Future of disk drive capacity and interface

[schoondoggy]

In several threads, we end up talking about RAID and drive failure and rebuilds. Many factors are involved with this, drive capacity, interface and for RAID 5/6 number of drives in the RAID set. As drives get bigger 4TB and up we are still at a 6G interface.

It sounds like traditional SATA is at the end of its life. SATA Express appears to be a solid standard for 8G and 16G, but we have not seen devices yet.

http://www.sata-io.org/technology/sataexpress.asp

SAS has a defined roadmap for 12G and 24G.

http://www.scsita.org/library/presentations/SAS%20Standards%20and%20Technology%20Update.pdf

Drive Vendors are still on track for big drives in 2016;

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/hard-drive-densities-will-double-in-size-by-2016

SSD will start using triple layer flash, density will increase by 30% in addition to Moores law;

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/video/Storage-Decisions-TechTalk-Dennis-Martin-on-SSD-trends

 

As capacity increases hopefully the interface will keep up.

These factors will effect the decisions we make around RAID and back up.

Anyone seen any data on when SATA Express will be in a chipset?

 

[Guest no-control]

IMO too early speculate. SATA III just became standard on this last gen of boards, not just a high end option. (maybe 2 gens?) USB3 is just now starting to become common. Thunderbolt still hasn't become mainstream, if ever. I think we have a while before SATAe is common enough to be useful. MEchanical limitations of HDD right now are the issue for large array/drive rebuilds. Much like RAM has, SSDs need to become cheaper and with higher capacity, Faster SSD speed is pretty much there for day to day use.

Edited April 28, 2013 by no-control

[pcdoc]

I ehco no-controls inputs.  There is always a bottleneck but I am not seeing that that Sata 3 is an issue under most drives in use today.  Will it be in the future?  Sure with SSD but we are not their yet at least for the mainstream.

[Joe_Miner]

In several threads, we end up talking about RAID and drive failure and rebuilds. Many factors are involved with this, drive capacity, interface and for RAID 5/6 number of drives in the RAID set. As drives get bigger 4TB and up we are still at a 6G interface.

It sounds like traditional SATA is at the end of its life. SATA Express appears to be a solid standard for 8G and 16G, but we have not seen devices yet.

http://www.sata-io.org/technology/sataexpress.asp

SAS has a defined roadmap for 12G and 24G.

http://www.scsita.org/library/presentations/SAS%20Standards%20and%20Technology%20Update.pdf

Drive Vendors are still on track for big drives in 2016;

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/hard-drive-densities-will-double-in-size-by-2016

SSD will start using triple layer flash, density will increase by 30% in addition to Moores law;

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/video/Storage-Decisions-TechTalk-Dennis-Martin-on-SSD-trends

 

As capacity increases hopefully the interface will keep up.

These factors will effect the decisions we make around RAID and back up.

Anyone seen any data on when SATA Express will be in a chipset?

 

I Believe I saw that SATA Express will be part of Broadwell coming out in 2014.

 

I think cards are suppose to be introduced the 2nd half of this year so I suspect we have some freaking fast SSD's about to hit the market.

 

BTW, thanks for the links

Edited April 29, 2013 by Joe_Miner