Which makes them perfect for today's and tomorrow's computers - use SSDs as main drives and HDDs for data storage. But I think the write speed will be good enough to use these drives as main drives, as well...
As for reliability - I don't think it's going to be that much of an issue - I've had CD-RWs that I used as portable storage and wrote/erased/read dozens of times (with scratches on them from constant use). A fixed platter in a clean housing should last quite a while...
What the greater storage allows for me is to be more profligate in my usage of it. For example, I've re-encoded my CDs at 320kps, and I've been scanning my old books at much higher resolutions, and am less picky about which ones to scan.
You seem to be in an entirely different universe from the point. Most workloads would take weeks, months, even years to write out 60TB of data. It will be unnecessary for the filesystems to garbage collect old data with any frequency, and you may very well not want them to -- when you have so much space, why not have an available record of every single I/O transaction back to the beginning of time?
> Most workloads would take weeks, months, even years to write out 60TB of data
Today, yes, but this isn't going to give us 60TB drives today, or even tomorrow. It's going to give us 6TB drives. It might give us 60TB drives at some point down the line, and it would be unwise to make any strong predictions about workloads at indeterminate points in the future.
60TB is 2+ years of HD video at typical bitrates. It's two months at a patently absurd 100mbps. You could write every bit of traffic passing through a 10gigabit link for 14 hours.
Assuming a 100-year lifespan, if every second of your life were recorded at 5mbps, you would need just 30 such drives.
Yeah, I'm pretty confident about my prediction as to most workloads.
I get 9 months at 20 MBit/s [1] which is kind of low for a blu-ray[2] or a high-end consumer camera, today.
I find it kind of difficult discussing 60 TB since it will be soo faar in the future. By then we will at least have 4k and probably a bitrate in ~100 MBit/s (since the cap is at 50 MBit/s today that is aiming low but there will probably be a limit where you say that it is enough (then again, 3D imagery could potentially demand much more)), a small drive (same density but ~2") would hold about 2 weeks of footage which IMO sounds reasonable for a camera in an age where you don't have to compromise that much.
It will put some constraints on usage patterns, but I don't feel that 60 TB will be that much more data than 4 TB is today. Sure, for text and audio you basically will have an infinite amount of space (as a consumer) but that is the case even today. 60 TB is only 15 times more than we have to day in a single drive, and it will take many many years to get there. And I can barely fit my grandfathers VHS camera tapes on a 4 TB drive today, and since I want some redundancy 4 TB isn't enough for even that.
> I get 9 months at 20 MBit/s [1] which is kind of low for a blu-ray
Blu-Ray bitrates are bloated for various reasons, like older encoders, film transfer, and a lack of anything better to do with the space. You don't need 20mbps with modern H.264 High encoders, it's just a waste. Anything past 10 is at best questionable
> By then we will at least have 4k and probably a bitrate in ~100 MBit/s
Even if 50mbps were something that we would ever need at 1080p (it's not), 4k would not justify a doubling in compressed size, there is no reason to have 100mbps compressed video.
4k is also way beyond reasonable for home display. Just 3840x2160 on a 60" display would be something like 23 arc seconds at 3 meters, you physically cannot see that.
> 60 TB is only 15 times more than we have to day in a single drive
4TB is already orders of magnitude more than most workloads will ever need. I was using video to demonstrate the absurdity of thinking typical workloads would actively use 60TB, because it's not a typical workload, it's a worst-case scenario.
> Blu-Ray bitrates are bloated for various reasons, like older encoders, film transfer, and a lack of anything better to do with the space. You don't need 20mbps with modern H.264 High encoders, it's just a waste. Anything past 10 is at best questionable
But most people won't want the hassle of re-encoding the data they receive. If it takes up twice as much storage, so what? A lot of people will buy that 60TB drive instead of a 30TB one.
> Even if 50mbps were something that we would ever need at 1080p (it's not), 4k would not justify a doubling in compressed size, there is no reason to have 100mbps compressed video.
So consider 4K + twice the frames to handle 3D + doubled framerate. That's 16 times the amount of uncompressed pixels. And I'm not convinced that's the upper bound of the amount of raw data we'll see.
It's not that long ago you'd have been called crazy if you suggested we'd need anything beyond 1080p, and a lot of people were questioning whether HD would ever get any traction.
> 4k is also way beyond reasonable for home display. Just 3840x2160 on a 60" display would be something like 23 arc seconds at 3 meters, you physically cannot see that.
I know people with projectors. 60" is by no means the upper bound on size people will want. 100"-150" maybe.
While I agree that there are diminishing returns when increasing the bitrate for modern encoders there certainly is a noticeable difference between 20 Mbit/s and 10 Mbit/s.
We would need those high-resolution displays if we ever want to be able to show off pictures decently, and we have (finally) just begun to experiment with high-resolution displays. 4k displays are already being demoed.
My point was that 60 TB vs. 4 TB, given the time difference, isn't such a big deal. Biggest hurdle is to get a stable COW-filesystem. But as today SSDs will rule the workstation (and pretty much everywhere you value performance) and SSDs have much bigger technical challenges to get that big.
Regular spinning harddrives will thus only be used where you have a untypical workload requiring lots of data.
People won't buy drives much bigger than their workload can use. It's possible that 60TB drives would only be used in massive storage systems, not PCs.
People will, if it comes bundled with their computer.
Nearly every grandparent I've run across has a >100GB hard drive (if not >500GB). They're all using roughly 20GB of that drive, after a couple years.
With only very rare exceptions, people don't choose what goes into their computer. They buy what looks good for a price that they're willing to pay, for the simple reason that buying a computer is full of more buzz-words, acronyms, and useless numbers than any other purchase I've ever made. It's insane, and it gets people to buy more than they need, so the sellers won't stop doing it.
> "People will, if it comes bundled with their computer."
But what will a computer look like in 10 years?
What I've been noting, from the whole mobile explosion, is that people really don't care if their computer only has 64GB of storage. Of all the complaints that people have about tablets and phones replacing 'real' computing, disk space rarely enters the discussion.
So even if tablets and smartphones don't notably replace traditional PCs, their effect on consumer perception of the necessity of large disks can't be ignored.
Sure, it's easy to market 'more gigabytes than your old machine' to a regular person. But so is "faster boot" and "less waiting".
That's why laptop makers can't seem to ditch spinning disks fast enough.
And what motivation does a PC builder have, to continue bundling increasingly-capacious hard drives with little markup? Why not bundle increasingly-faster and increasingly-cheaper SSDs and save the spinning drives for higher-margin positions as add-ons and external storage?
I'd be incredibly surprised if the market for spinning disks doesn't shrink over the next 10 years. They'll certainly remain, even for consumers. But there's no good argument that they'll still be standard.
As far as I've seen, disk space hasn't been in computer-purchasing discussions at all for a few years now - salespeople just say "more than enough" and leave it at that. If you know otherwise, you're in a special class of consumers, and it still matters to you. Plus, if we get 60TB drives tomorrow, we'll have new ways to fill it within the week, and some people will do so, just as we've done to this point.
I totally agree that spinning disks are on the way out, except for high-storage purposes. And then only until flash storage meets / exceeds their density (solid state has a habit of doing this). And I totally agree that the HD size means nothing to most people buying computers. But it does drive sales over smaller numbers, so we'll keep seeing them go up as long as that's true. Maybe the tipping point is now, but I'm not putting any money on that.
As for 'boots faster / less waiting', it isn't something that's generally quantifiable because it comes with a wide range of caveats. Even if it were (I haven't seen any, but I haven't PC shopped for a while), most people I know are well aware that computers slow down over time. They may not know why, but they have seen it happen to every computer they've ever owned - "It wasn't this slow when I bought it" is a common complaint. On top of that, the vast majority of people I know simply don't shut down their computer until an update forces them to. Computers resume from sleep very quickly - my laptop is awake and responding by the time I can get my hands on the keyboard to punch in my password. Cutting that time in half gains nothing, it has reached the 'fast enough' point that it's not an incentive.
Not sure I would trust the wear and tear of an alloy that is constantly heated and cooled.
60TB of write-rarely cheap storage for backups would be very handy though.