Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive

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Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte 'Archive' Hard Drive

Posted by timothy on Saturday December 13, 2014 @04:44AM from the thought-you'd-like-to-see-my-vacation-slides dept.

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.

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Just in time. by crow · 2014-12-13 04:51 · Score: 1

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.
1. Re:Just in time. by TheGratefulNet · 2014-12-13 04:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  
  --
  "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
2. Re:Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 05:05 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  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.
  But you'll be able to tell when that happens when your voice gets really squeaky.
3. Re:Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  That's a lot of porn to lose. I'd wait for the next gen.
4. Re:Just in time. by swb · 2014-12-13 05:12 · Score: 2
  
  With 8 TB drive sizes I would think you would want double parity and some kind of hotspare. The rebuild times on that could be glacial.
5. Re:Just in time. by TheGratefulNet · 2014-12-13 05:14 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  easily fixed with autotune...
  
  --
  
  --
  "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
6. Re:Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 05:21 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  What? Seagate discs for consumers have been pretty much bullet proof according to what I've been able to find. I've got discs from them that are 15 years old that I scrapped for lack of capacity rather than failure and drives from them from many of the generations in between.
  HGST are the ones doing helium, not seagate BTW.
7. Re:Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 05:26 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  their enterprise drives are ok but I wouldn't touch them, these days, for consumer drives. no way!
  There is no difference in reliability between "enterprise" and "consumer" drives. Those are purely marketing terms. The sole advantage of enterprise drives is a longer warranty. If you are bad at math, you might think that is a good deal.
8. Re:Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 06:00 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...
9. Re:Just in time. by jandjmh · 2014-12-13 06:06 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
10. Re:Just in time. by Voyager529 · 2014-12-13 06:07 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Crow, listen to this guy. Assuming these things have 100MBytes/sec write speed, a simple RAID-1 will take over 22 hours to rebuild.
  If you want 8TB of usable space, get 4x4TB and RAIDz2 (i.e. RAID6) them. Even if it's disposable data, the data must be of sufficient use to justify a FreeNAS build over a simple external. It's worth your time to do it right.
11. Re:Just in time. by Lord+Apathy · 2014-12-13 06:14 · Score: 2
  
  you are better off with generation-1 than generation-current.
  I completely agree. I'm about to retire a rack of 1 TB drives in my NAS and replace them with three 4TB drives in a raid 5 array. The 4TB drives will had to be out a year before I started to trust them.
  Live on the bleeding edge with shit your not afraid to lose. Trust your important shit with well tested 2nd or 3rd generation technology.
  
  --
  Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
12. Re:Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 06:15 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...
  Agreed. The price is also different.
  For reliability, I prefer actual data over your anecdotal opinion: Consumer drives shown to be more reliable than enterprise drives.
13. Re:Just in time. by silas_moeckel · 2014-12-13 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  I'm not sure it's even fair to consider an ent sata a enterprise drive, if they were comparing to sas that would be something.
  
  --
  No sir I dont like it.
14. Re:Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 06:28 · Score: 1
  
  if they were comparing to sas that would be something.
  Why would the interface change the reliability of the HDD?
15. Re:Just in time. by ericloewe · 2014-12-13 06:36 · Score: 1
  
  Good, because these don't have Helium.
16. Re:Just in time. by ProzacPatient · 2014-12-13 06:37 · Score: 2
  
  For reliability, I prefer actual data over your anecdotal opinion: Consumer drives shown to be more reliable than enterprise drives.
  This probably has more to do with TLER than anything because consumer drives are designed with the expectation they'll be run as a single isolated disk whereas enterprise disks are typically expected to be part of some RAID array running in tandem with other disks the RAID controller can use to correct errors, so while an enterprise and consumer drive might share the same physical hardware the firmware for enterprise drives can differ significantly in the way they handle error recovery.
17. Re:Just in time. by beelsebob · 2014-12-13 06:37 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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?
18. Re:Just in time. by Blaskowicz · 2014-12-13 06:40 · Score: 1
  
  The slower speed can't get you lower power there, the drive is slow when re-writing because due to the tech used it has to do some copy/delete/write stuff very roughly similar to having to erase a whole block of flash to write a single logical 512 byte or 4096 byte sector.
  If you mostly store large stuff that doesn't get deleted or don't care about the possible reduction in write speed, it's still fine to get that drive. (good at recording TV stuff you intend to keep, not that good if you're continuously recording just to go back after taking a pee break or in case there was something worth keeping)
19. Re:Just in time. by Vairon · 2014-12-13 06:40 · Score: 1
  
  The average read/write speed of this drive is 150MB/sec with a maximum sustained read rate of 190MB/sec. See http://www.seagate.com/files/w...
  Assuming only the average read/write rate it would take 14 hours and 48 minutes to simultaneously read from one drive and write to another.
  8*1000*1000/150/60/60=14.81 hours
20. Re:Just in time. by ultranova · 2014-12-13 06:40 · Score: 1
  
  I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...
  
  Thank you for clearly stating your biases. However, your statement is too vague to be either verified or taken into account in a decision-making process in any meaningful way. Either of these would require knowing at least some of the specific differences.
  
  --
  Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
21. Re: Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 06:48 · Score: 1
  
  Bad firmware. Google seagate drives bad firmware how to update
22. Re:Just in time. by Immerman · 2014-12-13 07:05 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Unfortunately there is a common trend in the commercial world where a once-quality brand decides to cash in on it's reputation and sell low-quality crap and "We're a quality brand" prices. No doubt it boosts profit margins dramatically, for a while, but means the world loses another quality brand, and a lot of customers get screwed over. And sometimes it's a graduated process where the high end enterprise/boutique products continue to maintain their quality to prop up the brand, while the quality of the normal products falls off a cliff.
  I haven't been following hard drives closely enough to be able to comment on Seagate's case, but I've seen it happen to far to many once-great brands to be even remotely surprised.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
23. Re:Just in time. by tabrisnet · 2014-12-13 07:20 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Don't use RAID5 with drives over 1TB.
  a) a RAID5 rebuild takes many hours, b/c it involves reading the entire disc.
  b) drives from the same production batch tend to cluster failures.
  c) I recall reading that the uncorrectable read error rate tends towards the 2TB mark.
  That is, chances are very good that a single drive failure will become a 2-drive failure during a rebuild.
  RAID6 or nothing.
24. Re:Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 07:29 · Score: 1
  
  Seagate makes the best power savings drives... after 2 weeks to 3 months, 3 out of the last 5 Seagate drives I purchased died in less than 6 months. Those 3 consume 0 watts of power, while holding about 5 TB total of data (inaccessible though it may be). None of them gave a SMART warning until after they failed. Though I did get the click of death on one, shortly before it crapped out.
25. Re:Just in time. by greenfruitsalad · 2014-12-13 07:37 · Score: 1
  
  unfortunately, even voting with your wallet is out of the question these days since you only have a duopoly to choose from. i just hope ssds will soon catch up capacity-wise.
26. Re:Just in time. by Immerman · 2014-12-13 08:03 · Score: 1
  
  A duopoly? Has Toshiba collapsed as well without me noticing? Surely neither Seagate nor WD has gone under.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
27. Re:Just in time. by mysidia · 2014-12-13 08:04 · Score: 2
  
  Why would the interface change the reliability of the HDD?
  Because a SAS drive is not identical to a SATA drive with a different interface attached.
28. Re:Just in time. by WaffleMonster · 2014-12-13 08:11 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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?
  Its simple to upgrade the firmware when you can still access the drive otherwise you have to jigger up a TTL level serial interface and send AT commands to unbrick the thing...lots of "fun".
29. Re:Just in time. by Lord+Apathy · 2014-12-13 08:19 · Score: 1
  
  The RAID-5 is not set in stone. RAID-6 is an option that has not been ruled out, odds are I will go that route.
  I know about the drive failures in batchs like that. I've been bitten by it before. I usually buy drives from different sources weeks apart. That increases the odds that the drives will come from different batchs. I don't if that affects the reliability of the drives themselves but makes me feel better.
  
  --
  Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
30. Re:Just in time. by JWSmythe · 2014-12-13 08:24 · Score: 2
  
  Their consumer drives have gone to absolute shit. I was buying them because they were marginally cheaper than the other choices. I ended up with a couple dozen running over the period of about a year. As each matured to about 1.5 years old, they started dying. Seagate reduced their warranty for consumer drives down to 1 year, so now they're all paperweights.
  I guess they're ok, if you want to build a computer that you only want to use for 1 year. Maybe building out a machine for someone you don't like, or you like repeat business from angry customers who lose all their data yearly.
  One of these days, we're going to have a thermite fueled funeral pyre. I'll post the YouTube video. :)
  At least these "archive" drives get a 3 year warranty, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they start trimming that down over time as they find out what their real failure rates are like.
  
  --
  Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
31. Re:Just in time. by mysidia · 2014-12-13 08:30 · Score: 1
  
  There is no difference in reliability between "enterprise" and "consumer" drives. Those are purely marketing terms
  The statement you have made is an overly broad genralization.
  There are a multitude of differences between the average consumer drive and the average enterprise disk drive, which affect operational reliability of the drive in various scenarios.
  For a consumer drive; the reliability has to be measured as correct operation of a single disk drive in a consumer workstation.
  For an enterprise drive; the reliability has to be measured as correct operation within a larger storage subsystem, such as a hardware RAID environment, or a disk drive shelf being utilized by a Software or RAID subsystem e.g. Equallogic PS5xxx, Netapp FAS array.
  One of the most important differences is the on-disk format and metadata.
  Secondly, different types of disk drives have different proprietary firmwares, so they have different reliability footprints when in operational use in different scenarios.
  Consumer disk drives cannot be substituted in while retaining the same level of reliability. Just like Enterprise disk drives cannot be substituted into a workstation while retaining the same level of reliability for that application.
32. Re:Just in time. by Immerman · 2014-12-13 08:30 · Score: 1
  
  No, it's means I didn't proof read and a homophone slipped through while my fingers were busy typing two sentences behind my brain.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
33. Re:Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 08:36 · Score: 1
  
  but to segment the market HDD mfgrs put better electronics in SAS drives. better firmware too-.
  I think this is BS. The marginal cost of "better electronics" is pennies. The marginal cost of "better firmware" is zero. So you are basically saying that manufacturers intentionally create defective products. In a competitive market (and the HDD market is very competitive) there is no reason they would do that.
  If they actually did that, it would show up in reliability tests, rather than just in the totally made up MTBF figures printed on the box.
  Also, they don't need to. They can just tell people that the enterprise drives are better, and plenty of idiots will believe them, in the face of contrary evidence, and even come up with conspiracy theories to justify their irrational choices. There is a sucker born every minute.
34. Re:Just in time. by DamnStupidElf · 2014-12-13 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, assuming you're not doing anything at all with the array while it's rebuilding, and none of the sectors have been remapped causing seeks in the middle of those long reads/writes.
  To throw out one more piece of advice; RAID6 is useless without periodic media scans. You don't want to discover that one of your drives has bit errors while the array is rebuilding another failed drive. RAID6 can't correct a known-position error and an unknown-position error at the same time. raidz2 has checksums that should detect the bit flip and reconstruct the stripe from the N-2 known good copies, but at these sizes you should probably start worrying about the possibility of two bit flips in the same stripe.
35. Re:Just in time. by jedidiah · 2014-12-13 08:51 · Score: 1
  
  Broken is still broken. Shipping a broken product is perhaps tolerable for a GAME but it simply shouldn't be tolerated for hardware. If the end user has to "patch" a piece of hardware then it's still an engineering fail and Seagate deserves every bit of grief anyone gives them.
  Their 3TB drives in particular seem to implode at about 18 months.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
36. Re:Just in time. by PRMan · 2014-12-13 08:52 · Score: 1
  
  I have just had a couple Seagate drives fail just outside of their 1-year warranties. I'm never buying Seagate again, no matter how cheap they were (and a 3TB was only $100 when I got it).
  
  --
  Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
37. Re:Just in time. by jbolden · 2014-12-13 09:04 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think they will. As SSD replaces HDD for day to day tasks HDD is replacing tape for longer term archive. HDD are going to move to slower and bigger while SSD is going to have to balance faster with bigger. The result will be many years of HDD having higher capacity.
38. Re:Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 09:09 · Score: 1
  
  This probably has more to do with TLER than anything because consumer drives are designed with the expectation they'll be run as a single isolated disk whereas enterprise disks are typically expected to be part of some RAID array
  Except that the referenced study shows that consumer drives are just as reliable as "enterprise" drives WHEN USED IN A DATACENTER. Nothing that you mention explains that.
39. Re:Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 09:48 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Consumer disk drives cannot be substituted in while retaining the same level of reliability.
  Thanks for your unsupported and unsubstantiated opinion. All the actual data says otherwise. If "enterprise" drives were actually more reliable, you would see them used in datacenters by companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. But all of these companies use "consumer" drives in their datacenters. So does everyone else that believes data over marketing.
40. Re:Just in time. by unixisc · 2014-12-13 10:03 · Score: 1
  
  Why do we need PMR or SMR, given that flash memory densities are catching up to these? From PMR, they should consider SSDs
41. Re:Just in time. by Fweeky · 2014-12-13 10:08 · Score: 1
  
  I recall reading that the uncorrectable read error rate tends towards the 2TB mark.
  12.5TB, assuming the specified 1-in 10^14 bit uncorrectable-read-error rate specified for most consumer drives is accurate. I certainly don't see rates anywhere near that high with my consumer drives, but I could just be lucky.
42. Re:Just in time. by Pentium100 · 2014-12-13 10:10 · Score: 1
  
  We have a bunch of Seagate SV35 drives in a backup server. They started to get kicked out of RAIDZ one by one. Some show actual bad sectors (and were replaced since warranty was not expired), but others worked OK when tested using MHDD and the seller refused to replace then under warranty.
  It turned out that those drives are so sensitive to vibration that dropping a coin on the PC case (with the drive secured in the drive bay) from a few cm height caused the drive to hang for about two seconds and emit a beep.
  Now we use WD RED drives for this - they are more resistant to vibration and have TLER.
  SMART for all the Seagate SV35 drives we have show a lot of "High Fly Writes" - the normalized value is 1 and the raw value is between 1000 and 7000.
43. Re:Just in time. by jandjmh · 2014-12-13 10:13 · Score: 1
  
  None of the drives I have here failed due to this bug. They are still visible to the BIOS, but the most common failure mode is that the drive spins up, and then the head repeatedly seeks - click whir, click whir etc. Tries many times then spins down. Others are kind of readable, but have SMART warning, and bad sectors. I will second the comment someone else made about Seagate sending back even more terrible "refurbs". Some of my customer's drives did fail under warranty, and in every case I can recall when I returned the failed drive, the "refurbished" unit they sent me back failed in under a year.
  I am somewhat at a loss when asked by my customers what they should get instead. If they can afford it, and/or don't need too much space, SSD's are probably somewhat less likely to fail. I won't know for sure for another 3-4 years. Other than that, I just hammer away at the need for a backup system that can do a bare metal restore ....
44. Re:Just in time. by mysidia · 2014-12-13 10:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
45. Re:Just in time. by Pentium100 · 2014-12-13 10:19 · Score: 1
  
  TLER is useful in all cases, just that it is pretty much mandatory for RAID, so the drive manufacturers disable TLER on cheaper drives to prevent them from being used in a RAID.
  Yes, in theory, non-TLER drive stands better chance of recovering unreadable data, but during that time the PC appears to be frozen, so the user just reboots it. Even with TLER of 7 seconds (default) that's still a long time. I do not know about others, but I'd rather my PC be responsive and report the error so I can either restore the file from backup or run recovery software to read the sector 5000 times hoping to read it correctly once.
46. Re: Just in time. by bill_mcgonigle · 2014-12-13 10:31 · Score: 1
  
  Get the HGST "NAS" SATA drives, if you don't need SAS - they are much better than the standard SATA drives, meant for real storage duties - pretty much what nerds need for home. Great ZFS performance. Three year warranty is good enough.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
47. Re:Just in time. by darkain · 2014-12-13 10:39 · Score: 1
  
  The question is though, what method are you using to test for these errors in the first place? How do you KNOW there has not been a read error occurring within the discs? This is a big reason why ZFS exists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
48. Re:Just in time. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 10:46 · Score: 1
  
  Be aware, these are SMR (shingled) disks, and only support linear writes. Sequential writes will be plenty fast, but random writes will be terrible, as will any kind of fragmentation.
49. Re:Just in time. by greenfruitsalad · 2014-12-13 11:00 · Score: 2
  
  yes, a duopoly of WD and Seagate. at least in 3.5" disk market.
  http://www.wdc.com/en/company/...
  3.5" toshiba drives are pretty much WD with Toshiba's firmware and branding.
50. Re:Just in time. by thegarbz · 2014-12-13 11:27 · Score: 1
  
  Then feel free to publish some data. Backblaze did. Comparing enterprise vs consumer drives they noted no difference in performance or reliability. The only differences were price and warranty length.
  Then they did the math and realised that the warranty break even period was beyond the expected life time of any of their drives and opted to use only consumer grade drives in their storage arrays. Their blog is well worth a read. Pass it on to your manager, you may be the man who saves your company thousands of dollars.
51. Re:Just in time. by thegarbz · 2014-12-13 11:34 · Score: 2
  
  And yet some of those companies have published individual drive data showing the exact reliability. I suggest doing some reading on Backblaze's blog before you claim some mythical reliability advantage for a harddrive in some strange mid-tier solution. You'll find that reliability figures don't change between enterprise and consumer grade stuff.
  Now while you're spitting out observations let's dig into that for a while. I'm building an SQL Server and I work for a large enterprise. Do I
  a) dedicate my valuable time to individually picking components to meet my needs and build a system from scratch? Or
  b) call Dell and tell them I need a Server + OS + SQL Server installed and delivered tomorrow.
  Most companies choose b) as their core business is not in the design of their own server equipment and they don't have the resources to do a). All the companies who go down the b) route automagically get an enterprise grade drive because that's what they are given and I doubt it's even possible to spec them down to consumer grade drives.
  All companies with the resources to do it themselves which have gone option a) have concluded that consumer grade drives make more financial sense.
52. Re:Just in time. by 0100010001010011 · 2014-12-13 11:39 · Score: 1
  
  I decided to build a NAS, so I got 5-2TB (raidz2) drives and 4-3TB (raidz) drives.
  Out of the original lot there are still 4 drives running. All but 2 got replaced under the warranty. Out of the ones that got replaced only 1 is still running.
  I've sinced switched back to WD. (I went to seagate back in the 200 GB days... my 200 GB seagate still runs).
  It's terrible. Seagate has cost me a large chunk of money and time for what (I thought) would be a bullet proof home NAS.
53. Re:Just in time. by 0100010001010011 · 2014-12-13 12:14 · Score: 1
  
  Seagate tanked my ZFS pools as well.
  It takes a special kind of terrible hard drive to trip up ZFS. I'm glad I didn't have any of them by themselves or even in a hardware RAID-1
54. Re:Just in time. by mysidia · 2014-12-13 12:15 · Score: 1
  
  Most companies choose b) as their core business is not in the design of their own server equipment and they don't have the resources to do a).
  This is somewhat of a false dilemma. There are very few companies in (a) who are willing to invest in resources to a truly thorough engineering job designing their own customized applications and servers for basic business needs, and there are plenty of companies who are in (b) which do not have the resources to design their own applications, let alone server equipment.
  There are nevertheless numerous companies in (b) with IT management and staff who would like to at various times treat random projects as if the company were in (a); so Dell didn't spec the equipment with SATA drives, but now that our X application has new servers for it, we'll take this old storage chassis and toss some consumer drives in it. The key message is THAT will probably be a lot less reliable than the storage chassis outfitted with the disk drives that the vendor qualified, and what's more, even if the storage chassis doesn't do a firmware check on the drives to try and reject 3rd party drives to protect the customer from themselves; it is still likely to be completely unsupported by Dell when it eventually fails catastrophically.
  And yet some of those companies have published individual drive data showing the exact reliability.
  Yes, and they have a specific measurement of reliability and performance that applies to their environment, but not to most of mine or that of most enterprises. A hard drive has a reliability issue if it causes the storage system it is used in to fail; even if the hard drive itself is performing perfectly. Component failure is not the only reliability issue, so are bugs and unexpected behaviors.
  In their environment; Backblaze would be concerned if a hard drive fails completely and stops reading or writing data with integrity while not idle, and a read/write test of the hard drive surface would fail, this would be how they define hard drive reliability: since they don't consider a hard drive to have failed if the entire disk can still be read or written.
  In my environment I am concerned if a hard drive does anything or fails to do anything that causes it to be ejected from the RAID subsystem, or falls below a performance threshold, or accumulates bit rot, or causes a failure in the firmware-based health monitoring on the drive or in the storage chassis.
  If a hard drive power cycles or resets itself just once unexpectedly and therefore shows up as "Ejected" or "Failed"; then I consider the drive to be unreliable, even though it would not meet Backblaze or Google definition of an unreliable or failed component, they would simply keep using it, as long as the drive continued to pass their tests.
55. Re:Just in time. by rrohbeck · 2014-12-13 12:15 · Score: 1
  
  You need N+2 redundancy for large drives. RAID1 or RAID5 will lead to data loss with good probability when a drive has failed, needs to be rebuilt and you get read errors on the remaining drives. The raw read error rate has been unchanged ar 10^-14 despite huge capacity growth.
  
  --
  thegodmovie.com - watch it
56. Re:Just in time. by Mashiki · 2014-12-13 12:25 · Score: 1
  
  Seagate discs for consumers have been pretty much bullet proof according to what I've been able to find.
  A lot of people, myself included remember when Seagate was so bad, so terrible and had such a poor reputation that it's stuck. That was ~12 years ago, hell it was 14-15 years ago that the entire company nearly went under because of their poor quality. They have gotten better, but even I remember factory sealed boxes(100 units) and every single one of them being dead out of the box.
  
  --
  Om, nomnomnom...
57. Re:Just in time. by Pentium100 · 2014-12-13 14:25 · Score: 1
  
  Cost. SSDs are still more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs. Yes, SSDs are faster, but maybe my 48TB backup server does not have to have microsecond seek times...
58. Re:Just in time. by silas_moeckel · 2014-12-13 14:43 · Score: 1
  
  But they do time limited error recovery is a basic firmware difference between consumer and enterprise drives.
  
  --
  No sir I dont like it.
59. Re:Just in time. by kimvette · 2014-12-13 15:56 · Score: 2
  
  There are differences in firmware though when you compare enterprise 7200rpm drives to desktop 7200rpm drives - error timeouts for example, and caching algorithms. You can tweak the drives to change the timeouts and recalibration times to make desktop drives behave better in arrays but they are _not_ otherwise identical. Also, although you can throw a SATA drive on a SAS controller (I have such a setup at home) throughput in an array is generally much better with SAS drives. At home I edit the timeouts on my personal drives, but I work in a data center and at work I would not take such a risk. If I screw up I risk down time for 300k people, and would put my job at risk. We buy enterprise drives across the board for servers.Throughput also isn't as critical on my home system. Running desktop drives on an array controller comes with certain risks, even if you know what you're doing. I have daily backups running at home to mitigate the risk.
  Run desktop drives in an enterprise array, go ahead, and you'll see drives regularly drop out of the array even though nothing is wrong with the drives. They paused to recalibrate or error correction exceeded a timeout (so reliability in an array CAN and WILL suffer). You can yank the drive and reinsert it then it will run just fine for a while, then another one might drop out. Not acceptable for the enterprise, plus desktop hard drives are not rated/tested for 100% duty cycle while enterprise drives are. They are very similar but not identical. If you need a server (a tertiary DNS server or whatever) with a single drive, a desktop drive may be fine, but do NOT run a desktop drive in an array in the enterprise. Sooner or later you WILL regret it when 2-3 drives drop out of an array and you get called in at 2:00am to rebuild the server. Or, you could tweak the timeouts, risk fucking it up and put your job at risk.
  And, on the higher end (such as you would install in an EMC or Netapp filer), have you seen any 10000 or 15000rpm desktop drives that compare to enterprise drives? I haven't.
  
  --
  The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
60. Re:Just in time. by Immerman · 2014-12-13 16:55 · Score: 1
  
  Well $#@!
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
61. Re: Just in time. by ShanghaiBill · 2014-12-13 18:39 · Score: 1
  
  they are much better than the standard SATA drives
  Can you back up your otherwise meaningless opinion with any actual data?
62. Re:Just in time. by 0111+1110 · 2014-12-13 20:09 · Score: 1
  
  Seagate discs for consumers have been pretty much bullet proof according to what I've been able to find.
  
  You don't work for Seagate do you, AC? That is a very careful and strange phrasing, "according to what I've been able to find". Almost as if you have never owned a Seagate drive before.
  I've had a very high percentage of Seagate drives fail on me, but after drives made the jump to 1 TB all manufacturers became unreliable. Well pretty much. Samsung was the most reliable based on my experience but they were bought by Seagate (for over a billion dollars).
  So, although I won't say Seagate makes or has made the least reliable drives, neither have they been particularly reliable at least since the time 1 TB drives were first introduced, but back then everyone else was pretty reliable too.
  
  --
  Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
63. Re:Just in time. by 0111+1110 · 2014-12-13 20:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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?
  So you bought the Seagate company line about that? Either you never owned one of those drives or you were one of the lucky few that was eventually helped by the firmware fix. Although why you would wait around for many months for the 'simple fix' when you could get a refurb replacement immediately I don't know.
  This is why a good PR firm is worth its weight in gold. It's okay to have a catastrophic production failure as long as you can retroactively convince the ones who didn't get burned that it was all just a big misunderstanding and was easily fixable with a simple firmware update. If only Hitachi had done so well with their infamous Deathstar drives.
  So you believed their propaganda. Go back to the Seagate forums from that time and I think you will see that the so called "firmware fix" only fixed a small percentage of the problems with those drives. There was another fix that helped some people (more than with the firmware update) that involved removing the pc board of the drive and hacking the hardware yourself. I believe a soldering iron may have been required in addition to a particular sort of cable. I can't remember exactly but it was not a fix that most people would be able to apply and often it didn't work anyway. I had a 1.5 TB 7200.11 that I had been keeping for ages to eventually buy the cable and apply the fix but by the time I got around to maybe doing it 1.5 TB was a very small drive and I didn't care so much about the lost data anymore.
  I had 6 7200.11s. Both 1 TB and 1.5 TB. Most failed in less than 6 months and then their replacements failed too. None of them work today. Not a single one. And your firmware fix could not be applied to any of my drives because it was not a firmware problem. At least with my drives. Yes a small percentage of 7200.11s did have firmware problems, but mostly it was a hardware unreliability problem. The click of death as well as drives that just refused to stay online for long. They'd just drop out. And all kinds of 'delayed write' errors etc. Those were not caused by poorly written firmware. They were 100% authentic hardware problems and Seagate shipped out countless new drives to replace the things on warranty which would seem like a rather expensive thing to do if all they had to do was update the firmware. But maybe you will say even seagate "didn't do any research" and was unaware of the "simple fix" you speak of.
  Despite your convenient assumption about lots of 7200.11 owners being unaware of the too little and far too late 'fix' of a firmware update that didn't even work for most owners, I suspect that most found out about it when their drives started failing. A simple google search for '7200.11' and 'clicking noise' would eventually have gotten hits for the so called 'fix'. Of course it took Seagate forever and a day to even come up with that. I don't think they have ever even admitted that there was any sort of problem with the drives and by the time they came up with your so called "simple fix" most owners had already been burned pretty badly by their decision to go with Seagate. Before my 7200.11 I had been a big fan of Seagate. Nearly all my drives were Seagates. Now I don't care what name is on the drive. They are all incredibly unreliable. I have better luck with their refurb replacements usually.
  
  --
  Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
64. Re: Just in time. by 0111+1110 · 2014-12-13 20:45 · Score: 1
  
  Google seagate drives bad firmware how to update
  Google "7200.11" & "firmware update" & "didn't work for me" & "my driver serial number" & "doesn't qualify"
  
  --
  Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
65. Re:Just in time. by 0111+1110 · 2014-12-13 21:00 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah the helium worries me. It's such a small molecule. You need a really good enclosure to keep those things contained. And it would be such a convenient excuse for all of these companies to have a sort of guaranteed post warranty failure that they could time about as well as an hourglass full of sand. They might last as long as the warranty period plus 6 months though. Probably their testing shows that is how long it *should* take for enough helium to leak out. As if these TB class drives don't have enough failure modes.
  
  --
  Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
66. Re:Just in time. by 0111+1110 · 2014-12-13 21:06 · Score: 1
  
  3.5" toshiba drives are pretty much WD with Toshiba's firmware and branding.
  I'd been wondering if Toshiba was really making them. I have 3 of those 7200 rpm 3 TB drives that were so cheap last year and one has just started becoming unreliable. So a 1 in 3 failure rate in about a year. That's probably pretty good by today's standards. Now I switched the Toshiba over to duty as a parity drive to protect the others. Good to know that they are actually WD.
  
  --
  Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
67. Re:Just in time. by dbIII · 2014-12-13 23:21 · Score: 1
  
  More QC tests. At least we all hope so for the extra price, and it used to happen at some point.
68. Re:Just in time. by dbIII · 2014-12-13 23:27 · Score: 1
  
  their Microsoft SQL Servers, their Exchange server
  That sort of disqualifies them from having a clue about having a half decent setup doesn't it :)
  OK, I'll admit that the enormous interconnected pile of applications that makes up MS Exchange has a calendar that people really like inside it. Pity about the email part. As for MS SQL - Enterprise?
69. Re: Just in time. by Loki_1929 · 2014-12-14 00:24 · Score: 1
  
  Your search - Google "7200.11" & "firmware update" & "didn't work for me" & "my driver serial ... - did not match any documents.
  Suggestions:
  Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
  Try different keywords.
  Try more general keywords.
  Try fewer keywords.
  
  --
  -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
70. Re:Just in time. by thegarbz · 2014-12-14 00:27 · Score: 1
  
  The key message is THAT will probably be a lot less reliable than the storage chassis outfitted with the disk drives that the vendor qualified, and what's more, even if the storage chassis doesn't do a firmware check on the drives to try and reject 3rd party drives to protect the customer from themselves; it is still likely to be completely unsupported by Dell when it eventually fails catastrophically.
  Well THAT would need to be backed up by some evidence because there's nothing so far to indicate to me that throwing 3 consumer drives into a NAS is less reliable than a "vendor qualified" solutions. But at the very end you're back to a question of support. This is not an (a) solution. This is a (b) solution. Just because someone gets to customise the final design somewhat does not make it any less of a turn-key approach with a vendor support agreement. That really only leaves me with my original point, the companies who are truly doing their own thing and don't care about vendor support (which I will happily admit is much better for enterprise grade drives), they chose consumer drives and have statistics to prove that it's worth their while.
  
  In their environment; Backblaze would be concerned if a hard drive fails completely and stops reading or writing data with integrity while not idle, and a read/write test of the hard drive surface would fail, this would be how they define hard drive reliability: since they don't consider a hard drive to have failed if the entire disk can still be read or written.
  Then you should spend more time reading their blog before you make such assumptions. Backblaze does a great job on not only reporting how drives generate errors, but also what bugs they have in the firmware, what issues they have with drives that spin up / spin down and which they have blacklisted models which didn't work for them. They also provide analysis on how much interaction a drive needs such as (to use their example) if a drive fails from a RAID without having died and needs to be re-inserted. They provide analysis of what they consider failed based on predictive diagnostics, not only drives that actually have failed (they only did that in their early years). Best of all their core systems actually runs on Dell Powervaults and EMC storage racks all provided by the vendor (with no other option) with enterprise grade drives. They give a rundown multiple times a year on how exactly each type of drive works, how much interaction they have with techs, and the problems they caused. Their conclusion is there was no difference between the enterprise grade drives and standard consumer drives, and HSGT drives dramatically outperformed the enterprise drives.
  
  In my environment I am concerned if a hard drive does anything or fails to do anything that causes it to be ejected from the RAID subsystem, or falls below a performance threshold, or accumulates bit rot, or causes a failure in the firmware-based health monitoring on the drive or in the storage chassis.
  If a hard drive power cycles or resets itself just once unexpectedly and therefore shows up as "Ejected" or "Failed"; then I consider the drive to be unreliable, even though it would not meet Backblaze or Google definition of an unreliable or failed component, they would simply keep using it, as long as the drive continued to pass their tests.
  Actually it does meet their definitions if you actually read their blogs in detail.
71. Re:Just in time. by leslie.satenstein · 2014-12-14 06:32 · Score: 1
  
  In two years should we expect to have very large SSD devices in the multi-terrabyte ranges? Should we foresee arrival on the scene of dual ported SSDs permitting two concurrent accesses? One access port for the current application, the second port for a second computer system. The latter to serve as a hot standby or as the system that does the backup from the active system. I would consider relying on 8 terrabyte drives when dual ported SSDs arrive on the scene.
72. Re:Just in time. by leslie.satenstein · 2014-12-14 06:38 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  I have this point to raise. Today it is sata 3 as the fastest connection to drives. In 5 years, will it still be sata 3? Will the connectors continue to be the same as today's standard? Reminder, we no longer support pata ribbon connections. That type of connection is deprecated.
73. Re:Just in time. by bhiestand · 2014-12-14 07:32 · Score: 1
  
  I'm still looking at low single digit failure rates for WD Enterprise drives. Maybe I've just been lucky? Quantity in the 200-500 range.
  
  --
  SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
74. Re:Just in time. by Kyusaku+Natsume · 2014-12-14 10:29 · Score: 1
  
  I was bitten by that damn thing. I have a shoebox full of hard drives. Aside one drive of 250 Gb from Western Digital that become damaged in several sectors after 7 years the only drives I have that are really, really dead are the ones from Seagate, full spectrum from 750 Gb to 3 Tb.
  
  --
  Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
75. Re:Just in time. by lightbounce · 2014-12-14 10:49 · Score: 1
  
  Unfortunately there is a common trend in the commercial world where a once-quality brand decides to cash in on it's reputation and sell low-quality crap
  No, every drive company goes through models that are worse than others. You look back 20 years and you'll find reports of bad WD, Seagate, IBM, and other drives. It doesn't mean the company is cashing in. Drives are extremely complex devices and the technology inside them is rapidly changing. That means one drive model may use new and radically different technology than a previous drive even though from the specs the capacity increased only a little. On top of that, different drive model families at the same company are done by different teams. Some teams are just better than others, and often upper management doesn't know there's a problem until a bad drive is released. There is a valid point to be made that at least Seagate should have tested these drives better before releasing them from manufacturing. The problem is that if they totally messed up, it's obvious from the beginning. Beyond that, things become dicier. Engineering samples are not made on the same production lines as released drives. A failure during manufacturing that wasn't present during development may not show up until a lot of drives are made. Companies do testing on manufactured models, but there's still pressure to push the drives out. If they cut corners on testing at this point, a bad model still gets released to the public. But when it happens it's seldom deliberate. When I worked at a drive company I saw releases that were delayed by months when it became obvious there was a late-stage problem.
76. Re: Just in time. by BoogieChile · 2014-12-14 14:55 · Score: 1
  
  Conversely, "7200.11 firmware update didn't work for me my driver serial number doesn't qualify" gives me 3,220 results. How 'bout that?
77. Re:Just in time. by metaforest · 2014-12-15 12:41 · Score: 1
  
  Seizegate -- from the late 80's and early 90's round of SCSI and PIDE drives that suffered from early spindle bearing failure and sticktion problems.
  Sleazegate -- ever since... for various sleazy tricks like selling 3 year warranty drives into channels where the case manufacturer would only warranty the drives for 1 year. Bad firmware... poor customer service on warrantee issues, PR games...
  I simply will not buy prefabbed external drives anymore. I buy an empty case and stick a 'who has the best quality record this year aside from Seagate' drive in the case.
Re:WD, SG unreliable..but by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 04:58 · Score: 1

do you bang your seagate drives as soon as you get them before installing? I've only had two abysmal Seagates - a 800mb drive in 1995 and the dreaded 750gb 7200.11
Re:Helium and the density of the disc by Mostly+a+lurker · 2014-12-13 05:01 · Score: 2

From the summary:

HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive .
(emphasis mine)
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 05:05 · Score: 1

So...it's magic?
Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate sucks by SensitiveMale · 2014-12-13 05:08 · Score: 5, Funny

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.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 05:09 · Score: 3, Funny

> So...it's magic?
Could be. Or, it could be sufficiently advanced technology-- it's hard to tell.
Re:Helium and the density of the disc by Sarten-X · 2014-12-13 05:10 · Score: 4, Informative

"Reduce friction" is pretty close, actually.
The platters spinning around causes a lot of air to move around, as well. If that air is helium, the effects of the turbulence are less forceful, so moving parts don't need as much buffer space between them.
The individual platters don't change density, but since they can be packed closer together without aerodynamic damage, there can be more platters in a single unit.

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You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by Chas · 2014-12-13 05:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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How many days will it take . . . by PeeAitchPee · 2014-12-13 05:22 · Score: 1

. . . 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.
1. Re:How many days will it take . . . by 7213 · 2014-12-13 06:13 · Score: 1
  
  That's why the redundancy design of disk arrays like IBM's XIV (and others) are so necessary with large SATA drives.
  Rebuilding a single 8TB drive to another single 8TB drive in a raid array is dangerously slow (odds of a secondary failure are high). It will also have a long negative impact on array performance.
  But if your rebuilding redundancy from a failed 8TB drive across a system containing say 72 of these drives with (at least) triple redundancy of any given extent, you'll be just fine and struggle to notice a performance hit.
  Basically, large SATA drives don't belong in classic RAID designs. You want to massively distribute IO & redundancy to overcome the per disk bandwidth limitations.
2. Re:How many days will it take . . . by jedidiah · 2014-12-13 08:58 · Score: 1
  
  You're missing some zeroes in there somewhere.
  It does take a long time to "rebuild" after a failure of a large drive. There's no denying that. It's silly to even try.
  What I would despute is the idea that one of the other drives will magically fail during the rebuild if it wasn't already showing signs of dying.
  Due to Seagate's current quality levels, I have some personal firsthand experience with rebuilding large RAID arrays.
  It's not quite as scary as the fearmongers would have you believe.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I guess not. by edibobb · 2014-12-13 05:23 · Score: 1

I've just had two 5tb Seagates fail. Out of two.
Re:WD, SG unreliable..but by Kohath · 2014-12-13 05:23 · Score: 3, Informative

There are only 3 hard drive makers left. Hitachi is not one of them.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by Pieroxy · 2014-12-13 05:24 · Score: 1

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!
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by jones_supa · 2014-12-13 05:25 · Score: 1

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!
Archive? by dfn5 · 2014-12-13 05:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Archive? by sshir · 2014-12-13 05:37 · Score: 1
  
  My guess, is that due to the way they write data onto platter, this drive is pretty much useless for random writes (even more so than a regular hard drive). It's good only for huge sequential writes i.e. just bulk storage. Knowing this, they, allegedly, added some long term reliability features and slapped "archival" moniker.
2. Re:Archive? by Phs2501 · 2014-12-13 05:38 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  From this article here it appears that shingled hard drives are not completely random-access for writes. They will probably need some sort of flash-like translation layer to support normal file systems. (Or Seagate has provided that layer internally like SSDs do, in which case as a first-generation device it is probably buggy and will lose your data...)
3. Re:Archive? by citizenr · 2014-12-13 05:48 · Score: 1
  
  Yep, I remember watching some Linux conference about upcoming hot new SMR tech (2 years ago?), and I think they said those drives are read-modify-write on every write, that is the price you have to pay for huge capacities.
  They are targeting long term storage, and will be useless for desktop/server use.
  
  --
  Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
4. Re:Archive? by mc6809e · 2014-12-13 05:52 · Score: 1
  
  It looks to me like these drives write a large amount of data as a spiral of multiple tracks so that the platter must rotate many times to complete the write.
  That's fine for streaming data sequentially to the disk for long term storage.
  Random writes must be dog-slow, though.
5. Re:Archive? by sshir · 2014-12-13 05:58 · Score: 2
  
  Actually, as somebody pointed out, if you put any modern copy-on-write file system (xfs, btrfs etc.) on that puppy, SMR disk will work just like any other hard drive.
6. Re:Archive? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 06:12 · Score: 1
  
  That's the "shingle" part of he drive. Much like replacing a single shingle in your house is very expensive, so it writing a single sector on the drive. Because the drive writes blocks on top of one another, if you wanted to change a single sector, you'll need to re-write a large segment of sectors at the same time, the amount depending on how large of a segment of "shingles" they put on top of one another.
7. Re:Archive? by Vairon · 2014-12-13 06:54 · Score: 1
  
  The average read/write seek time of this drive is 12ms. That seems quite usable to me for multiple use cases.
  reference: http://www.seagate.com/www-con...
8. Re:Archive? by butlerm · 2014-12-13 07:35 · Score: 2
  
  XFS is not a copy on write filesystem, by the way. ZFS and BTRFS should work definitely work better, but they might need some internal tweaks to make the best use of it.
9. Re:Archive? by sshir · 2014-12-13 08:24 · Score: 1
  
  Oups. Yes, I meant ZFS.
10. Re:Archive? by lightbounce · 2014-12-14 11:10 · Score: 1
  
  Seek time is not the same thing as the time needed to actually read or write data. It's just the time needed to get the head to the track where the data resides. Once the head is there, the drive still has to read or write the data.
  With these SMR drives, on writes there's the read-modify-write penalty of having to rewrite entire tracks, and this is not reflected in the seek times.
11. Re:Archive? by lightbounce · 2014-12-14 11:30 · Score: 1
  
  In the first generation of SMR drives there was no support for sector remapping and garbage collection in either the OS or the drives. Random write performance suffered a great deal as a result.
  But the next generation of SMR drives will have an address translation layer similar SSDs which supports sector remapping and garbage collection. Much of the firmware will be adapted from what's in SSDs, but yeah, I'd be suspicious of first generation address translation firmware in SMR HDDs even though both WD and Seagate have worked on SSD firmware before and have experts in the technology.
  The next generation of SMR drives will also have areas of non-SMR (lower density) tracks to support random writes without the read-modify-write penalty. A new ATA and SCSI command set is being worked out where the host can tell the drive which addresses will likely contain random write/read data, which will likely have sequential write/read data, etc. This will require cooperation from both the host and the drive to implement but should reduce the random write SMR penalty.
Fun times by sshir · 2014-12-13 05:28 · Score: 2

It makes 6TB WD Green way overpriced. Will be fun to watch price action on newegg.
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)
1. Re: Fun times by 0123456 · 2014-12-13 06:55 · Score: 1
  
  I've never seen as many bad drives as the 3TB WD Greens, but about 80% of mine are still working fine, and I only had to replace one early. The oldest now has nearly 30,000 power-on hours.
2. Re: Fun times by Immerman · 2014-12-13 07:59 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps the way most mail-in rebate deals make money - most people end up being too lazy to actually send in the rebate form. Or don't have exactly the right paperwork to qualify: We're sorry - the packing/price list which clearly says RECEIPT at the top does not qualify as a receipt for the purposes of claiming this rebate. Oh, and by the way the rebate-claiming window is now closed, so don't even bother trying to get a "real" receipt from the seller to try again.
  And it's no doubt helped that warranty periods have been falling for years: Of all the drives I've had from the days when the standard warranty period was five years, only two have ever had issues before being abandoned as too small to be useful, and the ones still in use are still going strong a decade later. Now it seems like the goal is only to make the drives last at least one day longer than the warranty - after which any repairs become an additional profit center.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
3. Re: Fun times by WaffleMonster · 2014-12-13 08:27 · Score: 1
  
  I've never seen as many bad drives as the 3TB WD Greens, but about 80% of mine are still working fine, and I only had to replace one early. The oldest now has nearly 30,000 power-on hours.
  The 2 year warranty should be enough of a warning to all to stay far away from "green" variants.
  What can one expect to happen when drives are constantly speeding up, slowing down and parking heads?
  What's even worse there is no meaningful difference in power consumption between black and green drives. If you want to save power get a 2.5" drive... any environmental impact is by far offset by reduced lifespan and energy cost of production.
4. Re: Fun times by 0123456 · 2014-12-13 10:51 · Score: 1
  
  The 2 year warranty should be enough of a warning to all to stay far away from "green" variants.
  I have smaller Green drives that have been running 24/7 for five or six years with no user-visible problems. A couple of them are reporting 1 or 2 bad sectors, but that's it. None of the smaller Green drives have yet failed, with up to 45,000 power-on hours. But maybe I just got unlucky with the 3TB version.
  
  What can one expect to happen when drives are constantly speeding up, slowing down and parking heads?
  They don't constantly speed up and slow down, and I disabled the head parking.
  
  What's even worse there is no meaningful difference in power consumption between black and green drives.
  There's a few watts if you have a bunch of them in a RAID. And there's a significant difference in price, or was when I last bought some.
5. Re: Fun times by cheesybagel · 2014-12-13 10:54 · Score: 1
  
  The thing is the newest high density hard disk technologies have lower reliability regardless of which particular supplier you choose even if some are worse than others. I particularly hate Seagate.
Re:Fill in the blank by iamacat · 2014-12-13 05:29 · Score: 1

Raw 4K video footage, easily.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 05:29 · Score: 1

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.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by iggymanz · 2014-12-13 05:54 · Score: 3, Funny

fucking helium, how does it work
Yay! by TheDarkener · 2014-12-13 05:56 · Score: 1

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.
1. Re:Yay! by hairyfeet · 2014-12-13 10:28 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah my exp in the shop puts Seagate consumer right at the bottom. If the rumor is true you can blame Maxtor because when Seagate bought Maxtor instead of bringing Maxtor up to Seagate quality it brought Seagate down to Maxtor levels of shitty.
  Sorry that I can't remember where in the hell the thread was but on one of my many rants about dealing with shitty Seagate on one of the forums (may have been Tom's, can't remember) someone that claimed to be a former engineer at Seagate chimed in and what he said? Sounded right and explained what I was/am seeing with newer Seagate drives. He said when they bought Maxtor they got the uber cheap to make Maxtor ARM controllers and started slapping them on their drives...but the catch was Maxtor was using them on slow speed drives because the chips were extra shitty and would fuck up and start throwing off the tracking cause once hot these chips could return 1+1 = anything from 1 to 4, but their controllers were soo much cheaper than Seagate controllers the suits made them keep 'em.
  Anyway he said this is why you'll have Seagate drives fail in bunches while a lucky few will have the same drive and never have a problem, its because when they run low of shitty Maxtor controllers a few consumer drives will end up getting the "enterprise" controllers which is the original Seagate ARM chips. I know I've had to tell customers that any Seagate over 640Gb is a crap shoot which is why the Seagate drives are always on sale, they are so hit and miss it ain't funny.
  IMHO the best to worst as far as quality is Samsung (especially the Ecogreen, built like a tank it is), Toshiba, Hitachi, WD, and Seagate.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
2. Re:Yay! by TheDarkener · 2014-12-13 12:08 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks for replying, that info is very interesting indeed. Sounds about right I guess, *something* went very wrong with Seagate a while back. I guess I don't have as much experience with higher quality drives like Samsung, Toshiba and Hitachi, but I've sworn by WD for so many years (and don't remember the last time I saw a failed drive from them) that's pretty much all I buy.
  
  --
  It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
3. Re:Yay! by hawk · 2014-12-14 03:47 · Score: 1
  
  >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've got to admire a firmware that can report
  
  Error 215: Struck with sledge hammer.
  
  hawk
Re:WD, SG unreliable..but by fostware · 2014-12-13 06:01 · Score: 3, Informative

Not entirely correct:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
They are owned by WD, but they are still a manufacturer in their own right. For the moment.

--
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Can I buy one? by jtownatpunk.net · 2014-12-13 06:01 · Score: 1

Or is it like the current 8 and 10tb drives that only seem to exist at the fantastipotamus store?
May depend on the drive. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 06:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:May depend on the drive. by PRMan · 2014-12-13 08:53 · Score: 1
  
  Is that why mine is showing no SMART errors even though it's completely failing? I was wondering.
  
  --
  Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
2. Re:May depend on the drive. by lightbounce · 2014-12-14 10:31 · Score: 1
  
  Since it had been in an enclosure it hadn't supported SMART access to the drive.
  Drives in USB enclosures do support SMART data reporting using a protocol called SAT which embeds ATA commands inside of SCSI commands over the USB interface, it's just that a lot of system software doesn't support that. I have one of these drives, and I agree they're complete crap (mine died after a year). But the SMART data does say the drive is very bad.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by Camel+Pilot · 2014-12-13 06:03 · Score: 1

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.
Shingled encoding performance penalties by JoeyRox · 2014-12-13 06:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Shingled encoding performance penalties by rtaylor · 2014-12-13 06:33 · Score: 1
  
  It's handy that modern filesystems are mostly copy-on-write anyway.
  
  --
  Rod Taylor
2. Re:Shingled encoding performance penalties by JoeyRox · 2014-12-13 07:54 · Score: 1
  
  But the majority of users aren't running OS's that have filesystems with copy-on-write support, including Windows 7 and below with NTFS.
3. Re:Shingled encoding performance penalties by AbRASiON · 2014-12-13 19:14 · Score: 1
  
  I would suspect most disks used in this size range would be without much I/O, infact I'd go as far as to say (for me personally) fuck regular disks for high I/O. I'm still flabberghasted they sell 7200rpm HDD's for the desktop
  If you want performance, just buy an SSD or SSHD.
  I'd be happy with about 6 of these in my FreeNAS machine, I'm sure 6 combined would still turn over a decent data rate.
sequential + idle time for garbage collection by raymorris · 2014-12-13 06:08 · Score: 1

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.
1. Re:sequential + idle time for garbage collection by lightbounce · 2014-12-14 11:19 · Score: 1
  
  Others replied mentioning it's because PMR is mostly useful for sequential writes, not random.
  I'm sure you meant SMR, not PMR. PMR doesn't affect read or write times one way or another. But yes, SMR works a lot better for sequential writes than for random writes.
  In the first generation of SMR, no garbage collection or sector remapping was done. The shingled tracks were separated into "bands" of a few tracks, and when a random write was done all the tracks in the band past that point had to be rewritten. These drives just bite the bullet on random write performance. Sector remapping and garbage collection are scheduled to be done in the next generation of SMR drives, I don't know if they're out yet.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by Voyager529 · 2014-12-13 06:10 · Score: 1

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.
Re:Fill in the blank by VanessaE · 2014-12-13 06:19 · Score: 1

Backups. Lots and lots of backups. Too bad I *just* bought a 2 TB disk for that purpose a few days ago.
I see an addition to my zpool in the future. by dhickman · 2014-12-13 06:22 · Score: 1

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!
1. Re:I see an addition to my zpool in the future. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  If you want to be realistic go to Radio Shack.
I see an addition to my zpool in the future. by dhickman · 2014-12-13 06:25 · Score: 1

Crap, I need more coffee, $1500. Well the $259 a drive is msrp, so $1200 for six drives is probably accurate.
Re:density ? by fisted · 2014-12-13 06:47 · Score: 1

Of course it's not, this is capacity.

--
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Re:WD, SG unreliable..but by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 06:57 · Score: 1

Hitachi engineered all of the current generation drives that are being sold - and the teams/mfg's that built them carried over with the sale. All the reasons Hitachi was superior still exist. 5 years from now they'll probably be just as bad as all of WD's other drives.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by nbritton · 2014-12-13 08:02 · Score: 1

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.
Wouldn't it be better to just create a vacuum inside the drive? The vapor pressure of aluminum at 10^-10 torr is 600 C.
Not the only difference. by Chirs · 2014-12-13 08:05 · Score: 1

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.
1. Re:Not the only difference. by lightbounce · 2014-12-14 11:01 · Score: 1
  
  I have worked at both drive companies and large storage vendors and can back up everything you say. Among other things, drives for storage arrays often have larger RAM caches and have special vibration sensors because large arrays of drives produce unique vibrations.
  And yes, large customers often get special attention from drive companies. They get samples long before everybody else. While part of it is to keep large customers happy, it's also because these customers spend the time and money on doing a lot of testing, which as you say includes environmental as well as reliability and performance. Large customers have staff experts in drive testing and can often pinpoint exactly what caused a problem, something retail consumers can seldom do. For these reasons it's worth it for drive companies to give large customers special treatment.
Re:Fill in the blank by Truekaiser · 2014-12-13 08:06 · Score: 1

Steam games, will last about a month or so before i have to ad another. :P
Seriously modern games are nearing 100GB.
Re:WD, SG unreliable..but by aaaaaaargh! · 2014-12-13 08:49 · Score: 1

I've never had any problems with WD, but fully agree about Seagate drives. They must have a built-in self-destruction device.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 09:02 · Score: 2, Informative

The disk heads use lift generated by the air, or gas, in the drive to float above the platter. Under vacuum, the heads would scrape against the platters and would shortly render the drives unusable.
never had a problem with Seagate, but WD sucks. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-13 09:03 · Score: 1

WD sucks!!
Re:Fill in the blank by jedidiah · 2014-12-13 09:03 · Score: 1

...all of the multimedia I have collected since acquiring my first PC clone.
This includes any CD, DVD, or BD that I buy.
All of the convenience of streaming media but none of the downsizes like network outages or license revokation or just plain lack of availability.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
these are WORM drives by dltaylor · 2014-12-13 09:16 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:these are WORM drives by Tough+Love · 2014-12-13 10:09 · Score: 1
  
  Mod up. The one clueful post to the article.
  
  --
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
2. Re:these are WORM drives by WuphonsReach · 2014-12-13 21:10 · Score: 1
  
  Modern versions of Linux - you don't need "noatime" for ext4. The "defaults" uses "relatime" by default, which does a fake atime and doesn't break applications that are looking for atime.
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
3. Re:these are WORM drives by ckedge · 2014-12-14 04:28 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe they'll do something neat like putting in one non-shingle platter.... (yeah yeah, cylinders, but still...) Or maybe everyone will do something really neat at the driver/OS level like putting one regular drive or one SSD in the array of shingle drives, and let zfs handle the optimization.
  Personally, a 10TB drive would be perfect for many of us for the collections of .... stuff .... we have, that is write once and never write ever again, or if we do we don't really care about write speed. Any random read/write loads I have goes onto an SSD.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by Chas · 2014-12-13 10:36 · Score: 1

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.
Wouldn't it be better to just create a vacuum inside the drive? The vapor pressure of aluminum at 10^-10 torr is 600 C.
No. Because a vacuum would actually insulate the components. As there's nothing for heat to disperse through EXCEPT other components.

--

Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:More anecdotes by cheesybagel · 2014-12-13 11:01 · Score: 1

Seagate went in to the junkpile ever since they bought Maxtor.
Re:More anecdotes by Grishnakh · 2014-12-13 11:16 · Score: 1

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
That's funny; back around 1990 I knew some people who ran a huge BBS (a whopping 2GB online!!), and they absolutely hated Seagates.
It seems like many of these companies go through phases.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by TeknoHog · 2014-12-13 11:39 · Score: 1

There's always cooling by radiation, though it might not be enough with such shiny surfaces.

--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by thegarbz · 2014-12-13 11:40 · Score: 1

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.
Why not make 5 1/4" hard drives again? by technosaurus · 2014-12-13 12:47 · Score: 1

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?)
WD problem by whoever57 · 2014-12-13 13:16 · Score: 1

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!
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by Myen · 2014-12-13 15:44 · Score: 1

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...
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by Myen · 2014-12-13 16:03 · Score: 1

Ah, down thread pointed at the fact that HGST was sold to a mix of WD and Toshiba. Bah. And no edit button.
Recent time. by dbIII · 2014-12-13 23:16 · Score: 1

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.
Re: Helium and the density of the disc by dbIII · 2014-12-13 23:36 · Score: 1

Since it's to the 4th power radiation moves buggerall heat unless there's a large temperature difference.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by dbIII · 2014-12-13 23:37 · Score: 1

Then someone will lament how IBM no longer makes drives. Then the deskstar stories will start.
The deskstar was fine apart from that exhaust port problem.
Re:Ok, let's hear all the stories how Seagate suck by hawk · 2014-12-14 03:26 · Score: 1

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