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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.
you are better off with generation-1 than generation-current.
never trust the very leading edge. and, we're talking seagate, here; their enterprise drives are ok but I wouldn't touch them, these days, for consumer drives. no way!
no way I'm trusting helium, either; since it escapes and makes the drive useless a few years down the line.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
No, straight Helium is a lower density medium than normal air. This means less atmospheric friction and less driver motor friction while spinning a platter.
Since the individual platter assemblies run cooler, they can pack them closer together (and put more in a given drive casing).
Also, because they have to hermetically seal a platter assembly into the helium atmosphere, with some modifications, such drives can be used in full-immersion cooling, where normal air-cooled drives need to breathe.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...
Yes, I also have very old Seagate drives with capacities from about 40 to 300 or so gigabytes that work fine. I also have a 5 gallon pail full of dead 1 terabyte drives that are 2-4 years old. I do IT consulting (mostly for small business) and the failure rate on the 1 terabyte and up drives has been hideous. I have been hammering on all my customers to do full drive image backups regularly - and to replace the backup devices as soon as they are over two years old. I'm generally not a hard sell guy, but I am pushing this, because I don't want them to be able to say they weren't warned when I have to charge them $thousands to get going again after a drive fails.
You mean you got hit by the 7200.11 bug and didn't do any research into it to discover that it's a firmware issue with a simple fix?
No. Go look at an upper mid-sized enterprise, and ask what kind of hardware they have running their Microsoft SQL Servers, their Exchange server, or their Oracle cluster.
What Google, Facebook, and Yahoo are doing is not relevant at the enterprise level. These are super-colossal cloud-scale companies, that are 3 orders of magnitude larger than Enterprise computing, not ordinary enterprises.
Enterprise hard drives are designed for Enterprise use, not Google or Facebook's cloud or HPC clusters.
These massive companies also have their own custom hardware built at their disposal. They are not using RAID arrays like most enterprises are using, and they essentially have massive farms of workstations instead of servers running their computational workloads.
At sufficient scale, you can achieve reliability from consumer disk drives for in-house applications, by designing your application around your components, BUT the major requirement is that you are in control of the application stack, so you can actually use the disk drives like you want --- and not have to stick them in a tightly-coupled RAID array.
The consumer disk drives are not sufficiently unusable that you can't work around the limitations by having thousands of them in a cluster, with terabytes of cache spread over 5000 computers, and some smart application logic doing what ordinary RAID subsystems cannot.