Clawedge:

really interested in platter density. cant seem to find any info on that

its most likely 8 2TB platters shortstroked to 1.5TB 8x1.5=12 Short stroking 8 platters would keep them faster in throughput vs using 6x2TB platters.

Clawedge:

i doubt WD will waste 25% of the platter space. Never heard them short stroking in the consumer space. But it could be the case, never know. Hdd density increase has slowed to a crawl

Um? 1. It's not a waste. They are repurposing platters that didn't make the grade for 16TB 2. All drive manufacturers use shortstroking in this manner and always have done. 3. It's long been done in enterprise models for performance reasons. For instance, many 1TB drives were 3x500GB platters shortstroked to 333 instead of 2x500GB, these were often platters that didn't make the grade to be used in single platter 500GB drives (not that there were many) https://rml527.blogspot.com/2010/09/hdd-platter-database-hitachi-25.html

sdamaged99:

I don't know why WD are so far behind. Seagate are moving on to 16TB, and WD have only just gotten 12TB Reds. I mean come on WD!

Because they know HDDs are a dying technology. Even with just Seagate and HGST, the market is already becoming a bit saturated. They're committing more toward SSDs now, which I think is a smart move. And yes, I know Seagate also makes SSDs, but they don't seem to be as heavily invested in it.

costs more.

sdamaged99:

Hard drives aren't going anywhere. High capacity drives are going to keep being made for years yet. Storage requirements are going up and up and SSDs dont have the capacity (or cost) to make them a viable alternative. Look at the size of some 4K Blu Ray remux files, some are approaching 100GB each. I'm at 72TB and almost out of space. I'm dying for larger drives!

I said dying, not dead. There will be a point at which SSDs are more cost effective, and when that day comes, that will be the point at which consumer HDDs will pretty much be dead. It'll take several more years for enterprise drives to die off.

dogmandg:

I'm not so sure. For silicon based ICs, Moore's law seems to have leveled off. We've already seen this with CPUs. SSDs may be next. If they can move away from silicon, e.g. CVD diamond wafers, that could work, but I suspect this will take decades. Meanwhile, Helium seems to have given a new lease on life for hard drives.

From what I can tell, SSDs are a very long way away from reaching the limits of silicon. Their prices have steadily declined and capacities keep going up. This is often at the cost of performance, but, really only for lower-end parts. The average person can get a cheap SATA SSD and would be perfectly fine with it. Meanwhile, it's worth pointing out that there's only so much data you can fit on a HDD platter. They too have limitations due to physics and materials. Helium may have breathed new life into drives but I really don't think drives are going to get a whole lot bigger than what they've accomplished now.

As video quality improves, we'll not only see more pixels, but also less DCT compression. We're already seeing this in professional video camera formats. The codec bit rate is exploding. Professional video production companies are going through terabytes like water. 10GB Ethernet is starting to become the norm.

I would argue 10Gbps ethernet is farther away than 2TB SSDs costing less than 2TB HDDs.

Huge NAS drives with many HDDs in parallel end up being faster than a local SSD.

Note the way you phrased that: it takes several HDDs to exceed 1 local drive, and even then, probably only a SATA drive. We're starting to see M.2 drives in the thousands of MiB/s.