Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

Toshiba plans to use its proprietary recording technologies, FC-MAMR, MAS-MAMR, and disk stacking tech to lift nearline HDD capacities to 30TB by the end of its 2023 fiscal year.  Toshiba's fiscal 2023 ends on 31 March 2024. The details were revealed in a Toshiba chart presented to analysts over two investor relations days …

[ShadowSystems]

30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

*Throws my wallet like a derranged monkey flinging pawfulls of poop*

Shut up & take my money! GimmieGimmieGimmieGIMMIE! =-D

<Homer Simpson drooly voice>Mmmmmm... porrrrrn</Homer>.

I uh, I um, I mean music! Lots of music! I could store all my MUSIC on such a drive. No porn at all, nope a nope a nope a nope!

No porn to see here, please move along. =-)p

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

By my rough calculations, you'd be able to store 462.9 days worth of DVD quality video on a 30TB drive, though perhaps it'll compress a bit better if there is a preponderance of one particular colour...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

DVD quality? CRETIN! It's 2022, porn in less than 4k quality is not worth storing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

Dude, do you really want to see every blemish on those skanky crack-heads in that high of definition? Not me, leave something to the imagination.

[ShadowSystems]

Re: 30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

Actually, I can store a lot more than that, but only because being blind means I can lose the video, keep the audio, & thus each one takes up less space.

It also loses everything that made it even half-way-watchable in the first place.

Cheesy disco porn music & random grunting isn't very enticing. =-/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

In a hotel the people in the next room seemed to be at it all night. Eventually I realised it was a noisy passive extractor fan - whose rotation cadence depended on wind strength..

A guy sharing the house next door had a very vocal girlfriend. So "Roger the Lodger" quickly became known as "Roger the Rabbit".

In conference season I had to stay in a hotel on the outskirts of Bristol. Mentioning the night-time noises to the customer next day - they said that hotel was the local knocking shop.

[Bitsminer]

Re: 30Tb? 40Tb? 50Tb+?

But you still have to face:

size(all your porn) > size(all your available disks)

also known as:

There are two kinds of disk drives in the world: new ones, and full ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

min($/size) > max(size) always

[nintendoeats]

I agree. For me, 8 TB has been the price/size sweet spot for way too long.

[the spectacularly refined chap]

For $/GB 16TB is ahead on the cheapest drives going measure. Looking at Amazon right now the cheapest 8TB drive is a Tosh at £150. A 16TB Seagate Exos unit is £270. Noticed it was close 9/10 months ago topping up my Microserver, back then the 16TB option was perhaps a fiver more than a pair of 8TB drives. Still preferable since it keeps a bay free.

[nintendoeats]

If you aren't fussy about speed and are prepared to shuck, Seagate has been selling $200 CAD 8 TB drives for yonks. Say what you want, I've got 8 still working...

[Wormy]

Is that out of 32 purchased?

I once had 4 Seagate drives in a raid set in a home server... and 5 failures the first year. Their enterprise drives are somewhat better... I've traditionally seen about a 10% AFR with Seagate. HGST on the other hand has been mostly around probably 1-2% (now WD, as long as you buy the right line).

Yes, they had that one period under IBM where they were well-known for being the DeathStar drives, but that was a *LONG* time ago now. Seagate has reigned supreme as crappiest drive on the block for probably 2 decades at this point, with Toshiba somewhere between the two.

Cheaper is not always (or even usually) better.

[nintendoeats]

That is 8 out of 8, some of which ran for several years before being changed to backup drives (at this time, 4 are in the NAS and 4 are used for a mirrored backup).

[Tom 7]

I get worried that some of my older equipment will faint when looking into the void that is offered on some of these hard drives.

I can only fill up my 1/2TB drives by misconfiguring the backup to do the turtles all the way down shit! And that's after I've downloaded nearly every open AI training set yet invented!

[ShadowSystems]

At Tom 7...

I remember thinking that when I got my first HDD. It was probably some "super duper large capacity" like a whopping ten megabytes or some such. I definitely remember thinking there would be no way I'd ever manage to fill it...

Until I started backing up my then-current software collection from the low density floppies to the HDD. When I got about two-thirds through the library & realized I needed more HDD space, that's when I "woke up" to the fact that no matter how much you have now, you will quickly accumulate (if you don't already have) enough to fill it like expandable trousers after stuffing yourself for Crimbo. =-Jp

I had an 8Tb drive with about half-a-Tb left on it, so I bought a 14Tb drive to replace it. Copy the files over, unplug the old drive, put it in a drawer "just in case", and switch to using the new drive.

That was less than four months ago -- I'd bought the new drive as a present to myself.

My brand new, still has the manufacturer's "New! Shiny!" stickers on it, fourteen terabyte hard drive has less than four terabytes free.

*FacePalm*

I'd buy an enterprise grade, industrial capacity LTO tape rack unit to put all the data on, but my asylum wardens would get pissy over all the power my padded cell would draw. =-)p

[-v(o.o)v-]

The Exos drives are crap. Have dozens of them and often the Dell H700 totally fails to recognize them. Interwebs is full of complaints about their firmware.

[Anonymous Coward]

How do we back this data up?

[Julian Bradfield]

Same way as always - to another of the same, or to tape.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm talking about end users. I don't have 11 hours to backup to tape or the money for tapes and drives. I can't keep backing up to another due to the cost involved in replacing the drives every 2+ years or buying two that could fail at the same time.

This stuff used to be easy I could write to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray or even before that a zip drive. What do I have now? That's the point I was making as I know it's technically possible.

Luckily I can still back up all my important stuff to my 1tb raid nas and Blu-Ray if required but that about in the future?

[Anonymous Coward]

Backups

I only buy Chinese gear for that reason. They take care of the, err… backups.

[Wormy]

Amazon Glacier, if you don't mind your backups being hosted on someone else's hardware. Or someone else's competing infrastructure (Backblaze, etc.).

[Dave559]

Backups

"I don't have 11 hours to backup to tape or the money for tapes and drives. I can't keep backing up to another due to the cost involved in replacing the drives every 2+ years or buying two that could fail at the same time."

The 11 hours are when you are asleep (or some of them are, anyway), and the backup process is rsync (or something else similar and automated) that only transfers deltas to the backup drive (so that it doesn't have to take 11 hours each time).

I have a Raspberry Pi running as a networked Time Machine, and it… actually, sadly, it doesn't "just work", it was quite a bit of a faff of comparing multiple different sets of instructions to get it set up and working, but now that it does work, it does just work (although I should really get around to writing my own notes of what I did if/when I need to rebuild it - I also use a USB drive as a second Time Machine drive a couple of times a month when I remember to connect it.)

And, yes, it costs money to buy larger drives as you need them (although whatever the Moore's Law equivalent for storage drives is still generally applies, so the larger storage should in time become cheaper as you start to need it). Either your data is important enough to you for you to want to have a backup copy (at least one), or it isn't (in which case you can't really complain if you lose it if/when your drive dies). I slightly begrudge the expenditure myself, but that's just the way it is, it's part of the cost of owning a computer.

[Stuart Halliday]

You obviously buy 2...

[captain veg]

That's a copy. A backup is something different.

-A.

[eldakka]

> That's a copy. A backup is something different.

Err no, no it isn't.

Making a clone of a HDD, and putting that clone in your safety deposit box, is a backup.

A backup is just a retrievable redundant copy of the data. A copy on another independent (i.e. not part of the same RAID array) disk in the same chassis is a backup, just not a very good one. Now, you can get much more sophisticated from there, such as keeping many versions (version history) of changed files, and so on. But those are extended backup features, not requirements for 'a' backup. Like with most things, there are degrees of sophistication, cost, security, reliability, level of risk being protected against (drive failure, complete chassis failure, room-wide failure, building-wide failure, campus-wide, city-wide, state-wide, country-wide, continent-wide, finger failure (PEBCAK - deleting a file you didn't mean to)) amongst others that all factor in to how one does a backup or a backup routine.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is but how often are you going to have to get it out to update it at 30tb? Back to MTBF you're taking a huge risk.

[eldakka]

> It is but how often are you going to have to get it out to update it at 30tb? Back to MTBF you're taking a huge risk.

What's that got to do with the comment I replied to? I even specifically said "just not a very good one"

The comment was not about how good the backup scheme was, just if it was a backup or not.

A bad backup is still a backup, it's just, well, bad.

And if you were after a simple backup scheme, why would you 'update' it?

Make a new full copy and stick that in the safety deposit box. No 'update' required. And when it comes time for the next backup, get the oldest full backup out of the safety deposit box (so there is at least 1 newer set of backup media still there) and blat it and re-use the media for a new full backup.

We're not talking backups for multi-million+ dollar businesses that require auditable version histories of documents. For backing up a porn collection or family photos (hopefully not the same thing ahem), or resumes and receipts, it's perfectly adequate.

Otherwise I'd be talking about doing incremental forever (TSM né ADSM) to multi-offsite storagetek powderhorn 9310 tape libraries.

[Tom 7]

"Making a clone of a HDD, and putting that clone in your safety deposit box, is a backup." Well no that's a WOM if you are in an organisation that insists the code for the safety deposit box is never written down and only kept in the secure directory that exists only in the safety deposit box.

[captain veg]

Er, yes it is.

If your "backup" comprises simply duplicating the (single) primary storage on to an identical (single) device, which is the proposition to which *I* was responding, then all you have is a copy of it at precisely one particular point in time.

What characterises a backup, properly defined, is that you can restore any file to its state at any historical point in time, subject to the periodicity and eviction policy of the backup process. Put another way, the most important feature of a backup is the ability to restore from it.

So yes, backing up involves copying data. But it's not *just* that.

-A.

[Stuart Halliday]

You buy 2?

[Sampler]

As user? Backblaze unlimited cloud for $6usd/month seems pretty good, I have about 7TB (mostly raw photo's, I should probably prune more often / at all) in there at the moment and they seem fine with that.

[vincent himpe]

printout

on paper. you can ocr it when it needs restoring. but use acid free paper and stay away from soy ink. calligraphy on sheepskin worked for thousands of years. chisel and granite if you need longer.

[Jim Willsher]

Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive. Impressive feat, but no thank you.

[druck]

As much as I want to agree with you, I suspect someone has said that about every increase in drive capacity since the 10MB Winchester drive.

[JimboSmith]

I remember an article from the distant past in the mainstream press where they called a 500MB hard drive a company had installed “bloody big.”.

I also remember when we got a 1TB storage array at work. It was the size of 19” rack cabinet and weighed a massive amount. We were using it for one project and worried we wouldn’t fill it, at first. Then we worried that it wasn’t large enough.

[nintendoeats]

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

[RobThBay]

I remember hearing comments like that.... now I feel old. :)

[Graham Cobb]

I don't trust any of my data to a hard drive (or an SSD). That is why I have backups, of different types, on different media with different speed/space/delay tradeoffs.

I don't trust my data to devices at all - I trust it to probability. The likelihood of all my backups failing at once is 0.

[Woodnag]

trust it to probability

"The likelihood of all my backups failing at once is 0."

Nope.

Close to 0, sure, but not 0.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: trust it to probability

If at least one of your backups is not off the planet, you're still vulnerable to a dinosaur killer event.

[DJV]

Re: you're still vulnerable to a dinosaur killer event

In that case whether or not the backups survived is probably irrelevant!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: you're still vulnerable to a dinosaur killer event

yes, think about those roach-boffins that finally retrieve the contents of the storage system from that long-gone homo civilization, and the ultimate poser for their roach science conferences: how come those ancients fornicated constantly and yet failed to produce enough offspring to colonise the whole galaxy before the biggy took out them out?

[Dave559]

Re: you're still vulnerable to a dinosaur killer event

And roaches certainly know a thing or two about fornicating and reproducing!

[bazza]

I'm constantly amazed that tape is still around, still competitive for backup, still amazingly capcious. I keep wondering about getting a drive, just for the hell of it.

[Bitsminer]

LTO (the only current tape technology readily available) is somewhat problematic for connecting to a machine.

Earlier LTO-3 and 4 IIRC required at least 30 MB/s feed rate to keep the tape drive mechanics occupied writing data. The drives have a (very-hard-to-locate-the-document) policy that they will fill with empty data blocks if the data feed rate is insufficient. Your 100GB cartridge is only 80GB if you don't feed it fast enough.

Later LTO-5 required 60MB/s and subsequent drives require 160 megabytes per second continuous streaming. (It varies slightly with drive vendor.)

Drives are either fibre-channel or sometimes serial-attached SCSI (SAS).

Not your typical home setup. I doubt a Synology will support FC....

[Anonymous Coward]

> That is why I have backups, of different types, on different media with different speed/space/delay tradeoffs.

And in widely separated physical locations?

Otherwise, in case of fire or natural disaster it will be very large values of zero that we'll be talking about.

[Graham Cobb]

Yes, obviously.

[Timbo]

"The likelihood of all my backups failing at once is 0."

Surely the issue is whether your backups are tested such that you can restore from them.

I once knew a firm who had ONE backup tape that was used at the end of business every day, week in week out. And they NEVER checked that the data written to it was OK.

It took me a week to at least convince the owner to have at least 3 tapes in rotation...(original, father, grandfather)....and with a view to having more blanks available so that they could store some backups offsite, at a second location. (This was pre-internet days, when sneaker-net was the "norm".)

[eldakka]

> Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive. Impressive feat, but no thank you.

This is why god invented RAID (for localised HDD failures) and backups (for filesystem level issues - RAID won't help you there - or disasters that fry the entire chassis/room).

I currently have a ~50TB RAID6 array (thats grown over time from like 2TB 20 years ago with the addition of additional HDDs and/or replacing smaller drives with bigger drives) and have had a half dozen HDD failures over that span and not lost a single bit. I've come close, I'll tell you, but close isn't a loss in this case ;)

I do have (intermittent) backups as well, but haven't needed to use them to recover from HDD failures due to the RAID array surviving those failures.

While I don't (obviously!) have 30TB HDD, I could see upgrading to them in 10 years if other storage tech hasn't replaced it on a holistic $/GB + reliability/performance basis by then. Which, TBH, I am hoping for ;)

[DJV]

"I currently have a ~50TB RAID6 array"

Damn, that's one heck of a lot of pron ... er ... files!

[Graham Cobb]

RAID is nothing to do with backups. RAID protects filesystems. Backups protect data.

Of course RAID is very useful. But it doesn't protect against user errors (deleting the wrong file), software errors (apps corrupting files), filesystem errors (OS bugs damaging a directory) or operations errors (removing the remaining good drive from the array).

I take various sorts of backups, with different backup speeds, restoration speeds and survivability. Quick snapshots (using btrfs snapshots) which are instant and mean the files are kept around for easy restoration if I delete the wrong file, or just want to check what I changed. Rsync snapshots which are stored on a different filesystem (and disks) in case Btrfs loses the plot and loses a large chunk of the filesystem, or a serious hardware problem on the server trashes multiple disks. NFS copies on a different box in another building in case of a small fire. Cloud backups (several, in different formats for different types of access/restoration) in case of a big fire. All those are completely automated so I don't have to remember to do anything (although the restoration procedures are successively harder work).

And occasional manual complete copies onto some old disks stored with friends/family in case they want to look at the data after my funeral :-)

[eldakka]

> RAID is nothing to do with backups. RAID protects filesystems. Backups protect data.

Correct, but as the OP was stating:

"Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive."

i.e. hardware reliability issues with a HDD, then since this is exactly waht RAID is for, then my answer was totally appropriate to mention RAID.

And, I also did mention doing backups. You seem to have stopped reading at seeing the word RAID and missed the "and backups" part of the same sentence ;)

[John Riddoch]

RAID is fine, up to the point it takes so long to rebuild the replaced disk that another disk fails in the meantime. I think we got to the point that RAID 5 was no longer "good enough" because the chance of hitting a 2nd disk failure during a rebuild of the parity was pretty near 1 on large storage arrays some time ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

> This is why god invented RAID

I didn't know it was Stallman's doing.

[Lotaresco]

"Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive. Impressive feat, but no thank you."

I've been trusting much more data to mechanical hard drives for at least a decade. Given that my drives are configured as RAIDs their failure rate is actually higher than that of a single drive. It would make sense to have high capacity drive for either nearline or offline backup. Locating the drive in another building would improve the odds of not losing everything in a single incident.

[Klimt's Beast Would]

Can't touch this?

What does the competition say or are they not in the Premier League?

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Can't touch this?

My, my, my data hits me so hard

Makes me say "Oh my Lord"

Thank you for saving me

With a RAID to rhyme and two mirror drive

[Anonymous Coward]

So which Twoshiba will end up manufacturing this?

And do I trust them long term with my music, definitely not porn, videos?

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/08/toshiba_revised_split_strategy/

[captain veg]

far too big

I have no (presently) conceivable use for a 30TB drive, but it might be useful as a backup to the (circa-) 1TB SSD.

There was a time when a 120GB SSD was enough. It's gone. 512GB is looking dicey for anyone ripping (or downloading) media. So a 30GB SSD would be nice. Until then, spinning rust will have to do.

-A.

[Piro]

Re: far too big

Most people were coming from hard drives of around 500GB at that time down to the 120GB SSD for the system, so in my humble and mostly useless opinion, a 120GB SSD was not adequate, but rather popular because larger SSDs were price-prohibitive.

[GlenP]

Re: far too big

larger SSDs were price-prohibitive

Dell were prone to that. Changing the 128GB SSD up to a 256GB SSD cost significantly more than buying the 128GB model and a 256GB SSD, only the hassle of changing them and the warranty issues stopped us doing so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: far too big

Changing a drive is about the lowest hassle thing you can do to a computer, standalone SSDs typically have longer warranties than the drive that came in the computer, and if you're in the US, Magnuson-Moss makes it illegal for Dull to void your warranty because you changed a drive. (Not sure what British warranty law is, but I'd be shocked if the US actually had better consumer law.)

[Wormy]

Re: far too big

I assume you meant 30TB SSD. They're available, but bloody expensive, and generally only in U.2 form factor that you'd be hard-pressed to fit in a modern laptop. Desktop you should be fine with a little extra hardware, though (I think I've seen carrier cards that will take a U.2 and plug into a PCIe slot).

[ShadowSystems]

And then I go & read ARS Technica...

A one Tb SD card for ~$150.

How many 1Tb SD cards can you fit, along with their reader hardware, in the same space as your typical internal SSD?

Get an external enclosure with power supply, load it full of 1Tb SD cards, & plug a USB-C cable into it/your device to give it the storeage capacity of your typical cloud server.

I imagine a case the size of an RPi with battery could fit in a pocket & offer more "personal cloud" capacity than damn-near anyone else on the market.

*Homer Simpson happy moaning*Mmmmmmm... Files!

[nintendoeats]

Re: And then I go & read ARS Technica...

You can get SATa adapters that just take a bunch of microSD cards. I don't know how the speed is, but I'm guessing it's very poor.

[Lotaresco]

Re: And then I go & read ARS Technica...

"You can get SATa adapters that just take a bunch of microSD cards. I don't know how the speed is, but I'm guessing it's very poor."

In the past I RAIDed a load of floppy discs, just because I could. The speed was about 10MB/min for a RAID 0 array. Doing the same with 8GB USB drives achieved 80MB/s. I would expect 80-100MB/s for a microSD card RAID. Easy enough to try if you want to "do your own research".

[10111101101]

But still running at 5400 RPMs

If they are running at speeds of 14400 > rpms then we got a deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

30TB disk drive

buy now and lose all / some of your data in one go! ;)

p.s. yes, I heard about 'backup', everybody heard about 'backup'...

[Paul Crawford]

Re: 30TB disk drive

RAID-[1..6] is your friend, RAID-Z is your best friend, RAID-Z2 (and remote replication) your soulmate

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember the everywhere girl?

> Analysts were shown Toshiba's HDD capacity roadmap, pictured above.

Remember the everywhere girl who appeared in numerous adverts? Well now we have the "everywhere datacenter".

[Anonymous Coward]

Fifty years ago we marvelled at the new hard disk of 600MB that took 8 hours to back-up to magnetic tape. The unit measured about 2mx1.5mx3m - weighed 1.5 tonnes - and had water cooled bearings.

[Alan Brown]

Pricing?

It'd be ironic if 32TB SSDs undercut it when it finally shows up