reminder that HAMR have write limits.

What market does this drive serve? If they're used for a mass data dump, the random read/write performance would be abysmal. If my math is right, even with SAS 22.5Gbps and if this drive could maintain that level of bandwidth (which it obviously can't), it would take a minimum of just under 3 hours to backup the whole drive. That's a lot of downtime for a major business. And yes I know, the drive could still be used during the backup, but being a HDD, it would be significantly slower, only adding to the backup time. But the fact that the drive will most likely sustain read performance 10x slower than what SAS can offer, that means in a more realistic scenario, it would take more than a day to back up. More than a day of downtime is an easy way to doom a business. Maybe this is fine for archival purposes, depending on the price.

schmidtbag:

What market does this drive serve? If they're used for a mass data dump, the random read/write performance would be abysmal. If my math is right, even with SAS 22.5Gbps and if this drive could maintain that level of bandwidth (which it obviously can't), it would take a minimum of just under 3 hours to backup the whole drive. That's a lot of downtime for a major business. And yes I know, the drive could still be used during the backup, but being a HDD, it would be significantly slower, only adding to the backup time. But the fact that the drive will most likely sustain read performance 10x slower than what SAS can offer, that means in a more realistic scenario, it would take more than a day to back up. More than a day of downtime is an easy way to doom a business. Maybe this is fine for archival purposes, depending on the price.

These are not for home usage but for large datacenters. Anyone at home would be better off with a normal drive and spreading data on to multiple drives. Price usually has a sweet spot and starts to creep up on the smaller and the bigger drives, so keeping on the sweet spot and buying more drives makes more sense.

Silva:

These are not for home usage but for large datacenters. Anyone at home would be better off with a normal drive and spreading data on to multiple drives. Price usually has a sweet spot and starts to creep up on the smaller and the bigger drives, so keeping on the sweet spot and buying more drives makes more sense.

I'm aware, hence me mentioning SAS. You hardly ever see SAS at home, even home servers. Regardless, none of this changes my point - these drives are too large and slow to be of practical use beyond archiving, and they might not be cost-effective for archiving.

Where are these drives slower? Just during writes operations is it? I'd imagine with a lot of these drives... data is only written once to it and never changed again... eg... imagine something like upload sites having to store user videos/pictures. Once written it just stays there and never changes much... certainly a lot slower than the drive is capable of re-writing changes when they happen once in blue moon. These would be just mass storage drives. Maybe not even backed up ever either. Don't think sites have to guarantee user uploads. And if they do bother, 99% of time the drives are sitting idle and not serving the mountains of absolute shite that users upload to them.

Astyanax:

reminder that HAMR have write limits.

So kinda sucks then. What's the limit or does it vary?

schmidtbag:

What market does this drive serve? If they're used for a mass data dump, the random read/write performance would be abysmal. If my math is right, even with SAS 22.5Gbps and if this drive could maintain that level of bandwidth (which it obviously can't), it would take a minimum of just under 3 hours to backup the whole drive. That's a lot of downtime for a major business. And yes I know, the drive could still be used during the backup, but being a HDD, it would be significantly slower, only adding to the backup time. But the fact that the drive will most likely sustain read performance 10x slower than what SAS can offer, that means in a more realistic scenario, it would take more than a day to back up. More than a day of downtime is an easy way to doom a business. Maybe this is fine for archival purposes, depending on the price.

These would likely go into a big storage array. I suspect these would be mostly used by businesses who require on-prem and want an middle ground option between local drives on a server and something like a massive (but slow) archival tape library system.

Only a matter of time before we see 1 petabyte drives...