IronWolf, which took third place, clearly demonstrates that helium-filled drives do not have to be expensive - 2.9 rubles per gigabyte. It is perfect for building a huge network storage. In general, users usually buy high-capacity hard drives just for network storage. All devices are equipped with a SATA 6 Gb/s interface and, as manufacturers say, are designed for long-term use, even if the characteristics of any drive do not indicate that it is optimized for network storage.
In addition to IronWolf, two eight-terabyte Enterprise NAS and NAS HDD models are ideal for assembling home network storage. Their speed is high both when writing and when reading; data is transferred at speeds of more than 190 MB/s. Other eight-terabyte devices are quite far from them: the data transfer speed of the HSGT Ultrastar He8 is about 160 MB/s, Western Digital Red or Western Digital Purple is about 150 MB/s. The tested 8TB Seagate models benefit from a 256MB cache, while others have only 128MB.
In addition, the disk rotation speed of Western Digital devices is 5400 rpm - the rest accelerate to 7200. Seagate Enterprise NAS has affordable price, so it is perfect for home use, despite the fact that it is intended for corporate use. If you are not planning to purchase network storage, take a closer look at the Seagate Archive 8TB - the most inexpensive drive with a price of 2.2 rubles per gigabyte.
Huge disk space required not only for PCs and network storage, but also for mobile devices and laptops. We present leaders of various categories.
The Samsung 850 EVO is currently the highest capacity SSD available with a whopping 4TB of memory. The top model from our rating produces the best results in terms of read and write speed. It uses 3D V-NAND flash memory technology and a huge cache.
Seagate Innov8 is one of the highest-capacity external 3.5-inch hard drives. It will fit as much as 8 TB of information.
However, large amounts of data are transferred slowly: the disk's write speed and access time are not impressive. But the reading speed is decent.
Until now, the capacity of 2.5-inch hard drives for laptops was limited to 1 TB. Seagate FireCuda increases storage space up to 2 TB and with a thickness of 7 mm fits into any laptop.
The built-in eight-gigabyte flash memory significantly increases reading speed.
The practical advantage of the five-terabyte Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive, housed in an external 2.5-inch case, is that it does not require separate power.
The disc is great for use on the road. But due to SMR technology, the recording speed is not the best.
PHOTO: manufacturing companies; CHIP Studios
08/27/2014, Wed, 14:08, Moscow time, Text: Sergey Popsulin
At the end of 2014, Seagate plans to begin mass shipping of the world's first 8 TB hard drive. The company believes that this is not the limit, and by the end of 2015 they plan to reach a capacity of 20 TB.
American Seagate Technology announced the development of the world's first hard drive with a capacity of 8 TB. The device is made in a 3.5-inch form factor and is equipped SATA interface with a data transfer rate of 6 Gbit/s. Other parameters are not noted.
The world's most expensive hard drive was developed by the French radioactive waste management agency ANDRA for the government. It is made of artificially grown sapphire and platinum. The sapphire hard drive, which consists of two twenty-centimeter thin fused disks, is expected to last one million years, so there is no fear of losing important data. The disk is capable of storing up to forty thousand miniaturized pages printed using platinum micropatterns. This data can only be read using a microscope.
11. Diamond Mouse – $25,700
The Pat Says Now Diamond Computer Mouse is a standard three-button USB optical mouse with a 300 dpi sensor resolution. The mouse is made of 18 carat white gold and framed with 59 diamonds. In addition, the mouse can be personalized with your name in diamonds. There are two designs - Diamond Flower and Scattered Diamond - and a choice of yellow, red and white gold. The top cover and buttons of the “Diamond Flower” are made of 18-carat white gold. Gold gets its color from an alloy with palladium. precious metal, close with platinum. The amount of palladium in the alloy is 13%.
