[Macworld]

Post your comments for Report: 60TB disk drives could be a reality in 2016 here

[henryhbk]

Future Macworld Headline in 2016: Microsoft Office 2016 predicted to be 2TB and Adobe creative suite CS10 3TB...

[flybynight]

This article seems to leave some dots unconnected.
It says that the largest drive now shipped in 2011 at 4TB and "From 2011 to 2016, the five-year compound annual growth rate for hard drive drive areal densities will be equivalent to 19 percent…" Doing the math, that brings us close to 10TB in 2016. How do we get from there to 60TB? At that rate of growth, we're looking at 10 years beyond 2016.

[TeaEarleGreyHot]

And when the day comes that we get holographic video perfected, I'm sure storage requirements will double quadruple gazoople!

[haldor42]

I am waiting for the Quantum HDD tech to come then I will have a limitless area to put stuff... lol

[leftnotrackswzdv]

How long until you can fit 1 million TB in a hard drive the size of Brent Spiner's head?

[payneok]

Now do people see why we need Thunderbolt...

[donfrase]

And how does SSD projected growth compare?

[objectivesea]

I was interested to read: "Seagate began shipping today's highest areal density disk in September 2011. That drive, designed for desktop apps, boasted 4TB of capacity in a 3.5-inch form factor. The drive had five platters with 625 Gbits per square inch, or the equivalent to more than 1TB of capacity per platter."

I have seen these 4TB drives offered for sale, but thus far, 3TB hard drives seem to be a better bargain in terms of dollars per storage capacity.

The description given would seem to imply a capacity in excess of 5TB. Is the drive rated at 4TB because some of the nominal capacity is actually used for parity checking, etc., as a means of transparently correcting data that are retrieved for the user? It would be nice to know, for example, that the drive could be expected to accurately maintain, retrieve and update its data without failure for a very long time.

[PJL500]

henryhbk, on 22 May 2012 - 09:31 AM, said:

Future Macworld Headline in 2016: Microsoft Office 2016 predicted to be 2TB and Adobe creative suite CS10 3TB...

Yeah, I'm gonna hold out for a 1Petabite drive - also holding out the Mach-7 razor.

[gofigure]

As long as drives crash increased size not practical. Ever try transferring or recovering a drive. Better to use multiple small drives rather than one large drive.

[hmurchison]

Writing parity across today's large drives in a RAID set is slow enough. I can see that unless things change a RAID-5 set using 5 8TB drives may take 4 days.

Apple better have a successor to HFS+ that handles data integrity because the larger the drive the more potential for data corruption.

[JDW]

This is a "Who The Heck Cares" article for most of us. What most people want is bigger, significantly cheaper flash drives. I want a 1TB flash drive replacement for my iMac's internal drive that only costs me $150, and I'd prefer to not be forced to wait another 5 years for it either!

[DVA_Airwolf]

I look forward to the day when WD bring out multi-TB "Velociraptors".