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6 Terabyte Hard Drive Round-Up: WD Red, WD Green and Seagate Enterprise 6TB
MojoKid writes The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.
Is anyone with significant amounts of data not caching their frequently accessed data on SSD? Rotational is still about 8x cheaper than SSD these days, but the days of rotational speed for cold data are numbered. Storage is easily abstracted so it's not a legacy concern. A lot of shops I know have already invested in a complete switchover to full-SSD (we're talking racks of SSD) with tape backup.
Even my home file server uses two tiny second gen 64gb SSDs for read/write caching for ~20TB of data. I just buy the cheapest, biggest rotational drive whenever I start running out of room. When the price on those new Seagate 8TB drives (currently $230) drops to under $150 I will probably start swapping out my oldest 2TB drives to avoid having to upgrade the case in this decade.
moox. for a new generation.
If you can't figure out what he meant from the context then I think you might want to re-evaluate who the worthless fuck is.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
There were no mentions of reliability metrics
...which is the only reason I'd care to read such an article. I have a Synology 4-bay NAS filled with drives for home stuff. Although it's not critical data and I have the most important folders backed up to Amazon Glacier, several TB of data is tied up in rips of our CD and DVD collection. While I could re-rip everything, the first effort took weeks and I'd strongly prefer not to have to again.
So for my specific application, I don't care a lot about raw performance because everything's going through a 1Gb switch anyway. However, this thing runs 24/7 and I'd like a reasonably warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not likely to have two drives fail simultaneously. NAS drives (I've bought WD Red most recently) are specced for exactly that environment and have things like anti-vibration mechanisms to make them less likely to spontaneously explode. For the exact opposite, check out the Seagate Barracuda Data Sheet. Scroll down to where they're rated for 2,400 power-on hours. In other words, they're built to survive a whopping 3 months in a NAS.
If you're buying something to stick in your gaming computer, read the performance specs. If you actually care about the data you're writing, the reliability numbers are way more interesting.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've seen in general, three lines of HDDs. Basic desktop/laptop drives, premium desktop/laptop, and enterprise grade drives which are designed to all wind up at the same firmware level to minimize issues when in RAID controllers.
However, a "NAS" hard drive? Is this something a step down from enterprise drives, but designed for a device like a Drobo, or some other solution that really doesn't care about background drives, uses RAID 5 or 6, and expects drives to blow out over time?
Are the Red drives designed to be paired or run in RAID arrays specifically, as opposed to the Green line that is made for power savings?
I always thought that the NAS/RAID drives allowed Time Limited Error Recovery to be specified, which would prevent RAID controllers from interpreting a long error recovery interval as a drive timeout and erroring out that drive and removing it from the array. The NAS and Enterprise drives do allow this option to be set.
IMHO serious archives go on tape. However you have to be very serious about it since a couple of hard drives is a lot cheaper than an LTO6 drive and a few tapes - tape doesn't win until you hit large volumes and long timescales.
A ten year old tape you pull out of a box is going to work apart from a tiny fraction of a percentage of the time. A drive - not so likely since the spindle lubricant doesn't last forever and polished surfaces stick via diffusion. A twenty year old tape should have been transcribed years ago but is going to work unless it has got hot or damp in storage. A thirty year old tape is probably brittle and needs to be read with care, but I've sent a couple of dozen off to be transcribed. It was seismic data so file formats that could handle a few bits missing here or there, and errors outside the file headers have little impact due to "stacking" multiple datasets that overlap. However those reels from the early 1980s and late 1970s preserved effectively all the data put on them despite less than ideal storage (a shed in a humid subtropical climate).
Hard drives are not designed to last for a decade in a box. A decade powered up is ironicly likely to result in less dead drives than powered off on a shelf. Tapes don't have to deal with high speeds and are instead designed to last. They die from the substrate getting brittle over decades, the oxide peeling off the tape over decades and magnetised zones on one section of tape magnetising an area on the next loop of tape, once again over decades.
All that said, if you only have 6TB or so to keep, and you don't want to go for a pile of Blueray disks, getting a couple of drives every few years (3? 5? 7?) is a lot more sane than mucking about with tapes.