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Seagate Ships First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive
MojoKid (1002251) writes Seagate announced today that it has begun shipping the world's first 8 Terabyte hard drive. The 8TB hard drive comes only five months after Western Digital released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate's high capacity HDDs had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
That sure is a lot of porn...
I remember when tape drives stored a few times more data than hard drives, and were priced about the same. I know I can back up to external USB drives (which I do using Snebu, but I which tape drives were more affordable.
Just like before I can lose entire tv series when the disk fails. But now it's the HD version of the series I will lose. That's called progress.
lucm, indeed.
Before SSD's were all the rage, a common thing to get a speed boost was to do 'short stroke' the drive. Essentially, all you do is only partition the first third of the drive and use that space.
The theory is that the head doesn't need to move around as much and speeds up the drive. I've never done it but modders used to swear by it.
I doubt it would be trivial: you can sacrifice capacity for some speed by reducing the amount of platter area you use(and thus how far back and forth the read/write head assembly needs to move); but RPM is still a serious constraint, and bumping that tends to get rather costly. 15k RPM has been the effective ceiling for years, and while increases in data density improve best-case read and write speeds they have no effect on how long you have to wait for a given chunk of disk to finish its rotation and come back under the read head.
It also doesn't help that SSDs are aggressively moving into the high speed area. If you applied the engineering tricks used in ultracentrifuges you could probably build a damn fast HDD; but doing so for less than the price of a really nice SSD would be a great deal more challenging.
So I have multiple servers in different locations all using 3TB external USB3 Seagate drives (powered by AC adapter). At least 12 in total, one for each server used for BMR backups. In less than a year, ALL DRIVES FAILED!!! Either they started out with bad blocks and progressively got worse, or just died.
Seagate, never again! The article below doesn't show just how bad Seagate drives are when used every day.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Life is not for the lazy.
Rotational Vibration (RV) is the vibration the drive experiences from the platters rotating at high speed. When you put a bunch of drives in a cage, some interesting harmonics build up which can shorten the life span of the drives further. Enterprise grade hard drives are built to better withstand these vibrations, lessening the chance of failure. (At least that is what their literature says -- personally I'd mount the drives using grommets or something like what Rackspace uses [rubber bands I think?]).
If it's the outer most tracks, sure. More surface area = more bits. As such, that 1/3rd would be physically narrower making the actuator arm not having to swing as far back and forth when reading/writing to that partition. As a bonus, the outer most track also has faster throughput as more bits fly under the head vs the inner track regardless of RPM.
Life is not for the lazy.
Considering how awful QC and MTBF have been with Seagate in the past 10 years or so, I really can't think of a good reason to buy this drive.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would MUCH, MUCH rather have half speed double capacity. Just about all my storage comes much closer to write once, read mostly.
I've got a 32tb array in my RV so that's where my mind went even tho I know it can't be right. :) It's traveled 11,000 miles without a blip and was expanded from 26tb last fall. I don't have any proof to back it up but I'll bet it's one of the largest mobile arrays in the world. Sure, it'd be easy to build a bigger one but who needs that much storage on the move?
Also, I'm getting a kick out of the idea of 8tb drives. Most of mine are 2tb and I just started swapping in 4tb drives last year. Haven't even had a chance/reason to start putting in 6tb drives and now they're up to 8tb. Pretty soon, I'll be able to whittle it down to a mirror.
Damn, I thought it meant it would do well in my Winnebago. My server rack is near the rear axle and I've had some issues on bumpy roads...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Invest in a very high speed Internet connection and you can just download anything you want relatively instantly via torrent. Makes local storage a practical waste of time. IME anyway.
The Pillar Data Axiom SANs did this. DEC filed a patent for it back in '92. http://www.google.com/patents/...
I'm sure they already have 'two or three' on order!
That's why there is a feature called Write-intent bitmap. There is a performance hit, but it's well worth the rebuild time saved if you value your data.
As you mention, 15k SAS drives are going to be rapidly undercut by SSDs. The price difference is no longer 10x or 20x when looking at cost/gigabyte, the price difference is now only 2-3x.
Pay 2x-3x the amount for a SSD of the same size as the 15k SAS, and you gain 50x improvement in your IOPS. For workloads where that matters, it's an easy choice to make now. As soon as you say something like "we'll short-stroke some 15k RPM SAS drives" - you should be considering enterprise level SSD instead. Less spindles needed, less power needed, and huge performance gains.
The only downside of SSDs is that write-endurance. A 600GB SSD can only handle about 120TB of writes over its lifespan (give or take 20-50% depending on the controller, technology, etc). The question is - are you really writing more then 60GB/day to the drive (in which case it will wear out in 5 years).
And more importantly... will you care if it wears out in 4-5 years? That you could handle the same workload using fewer spindles and less power likely pays for itself, including replacing the drives every 4-5 years.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Anyone else remember when 10MB was a decent size disk and 30MB was huge? Man I'm getting old...
What?!?!?
I see in this drives future, let me see my crystal ball.....2 years from this day. Yes....
The drive shall fail.
Your mystical fortune says...let me see...
Use backups.
That'll be $75.
No, you can't see my third nipple.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Classic display of that same effect on drives in an enclosure causing a pretty severe performance drop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Rotational Vibration (RV) is the vibration the drive experiences from the platters rotating at high speed. When you put a bunch of drives in a cage, some interesting harmonics build up which can shorten the life span of the drives further. Enterprise grade hard drives are built to better withstand these vibrations, lessening the chance of failure. (At least that is what their literature says -- personally I'd mount the drives using grommets or something like what Rackspace uses [rubber bands I think?]).
Actually, multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance is a design feature whereby the drive is designed to be capable of withstanding and tolerating induced rotational vibrations from outside the drive. Enterprise drives are normally designed to minimize the vibrations they generate and induce into their surrounding chassis. But on top of that, being able to dampen vibrations induced from the outside and function optimally can significantly improve the performance of the drives. In enterprise environments where performance is important, disk drives can theoretically tolerate a lot of vibrations by simply temporarily ceasing reads and writes until their read/write heads get back into alignment. But those pauses force the drive to wait for at least a full rotation before they can try again to read the same blocks. If this happens frequently the performance of the drive can be significantly degraded even if the drive lifetime isn't impacted. Multi-drive RV tolerance is not just about surviving the vibrations, its also about being able to function optimally without having to degrade performance when in a (relatively) high vibration environment, as is often the case in large high-density drive enclosures.
Without this feature, you can sometimes find your 4000 IOPS spindle array delivering only 2000 IOPS at random times, and not know why.
A bit off topic, but what would be the recommended file system to use on a drive like this when you're using it for backups? Something with built-in file checksums or is using ext2/3/4 and writing a script to generate and validate CRC files better?
I bought a 4TB WD My Book yesterday and am slightly concerned about the high failure rates for the 3TB version of the drive. Something about bad controllers...
Welp, seems my post was a bit misunderstood. I was actually thinking transfer rates. Say you have an 8TB drive with 6 platters - the option could be to pair up the platters and write alternate bytes to each, doubling sustained read and write.
It could also be an option to turn on when you start using the drive, and if it gets half-filled up, it should be possible to decouple them and get the full size.
The tendency for many consumers is to have an SSD boot drive and a platter storage drive - but that platter drive takes some time to fill up, why not double speed it until it's half full?
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the problem is that the hard drive head assembly moves as a single unit, which means all of the heads for all the platters must move in unison. But the precision required to move the heads to the precise spot on the tracks where the data is recorded is such that it would be too difficult to design the heads in such a way that when one was over its track, all of the others would be *guaranteed* to be over their tracks on their respective platters. To do this you'd need to have the heads each on their own arms with their own voice coils to keep them all on track simultaneously. But that would add enough cost to the drive, it would be cheaper to just buy two half-capacity drives and stripe them yourself.
Basically, I think its possible, but not economically logical to make hard drives in a way that would allow for this kind of in-box striping. That's what RAID is for.
My Altair 8800 running CP/M had a washing machine size hard driver. Air compressor,
big power draw, etc. Had a 5 MB fixed platter, and a 5MB removable platter. I think
was made by Shugart. Interface was parallel port (not printer port, but similar).
In its day, it was the cat's meow.
I still have that Altair, but not the drive. I replaced with a 5MB drive to a parallel port,
8" then 5". I also experimented with IDE interface and a 3.5" drive, but I do not
remember the capacity. Then the Altair got stored away. I have a bunch of them,
and some IMSAI 8080 (a better computer).
Yes, Jeannie ... I *am* an old geezer.
Actually I think the goal is to use the innermost tracks on the disk. The linear read speed is slower, you're correct that the outer tracks are faster, but the inner tracks have lower seek times.
You're dreaming if you think HDDs don't fail without warning.
Back in the day, my college campus mainframe, a Burroughs B6700, had (in addition to its more conventional "disk pack" drives) a head-per-track (HPT) drive. The disk was several feet in diameter and the whole surface was covered with read/write heads (they didn't need to move).
Can't find specs on the B6700 version, but here's a blurb about the older B5500 version (from http://www.retrocomputingtasma...)
-- Alastair
Actually, I've got unlimited LTE. Too bad today's consumer no longer has that option. I held onto it for 2 years before I hit the road. Expected to use it as a backup but RV park/resort WiFi universally sucks balls so it's usually my primary connection. LTE makes zero sense at the rates Verizon charges these days. My speed peaked just north of Atlanta at 80 megs down, 44 megs up. Totally pointless if I had a 2 gig plan. Even in my current location out in the country, I'm getting...pauses download...11/15. And I move a lot of data which I can do because Verizon is not allowed to interfere with the performance on the unlimited accounts. It's part of the agreement Verizon made with the government when they bought 700Mhz a while back.
Which, of course, is why they're planning to start throttling LTE service for unlimited customers starting in October.
he said winnebago, not airstream dude.
We'll just put your data onto your new Seagate drive... aaaand it's gone!
Worst. Signature. Ever.
first third wouldn't really do it on multiplatter drives though?
you'd have to do 100gb there and skip and 100gb and skip and 100gb... just the right way.
wouldn't surprise me if modders used to swear by bullshit though.
what I had do do once was to skip 600mbyte in the middle of a 3.2gb drive because that area was a broken platter or head and would crash the drive if tried to access - it worked just fine when I formatted around that area though...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
From TFA
PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
They actually use a variant of PMR that's based on magnetic monopoles. The reason why they're "shipping only to select enterprise clients" is because there's a limited supply of those, looted by the Red Army from a secret Nazi lab in 1945 and only recently rediscovered in former NKVD archives in a bunker outside Moscow.
Not a lot of people know that...
Honestly if this were a WD article someone would come up with the same anecdote and a different brand. Every manufacturer has had bad batches. I too have had a Seagate fail. I also had a WD fail. Like 4 IBM drives fail, a Quantum drive fail.
I wouldn't trust a Seagate drive with 100 MB of data, let alone 8 TB.
I'd guess 2TB, before it fails.
There's an old story posted in a comment on The Register once - someone posted about having an old storage rack with so many hard drives in it that when the power was applied and all spun up together, conservation of angular momentum would make the whole rack rotate slightly in the opposite direction. Solved by configuring them for a staggered spin-up.
That has been done and abandoned. HPT (head-per-track) drives were popular way back, but were a bear to keep aligned.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Medium business with two locations. Each locations houses 3-4 servers, running about 15-20 Virtual Machines on each host. Every essential system is virtualized. Another server, lower specs, but loaded with plain 7200 rpm enterprise class drives (Not 10k RPM drives like the VMHosts) run Microsoft DPM 2012 R2. We have it constantly backing up. Our email and file servers are backed up on the hour or every other hour. All others that are more "set it and forget it" systems that dont change or store changing data are backed up once a day or so. The entire VM. Should a VMHost fail all child VM's can be restored immediately. Likewise I have recovery points going back 2-3 months for our main data drive and email using DPM with regular drives. I can get anything near instantly rather than having to search a tape. I can see tape would be useful if something was deleted years ago and needed to be recovered. However until then I'm drive only. Likewise all our VMHost servers are RAID5 or RAID6, and even our DPM server is RAID5 so if a drive fails we're okay. If two fail at once.. it's a backup. We also try to mix batches of drives in it as well or add them spaced apart so they have different operating hours and time to replicate if it has to rebuild from a single drive loss. (Why ive been switching our main servers to RAID6, as any weaklings would die sometimes during rebuild of a raid5 array or even raid1 array which leaves out SOL).
This doesn't apply to four post gear or anything that gets too toasty; but the fact that a lot of music related hardware is rackmount and has to survive roadies and touring makes rack hardware surprisingly attractive for mobile use. If the job is too big for a laptop and small enough for half depth hardware, just check out the local music supply place and pick out a nice portable rack. Quite sturdy and shock resistant, usually at least offers a front door that clips on well enough that you can ship it, available in a variety of heights(and typically stackable unless you go for a wheeled one). A very convenient overlap.
Your post contains:
2 paragraphs.
6 sentences.
375 words.
On average, your post contains:
3.00 sentences per paragraph.
62.50 words per sentence.
For comparison, typical English text contains:
4.49 sentences per paragraph.
38.58 words per sentence.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.