Slashdot Mirror
Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive
MojoKid writes Seagate's just-announced a new 'Archive' HDD series, one that offers capacities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB. That's right, 8 Terabytes of storage on a single drive and for only $260 at that. Back in 2007, Seagate was one of the first to release a hard drive based on perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that was required to help us break past the roadblock of achieving more than 250GB per platter. Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed. That "something new" is shingled magnetic recording. As its name suggests, SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern, much like shingles on a roof. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. It should be noted that Seagate isn't the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive.
I am just about to build a FreeNAS or NAS4Free box. I was planning on running three 4TB drives to give me 8TB usable, but I'm probably better off with a pair of these. I'm mostly using the storage for TV recording, so the slower speed is fine. If the slower speed also means lower power, then it's a big plus.
Hitachi drives are quite the opposite and I have been running one for the past four years so far without issues. I have used WD(blue, black, green versions) and Seagate for the past 14 years and all failed within 3 month's, 6 month's, and the longest lasted year and half.
I'm impressed.
How can helium affect the density of the disc?
The only thing that I can think of having helium inside the disc chamber is to reduce friction
and then let's hear about how it's all anecdotal evidence.
Then someone will bring out the backblaze survey.
Then someone will say "They've never had a problem with Seagate, but WD sucks."
Then someone will lament how IBM no longer makes drives. Then the deskstar stories will start.
In other words, the same responses every time a hard drive story is posted.
is that really proper use of "density" ?
Rich
You'd have better luck writing 1's and 0's in a notebook then you would storing data on a seagate drive. It will fail within the year.
Write-Once-Read-Never, Datengrab, /dev/null
That started seventeen minutes ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...
Get with the times already.
. . . to rebuild your array when one of these puppies fails? :-( I realize it's progress, but I'm just thinking of the practical realities of using individual drives this big in a NAS.
I'm going to fill my 8 TB 'Archive' hard drive with ____________.
GO!
I've just had two 5tb Seagates fail. Out of two.
It's not deskstar but deathstar I was told...
As an anecdote, my first HDD to ever fry was a 8GB deskstar. I lost everything. Now I have backups and raid. Many failures later (at least 3) I've yet to lose a single bit I deemed important.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Then the deskstar stories will start.
Hey, that's one of the classics! SonyBMG rootkit, removal of OtherOS, and the Deathstar hard drives. Two decades of ranting excellence!
Why does this drive have the archive moniker? Is it any more reliable than a non-archive drive? The name suggests I can put data on it and shelve it for 20 years and come back with all the data still there. Is there any indication that might be the case? Somehow I doubt it.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
These drives are targeting more or less the same market. And judging by the number of complains, WD's 4 and 6TB drives are not much better in reliability department (although I might be wrong in that regard)
Nobody would have said anything if you had kept your trap shut.
You just had to be that ominous "someone", didn't you?
I can't comment on whether Seagate is better or worse than competitors from any kind of standpoint. And I can't trust anyone who makes any statements regarding that, unless it would be a comment from a company like Facebook with hundreds of thousands of drives.
But I do like WD's branding approach of color-coded drive families for different use-cases. Nowadays, we have to research everything we buy often to end up with the wrong information because of all the polarized opinions and disinformation out there. Knowing that Red drives are made for this use-case, green drive for this other use-case, etc, makes the choice a lot easier to get what we need.
oops, i forgot. here's the link: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/
nice and easy.
Me gusta
"In other words, the same responses every time a hard drive story is posted."
Of course, most people posting are not very bright or they'd do their own research.
Now my backups can disappear because my Seagate "Archive" drive took a sh*t 2 years after I bought it.
Seriously. I just went through a stack of 5 Seagate HDDs, from different customers, with a sledge hammer. They all died with S.M.A.R.T. failures.
I wouldn't trust Seagate with my data unless I *wanted* it to self-destruct.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Or is it like the current 8 and 10tb drives that only seem to exist at the fantastipotamus store?
I got a Seagate 3TB in a USB enclosure a year or two back.
Worked great for a year to a year and a half, then I started getting it randomly hanging. At first I assumed it was the usb interface going back, but upon removing the drive and directly plugging it into the system the same symptoms remained. Since it had been in an enclosure it hadn't supported SMART access to the drive. The SMART readings with the bare drive didn't show anything obvious, but actually reading from the drive would give read errors, and too many read/write errors over a certain period would cause the drive to hang, sometimes hanging the entire bus.
Long story short, it turned out I wasn't the only one having this problem, it happened pretty commonly across that entire serial line of drives, and there was neither firmware fix, nor warranty support for them (The enclosures only gave a 1 year warranty despite the drives having a 3 year warranty tag printed on them. The only thing I can figure is they figured out the entire batch was bad, about how long they'd last, and shoved them in a bunch of USB cases where they didn't expect anybody to find out.)
Having dealt with that drive, and reviews of them online, I'm going to be aversive to those, hitachi 3tb, and possibly WD 3tb for the forseeable future. Knock on wood, I haven't had ANY problems with 2 terabyte drives so far and given that another stepping of drives is coming out, we might see the later versions of the current-gen drives becoming mature enough to rely on for more than a year, which going off reviews doesn't seem statistically safe yet for this generation.
Boy I was about to post a Backblaze survey concerning enterprise vs consumer drives. I am so glad I waited until I read your post.
SMR drives are fine for I/O scenarios that don't overwrite data very often but they suffer from significant performance penalties for overwrites due to the read-modify-write/write-relocate operations required to modify a set of sectors within a shingled-encoded track. There are tricks to lessen the impact such as virtual sector remapping and background remapping but those can't avoid performance penalties in many scenarios.
Others replied mentioning it's because PMR is mostly useful for sequential writes, not random. That's true, and also the drive needs idle time between writes for garbage collection and remapping. It therefore fits the for daily backups, which are sequential and provide the drive time to garbage collect before it's used again.
It's less suited to something like storing security footage, where is has to record 24/7. Unless of course the recording software is specifically designed for PMR drives and writes directly to the raw drive, with no filesystem in use. In that case, it could write from LBA 0 sequentially to LBA MAX, then wrap around to 0 again, and no garbage collection would be required.
That started seventeen minutes ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...
Get with the times already.
You can't say "Get with the times" in a comment where Slashdot was scooped by ZDNet five days ago. That ship sailed.
Hmm, so for around $1200, I can add 32TB to my existing zpool via a six drive raidz2.
:)
I was considering another 4TB version of the above this summer, Hopefully these drives will be cheaper then.
That is cool.
It is nice to live in an age where the "I" in raid, is a realistic reality again!
Crap, I need more coffee, $1500. Well the $259 a drive is msrp, so $1200 for six drives is probably accurate.
6 of the 7 drives that have failed on me in the last ten years have been Seagates. A few were replaced by Seagate under warranty with refurbished drives, which also all died within a year of replacement. About half of the time, I would get *one* SMART warning on bootup, and I quickly learned to immediately copy off as much data as I could, because the drive would typically die on the next reboot. The other half of the Seagate drive would simply disappear one day from Windows and nothing could bring them back: no warning, no loss mitigation possible.
The moral is that I will never, ever trust that company again. It's a shame, since they used to be (mid-90s) the best in the industry, imho.
In contrast, I have had one Western Digital Green drive die, but very slowly, with plenty of warning, and I was able to copy all of the data off. My IBM/HGST drives have yet to fail, including a couple of Deskstar drives that have been running almost continually since 1999 (on heavily used shop machinery that control a lathe and misc. CNC equipment.)
I am happy to buy Seagate external drives again when they fix there USB adapter boards which I believe suffer from poor soldering since they work randomly. I had to make it an internal drive since I didn't see any cheap USB drive adapters compatible with 5TB drives...
The sooner Seagate gets these bulky drives out the door, the sooner I can buy a competing maker's drive of the same capacity, but with a lifespan exceeding a single year.
Drives intended to go in RAID arrays have different firmware and handle errors differently.
They may also get different testing. I worked for a telecom equipment vendor and there were specific drives that had been tested for behaviour under high/low temperatures, high/low humidity, vibration, etc.
If you're a big enough company then drive manufacturers will actually work with you to resolve drive firmware issues and/or answer questions about specific behaviours on their enterprise drives.
Lastly, at least in the SSD space at least some of the "Enterprise" drives have much better handling of power outages, with sufficient capacitors to handle writing out data.
It's not always worth buying "enterprise", but sometimes it makes sense.
I have a wonderful wind chime outside my house. Attached are two round shiny disks that reflect light in the wind as the chimes ring. Every time I look at it and shake my head and say "Take that, Seagate OEM drive!" I built this machine in January 2009. It had 3x500GB hard disks. Seagate OEM drives (even though I bought the drives separately from a vendor as new with warranty). The MTBF is 200,000 hours which is 11.5 years. Now ask anyone about MTBF and they will tell you to expect failure if you divide the 200,000 hours by the number of drives. So 11.5/3 = 3.8 years. But I didn't make it that long with any of the drives (two were still under warranty, one just missed the warranty). One of the warranty drives went into a NAS, one was replaced with a SSD. So if you are putting a drive in a NAS you aren't looking for really high speed, but you are looking for high reliability, and bulk storage (and it also depends on what your storage needs are). Now I did stuff a warranty Seagate drive into my NAS because I needed a drive, and the warranty drive was just sitting there. However, if I was running archives every night or running the NAS more than 3 days a week, I would stuff one or two large SSD's into it. The problem with a really big drive is when you lose the drive, you lose really big amounts of data. Sure a NAS helps, but how badly do you want to have to rely on it?
The kinds of MTBF I've been seeing with Seagate lately have caused me to select any drive other than theirs for any data storage needs.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The official brandname was "Deskstar", but the nickname was "Deathstar". I had a workstation drive that did the grating sound of death before keeling over. That was before the days of keeping user accounts on servers.
WD sucks!!
Write Once Read Mostly
Shingled media is almost useless for random access, since rewriting a logical block means relocating its entire "shingle" strip somewhere else., then, at some other time, garbage-collecting the entire region and relocating the still-in-use blocks. You definitely want to run these "noatime", to prevent thrashing directory blocks, and they should probably have a new filesystem designed for them.
Some have tried tinkering with flash filesystems due to the "copy/invalidate/garbage collect" and the LBAs are gathered in some larger storage block in no particular order, and that storage block needs to be managed. Don't know if Seagate will tell us what the size of a erase block (a set of overlapping, concentric "shingles", which have to be collected as a group) really is, or if they'll even be a consistent size.
If you're streaming from them, you may hit "garbage collect" long access times, and I don't know what proprietary commands and settings may be available, if any, to tell the drive "now is a good time to do housekeeping".
As "archive media", shingled drives probably work OK, since that is a WROM application, but, personally, I would NOT use them on any existing file system.
Not really impressed. A Yottabyte drive now that would be impressive
Just to ensure that the GP's post is self-fulfilling:
Backblaze's reliability report shows that HGST Deskstar drives are currently the most reliable on the market.
As someone who also bought one 75GB Deathstar and ended up returning it 3 times before I put it on the shelf with a red X as a momento I couldn't believe it.
I bought a Quantum Bigfoot back in the day just because I happened to have more 5.25" bays open. It did help that it was cheaper than the similar capacity 3.5" drives available at the time, but I still see new computers with multiple 5.25" bays.
If they put the same technology into a larger form factor, it wouldn't be long before the petabyte is reached.
(doesn't peta stand for the People for the Eating of Tasty Animals or something?)
My worst experience was with a 1TB WB "Green" drive. From brand new, SMART said it was perfect, but I could not write over about 900GB to it. This was not a GiB vs. GB issue -- the failures occurred before reaching 931GiB and manifested as drive I/O errors, not filesystem full errors. Writes were consistently failing before I reached the nominal size of the drive.
I haven't bought a WD drive since then.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Then someone will lament how IBM no longer makes drives.
I thought they still do, as HGST (that is, IBM sold the division to Hitachi at some point)?
Miss my DeathStar. Not sure; might have been a 75 GB disk...
Ah, down thread pointed at the fact that HGST was sold to a mix of WD and Toshiba. Bah. And no edit button.
I've got a pile of Seagate and Samsung drives on my desk that were in servers for less than a year and now they are only worth ripping open for magnets. The reliability of Seagate drives now doesn't seem to be anywhere close to what it was a few years ago.
This comes up from time to time. Vacuum won't "fly" -- literally. The one thing keeping the heads from scratching your valuable platter is the air cushion (or helium cushion) between platter and head. This basic design principle has stayed with us for many years, actually.
The deskstar was fine apart from that exhaust port problem.
I would never consider this with RAID-5, that requires four of them, three spinning and a spare ready to go. And preferably, hot swap. And when one fails, how long would it take to rebuild the data on the replacement? What about the chances of a second drive failing before the new one is rebuilt?
That is TOO much on one spindle!
From the summary:
Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed.
How is 8TB "beyond" 10TB?
That's why modern drives use helium instead of protons . . .
That sequel went straight to video. Other than watching him become Darth Squeaky after it got torpedoed, there was really nothing worth watching.
hawk