World’s Largest Hard Drive Offers Photographers 16TB of Storage
Aug 15, 2015
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
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As photographers, backing up our images has sort of become a passion, and so it should. The catch-22 in the situation is that hard drives (the ones with the little DJ in there spinning laser-read disks) offer the most storage space but suffer from low long-term reliability. We therefore resort to all kinds of other methods to increase file redundancy, such as cloud storage. Solid state drives (SSD) are great (and fast), but they have typically been rather limited in capacity. That…is changing.
The other day we reported on Samsung’s new 256-gigabit flash technology that would significantly increase the storage capacities of solid state drives, but we had no idea they were aiming for the moon and hitting it!
Samsung has since unveiled the culmination of this technology: the world’s largest SSD hard drive.
Samsung’s PM1633a is a 16 TERABYTE solid state behemoth that offers more storage space than any standard consumer could put to use in their lifetime, including most photographers. That’s more than 11 million of those 3.5″ disks we asked you about yesterday.
There’s a bunch of technical specifics that are just way over my head, but for those of you interested, you can read more about how they actually fit it all in there here.
What This Means for Photographers
That’s what you really care about anyhow, right? It’s the same as with most technology: fitting more stuff in a tinier package…AND…traditional hard drives, as we know them, could be on their way out.
Why is this good?
Hard drive disks (HDDs) have a significantly shorter lifespan than solid state drives. Because of the technology on which they are built, dependable usage can be counted on for about five years (although, less is a common occurrence).
However, solid state drives offer greater reliability because instead of a magnetic head writing and rewriting information to a shiny, spinning disk, SSDs rely on electronic impulses interacting with non-moving (“solid”) cells. Again, it gets very technical here and my mind starts wandering, so lets move on.
The Tech Report ran a test starting in 2013 in which the durability of solid state drives were tested. According to Digital Trends:
“A typical manufacturer’s SSD lifespan is rated at 20GB of writes per day for three years—or just under 20 terabytes (TB) of total data written. Using Anvil’s aptly named Storage Utilities software, the SSDs are subjected to endurance tests consisting of constant writing, deleting, and then writing again of various-size files. During the tests, Storage Utilities continuously monitors data integrity and write speeds, and in addition, all SSDs in the test have the ability to count host writes and provide overall health estimates.
“[A]ll of these drives continued to function well past the total number of terabytes they’re rated for, which, as mentioned earlier, is about 20 to 30 terabytes over a three-year period. The first one to fail, the HyperX, went after a whopping 728TB, or the equivalent to about 1,020 years at the rate of 20GB per day.”
The equivalent of 1,020 years…and that was the weakest one…
So, what we have in Samsung’s new unveiling is a product that can store more data than any other drive on the planet with a lifespan that could easily outlive the planet itself!
Again…what about photographers?
Well, “AGAIN”… I think it’s pretty obvious. What we are seeing here is the beginning of what could be a storage revolution (not to be confused with that crappy “reality” show that came and went) that could change our backup workflows. Most persnickety pundits are estimating that the new hard drive won’t retail for less than $5,000 which puts it well out of range for most consumers. BUT, as with all technology, prices will drop, and I’m expecting to see this pared down into simpler, more affordable offerings for those without a corporate-sized budget. (I mean, who really needs 16 bloody terabytes unless you’re doing major video production work?)
Imaging Resource took the time to break down the specifics to give us a little comparison. To put things in perspective, 16TB is the equivalent of:
- 305,000 RAW files from Canon’s 50-megapixel 5DS with.
- 51 hours of 4K ProRes UHD footage from Black Magic’s 4K Production Camera.
- 15.2 days of 4K footage from Panasonic’s LUMIX GH4
305K 50MP RAW files. Still trying to wrap my head around that one…
More storage space, greater reliability, less of this having-t0-replace-another-hard-drive BS…just unlimited on-site storage with a dash of peace of mind. Well, it may not be too much longer, folks…
[via Imaging Resource]
P.S. Just for getting the scale of things, see if you know how much storage the ‘big’ disks of 30 years ago had.
Allen Mowery
Allen Mowery is a Nationally-published Commercial & Editorial Photographer with over 20 years of experience. He has shot for major brands as well small clients. When not shooting client work or chasing overgrown wildlife from his yard, he loves to capture the stories of the people and culture around him.
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30 responses to “World’s Largest Hard Drive Offers Photographers 16TB of Storage”
that’s an enterprise drive – it’s not meant for average users. (To say nothing of the price)
Offers anyone 16tb not just photographers?
This for video scratch disk would be a dream…the price is probably a nightmare though.
For video scratch, you’re almost always better going for a RAID of smaller drives… way more performance, and cheaper to repair when one drive breaks (which it will. Claims that SSDs never break are utter rubbish)
Extremely narrow minded article.
Looks as though I’m sticking with amazon cloud unlimited for now, because who the hell has $5000 to drop on a hard drive?! Not me.
$5000?….nope
Allen, again, title is wrong as is part of the article.
This drive isn’t for photographers… it doesn’t even fit regular SSD space, so don’t expect this to fit a laptop – perhaps a desktop, but again, this wasn’t designed for consumers – it’s an enterprise drive.
Since spec details were not released just yet, we don’t know if it’ll run on a regular desktop… perhaps it could, perhaps not.
And then, of course, comes the predicted price of 5000 bucks.
It’s a next step no doubt, but more in tune with huge pendrives that were released in the past as proof of concept – they had impratical prices and were very big because they basically stacked memory blocks to store more content.
About endurance and reliability, again, yes, SSDs lasts longer and are more reliable than HDDs. A fact of optical storage versus solid state memory. BUT that doesn’t mean they never fail, and more importantly, when they do, they are unrecoverable. On that matter, from reports it’s more or less like HDDs: sometimes you get lucky, sometimes not so much. Depends on brand and etc…
” (I mean, who really needs 16 bloody terabytes unless you’re doing major video production work?) ” …speak for yourself, I have that in both my MacPro’s and still wish I had more space. I would’t trust ANY cloud solution at any price, that’s called taking personal responsibility !
Pete Cardwell. Exactly. I like how DIY tries to bait click this article to just photographers…because only photographers are given permission to use this hard drive. I think it’s time to stop following…
Seems nice to have that kind of space. All your eggs in one basket, not so much.
So true
Own two or more… I have at least dual back ups and one kept off site.
16 TB may sound huge now but it won’t in a couple years. The 120 MB drive in my first computer was huge at the time I bought it. Within a year, it wasn’t so huge anymore.
Backing up images on single 16TB drive …. well, may call it a passion, far from wise or professional anyway
It is not a laser which writes data to “normal” hard drives
Gary Britton
Still, better to back up in several places, cant trust to put everything in one metal box :P
Ideal back ups… 3-2-1 method… Three sources, two locations, one cloud based
I need this in my life!
Actually, 301k RAWs is not quite mind blowing. Believe it or not, there are wedding photofraphers who shoot close to 6k frames at an event. They do a batch process to all of them, and slightly more work to a few dozens, then deliver the whole package like that. Those people also have the habit of keeping the RAWs for a couple of years at least. With 30 to 50 events a year, 16Tb will fill up in less than 4 years.
6k images – maybe only in country’s like Romania, where weddings take 24h, there are a lot of moments, and when there are 2-3 photographers at the same event…
the most i had was 4600 images, at a big wedding (over 700 people ) and we ware 2 photographers (there was a third photog that focused on stupid images that i said i don;t do, don’t know how many that guy did, but it’s irrelevant )
i keep the raw till i gave all the materials and the year has ended (i don’t see why keep them after that), but the jpg i keep for ever
Haha, those weddings are actually an East European tradition, and yes, for the photographers might as well extend for a good 24h. Nevertheless, those 301k RAWs will stack up fast.
Lol
“The other day we reported on Samsung’s new 256-gagabit flash technology”
I just upgraded to a Mac 512…………technology is wonderful!!!!
This is not so bignof a drive. The ssd part is good thou but the price fall in not time. Never run out and buy the newest always wait it out.
hi there yeah 16 terabyte ssd solid state drives are bigger then 10 terabyte hard drives infact ssd solid state drives do last forever do you remember comadore 64 with 64 killobytes solid state drive 40 million comadores 64 still in use after 40 years operational drives could have inmortility life cycle wich means ssd could out live the universe