At the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in California this past week, Samsung unveiled the largest capacity hard drive in the world. It's a 2.5-inch solid state drive (SSD) that can hold 16 terabytes of data (15.36TB, to be exact).
Why There Is 2TB or 16TB Limit for Hard Disk Size
The partitioning scheme used by most modern Windows-based computers is MBR (master boot record), which sets a limit of 32 for the number of bits that are available to represent the number of logical sectors. Therefore, the maximum hard disk size is 2^32 * sector size.hard drive capacity - Computer Definition
The amount of storage on a hard disk, measured in gigabytes and terabytes. Hard drive capacity is generally measured by the amount of data users need to store, which is usually much greater than the space applications take up. Who discovered hard disk?
In 1956, the first hard drive to be sold commercially was invented by IBM. This hard drive, shipped with the RAMAC 305 system, was the size of two refrigerators and weighed about a ton. It held 5MB of data, at a cost of $10,000 per megabyte.
There are three main categories of storage devices: optical, magnetic and semiconductor. The earliest of these was the magnetic device. Computer systems began with magnetic storage in the form of tapes (yes, just like a cassette or video tape). These graduated to the hard disk drive and then to a floppy disk.
A typical computer has 3 types of memory: Cache memory, Random Access Memory (RAM), and virtual memory. Cache is the fastest and most expensive, RAM is slower and less expensive, and virtual memory is the slowest and least expensive type.
CD ROM is secondary storage device in which we cannot erased data .
Currently a Petabyte takes up about 8U of rack space over a hole floor of 42U racks 20 years ago. But a PB in one drive not practical for common use unless you was capturing some insane data that needed a physical transfer then its reliability issue drives fail and get destroyed all the time.
Seagate on Tuesday announced two new BarraCuda drives—one of which now holds the record for being the largest-capacity 2.5-inch drive.
2.5" hard drives normally come in one of three thicknesses: 12.5 mm - these are the Super-Phat drives that probably only larger laptops (DTRs and workstations) can fit. They usually have three platters instead of two, enabling higher capacity.
A petabyte of storage would:
Cost $93,662,499,307,520. Require a building the size of 10,814 football fields to hold the drives. Require 472 of the world's largest data centers to hold the drives.The two main issues with SSDs:
- Smaller available storage capacities: As of June 2015, most SSDs have a storage capacity of 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB. Need more than 1TB?
- Higher price per GB: The Sandisk Ultra II 960GB is one of the SSDs with the lowest price per GB.
The largest difference between 2.5 and 3.5 inch hard drives is their size. Two and a half inch hard drives aren't just narrower. They're also shorter and thinner, which makes them popular for laptop computers while desktop business computers typically use 3.5 inch drives.
