10-terabyte hard drive coming soon to a server near you
No, that wasn't a typo, and the image isn't a trick. What looks like an ordinary HDD, which could fit into a drive bay on your PC, actually holds 10 terabytes of data. It's not meant for your PC, though. Its destination is your datacenter.
This drive, better known as the 10TB SMR HelioSeal HDD, has been in the works since September 2014. At the show, sources close to the company said it would be shipping in the second quarter of 2015. To access these drives from Linux, a new device manipulation library had to be added: libzbc.
With this library, Linux can access Zoned Block Commands (ZBC)-based and Zoned-device ATA command set (ZAC) HDDs, such as the 10TB HelioSeal. The ZBC standard details how to handle devices that require writing to occur at specific locations on their media while allowing random reading of already written data.
