IBM And Everspin Announce 19TB NVMe SSD With MRAM Write Cache

Aah, I remember when Hard-Disks held the advantages of lower cost and higher capacity.
Well, at least they have lower cost (for now, and this was announce in August 2018!).
IBM And Everspin Announce 19TB NVMe SSD With MRAM Write Cache
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13174/ibm-and-everspin-announce-19tb-nvme-ssd-with-mram-write-cache

Samsung EVO SSDs keep evolving!

I hear that the 970 model is also available in 2TB, nice!
I could have an SSD for C: AND D: and keep the capacious HDDs for backing storage.
Samsung 970-PRO-512GB and 970-EVO-250GB, 500GB, 1TB NVMe SSD Review

Samsung makes an even bigger SSD

Samsung now has its 31TB SSD into manufacturing.
The 30.72TB PM1643 effectively replaces the current PM1633a and its 15.36TB capacity limit.
Read all about it here - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/20/samsung_30tb_ssd/ .
 

The roles of SSDs and HDDs are not what they were!

The days when SSDs were the small capacity but fast drives and HDDs were the slower but capacious drives are well and truly OVER!

Viking Technology is shipping a 50TB SAS SSD. Yes, you read that right.

An interesting new interconnect layer for servers

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/19/10x_faster_servers/

HDDs are definitely not making performance or capacity improvements of this order.

A 15TB drive you can completely re-write every single day of it's five-year warranty life and not expect a failure.
Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage
Now we just need better interfaces in our PCs to handle the 12Gb Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface.

Seagate caught up pretty smartish

Just a month or so later Seagate has a 10 TB Helium-filled HDD to rival Western Digital's.
I'll be on the lookout for a comparison!
Seagate floats out 10TB HDD filled with lifting gas

A 10TB Helium-filled Disk-Drive WITHOUT shingling

I'll bet you thought I was done here, hey? No, just very busy this last year.
This seems like a sufficiently significant bit of news to warrant a quick mention though.
WDC's shingle-free stocking filler: A 10TB helium disk drive
The spec' is pretty amazing and available in PDF format Here.
Here's a quick rundown -
Western Digital Corporation (WDC) has updated its Ultrastar He⁸ to the He¹⁰, providing the same capacity as the shingled HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha¹⁰ announced in June but without the shingling, meaning standard write speeds.
Compared to the He⁸ it has 25 per cent more capacity, and WDC says it has a 56 per cent lower watts/TB rating than traditional air-filled HDDs, a 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean-time-between-failures) rating, and a five-year warranty.
The drive has a second-generation, dual-stage HGST Micro-Actuator to enhance tracking accuracy and reliability in multi-disk enclosures. It is said to be "drop-in ready for all mainstream enterprise capacity applications." This presumably, partly at least, explains why WDC can now get to the 10TB capacity level without having to shingle (partially overlap) tracks and incur the penalty of slower rewrite speeds.
It rotates at 7,200rpm and is a classic capacity-optimized drive, with a 256MB cache and 249MB/sec sustained transfer rate. The previous He⁸ had a 205MB/sec sustained transfer rate. It can have a 6Gbit/s SATA interface or a 12Gbit/s SAS one.
There are Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options and the disk is built for 24 x 7 operation. To increase reliability, it retains a previous firmware version for safer firmware updates.

I think that Santa could probably fit that in his sack without any problem.

Python 2.x.x AND Python 3.x.x on Windows

If you need to run both Python 2 AND Python 3 scripts on Windows, this is good to know -
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15912063/how-do-i-run-python-2-and-3-in-windows-7
- also, check out section 3.4 here -
https://docs.python.org/3.3/using/windows.html

Less than 1 month later!

So, 8 Terabyte was the newer hotness in August, now at the start of September HGST has a 10 (Terabyte drive ready! (But I still hate Shingled Magnetic Recording)
Whopping 10TB disks spin out of HGST – plus 3.2TB flash slabs