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Seagate Says 16TB Hard Drive To Hit Market Within 18 Months (techspot.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you haven't shopped around for hard drives in a while, you may be surprised at what's out there. The largest 3.5-inch desktop hard drives currently available from Seagate, for example, offer a whopping 10TB of capacity for less than $500. In the event that 10TB isn't quite enough storage and a multi-drive setup isn't ideal, you'll be happy to hear that Seagate over the next 18 months plans to ship 14TB and 16TB drives. A 12TB HDD based on helium technology is currently undergoing testing and according to CEO Stephen Luczo, initial feedback is positive. Most enthusiasts and even some PC manufacturers are now using solid state drives as their primary drive due to the fact that they're much faster and more power-efficient. What's more, because they have no moving parts, SSDs generate no noise and are much more durable.

232 comments

  1. Great! by TWX · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can lose even more data when a single disk crashes!

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      RAID.... Mirror that beast...

    2. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Buy 2 and mirror?

    3. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There is this magical thing called backups.

      You should look into those.

    4. Re:Great! by sims+2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How long will it take to rebuild a raid array with discs that size? Even with only raid 1 I'd think the times would be horrendous.

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    5. Re:Great! by sims+2 · · Score: 3, Funny

      disks*

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    6. Re:Great! by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 1

      Put all your eggs in one basket... and then watch (ie backup or mirror) the basket very carefully.

    7. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Higher data density typically results in greater transfer speeds.

    8. Re:Great! by freak0fnature · · Score: 1

      It took me about 24 hrs to fill one of their 8TB drives...so easily 2 days to fill a 16TB.

    9. Re: Great! by saloomy · · Score: 1

      Install ZFS on your Linux box. It rebuilds only the used potion in a drive. I'm sure there are Windows options available too, but I'm familiar with them. Oh, and always use double parity. Single parity puts your data at risk during rebuilds because of the increased workload during repair.

    10. Re:Great! by nwf · · Score: 1

      I'd assume it would fill in less than 2x time, since it's likely able to write faster given it's putting the data in a smaller physical space. Likely more tracks, so it should likely increase, but maybe 50%?

      --
      I don't know, but it works for me.
    11. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Install ZFS on your Linux box. It rebuilds only the used potion in a drive.

      Why not buy a smaller cheaper drive that's slightly larger than the used portion, instead of a higher capacity drive that has terabytes of unused space?

      Think about your suggestion a bit more. In the old days before SSDs it could make sense to buy a larger drive and only use a small portion of it for better seek times but nowadays?

    12. Re: Great! by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Informative

      For these large drives you really want something like snap raid for their use cases. Large media stores backups and other bulky and rarely changing datasets are perfect for it. Not to mention that since data on any single drive is coherent you can loose more than parity can correct and still only lose the files with errors blocks or the content of that one drive were it to completely fail.

      Right now using 8tb drives as it's the best price per gb.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
    13. Re:Great! by freak0fnature · · Score: 2

      True, the Barracuda Pro 10TB drive is about 80MB/s faster than the 8TB archive drive, so likely it would also take roughly 24 hours to fill.

    14. Re:Great! by ctilsie242 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      On SATA? Days to weeks would be my guess. With drives this size, RAID-6 isn't even enough. It really needs triple parity, especially with drive arrays that contain 8-10 drives, or with 12+, quad parity.

      I'd like to see drive makers focus on reliability. Aerial density is quite high these days. Why not build in two different drive heads that can work in an active/active configuration (some drives about a decade ago had this ability), more ECC, bit-rot resistance, and more resistance to shock and vibration, as well as the other causes of data loss. Perhaps larger bad sector replacement tables as well.

      Maybe even go for speciality drives. One drive type would be dedicated to long term archive storage (perhaps as a WORM format with UDF as a filesystem). Another drive type would improve on the SSHD concept, with 256-512GB of SSD, and a good amount of HDD, so shingled writes are less of a performance bottleneck. Still another drive type would have 2-4 different heads, SSD, and be designed for fast, sequential I/O.

      Maybe add a new form factor. For example, a drive form factor that has a shock-resistant case so the drives can be used in lieu of a LTO tape, and supports hardware AES encryption, as well as a command to check the entire volume for bit rot and fix it, or at least tell that the volume has bad data on it.

    15. Re: Great! by subk · · Score: 1

      FTFY: Install ZFS on your FreeBSD box.

      --
      Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
    16. Re: Great! by TWX · · Score: 2

      Single parity can also lead to rebuild failures if there are undetected faults on the remaining disk(s). That's one of the principle problems with storage now as the amount of disk usage has grown so much. The chances of any given failure is much greater, and the steps taken to mitigate such failures in advance are subjected to their own potential for some kinds of failure too. It inevitably becomes expensive and labor-intensive to continue to monitor for these kinds of faults and to correct them.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    17. Re:Great! by TWX · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      Point me to a local backup solution that can handle 16TB in a single go. Point me to a cloud backup solution that can handle 16TB over entry-level cablemodem bandwidth.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    18. Re:Great! by freak0fnature · · Score: 1

      fill a 16TB that is

    19. Re:Great! by Monkey · · Score: 0

      If you're that worried about your pirated movie collection, you should probably buy two of these.

    20. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      RAID.... Mirror that beast...

      Fail. Literally.

      RAID is not a backup.

      Read and learn something.

    21. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FTFY: Install your Windows / FreeBSD VMs under Virtualbox under Solaris 11...

    22. Re:Great! by Guybrush_T · · Score: 1

      If you read the original comment, it was "Now I can lose even more data when a single disk crashes", in which case RAID is a perfectly valid answer.

      Read and stop your nonsense.

    23. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just make sure the basket wasn't made by Seagate if you don't want to count on eggs falling out of it within 18 months.

    24. Re:Great! by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      The 10TB drives benchmark at around 240 MB/s on their outer track. Figure a 16 TB drive with 1.6x the areal density will be about 25% faster, or 300 MB/s. That's the speed of the outer track. The inner track is half that, or 150 MB/s. And the circumference is proportional to the radius, so the integral between these two speeds (taking into account more data being stored on outer tracks) yields an average speed 1/3 of the way from 300 to 150 MB/s, or 250 MB/s.

      So a straight sector-by-sector (sequential) copy of 16 TB drive to another 16 TB drive would take 16000 GB / 250 MB/s = 64000 seconds, or just under 18 hours.

    25. Re:Great! by jwhyche · · Score: 0

      Pirate movie collection? Try porn collection.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    26. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What are you waiting to launch your startup? Or alternatively if you're unwilling, shut up and suck it.

    27. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Backups have no ROI...

    28. Re:Great! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'd like to see drive makers focus on reliability.

      They do. HDD reliability has been going up for a long time. Some brands and models are much more reliable than others. Google, Backblaze, and others have published longitudinal data about that. The MTBF printed on the packaging means absolutely nothing. If you care about reliability, then check reliability data, and stick to the "one-back" rule and don't buy bleeding edge hardware.

      Why not build in two different drive heads that can work in an active/active configuration

      Because customers that need high speed non-consecutive I/O have mostly moved to SSD.

      The only reason to use HDDs is because they are cheap. So anything that adds to the cost, just pushes more customers to SSDs.

    29. Re: Great! by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Indeed, and sometimes you can't even correct the errors. The raid doesn't know anything about higher level items like file systems, so restoring a dump won't save you. It has to be repaired at raid level, which often means destroying and recreating the entire RAID.

      With the amount of data today, RAID 6 or three-way RAID 1 is almost a must. With 16 TB disks, that means a minimum of 32 TB spent just on parity or copies. I'd much rather have more and smaller drives, even if that means extra enclosures.

    30. Re: Great! by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      I use btrfs. So long as you avoid RAID5-a-like mode it works very nicely. I wish RAID5 were fixed though.

    31. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With the 2 Terabyte desktop 5.25" drives, it took a whole night to transfer 500GBytes - i was backing up all my application and Linux distro downloads.

    32. Re:Great! by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Point me to a local backup solution that can handle 16TB in a single go.

      tar, dump and xfsdump all handle 16TB sizes in a single go. No special software needed.

      What kind of medium?
      You need three 6 TB tapes, or another 16 TB drive.
      With six tapes or two HDDs, you can do tower-of-hanoi incremental backups for quite a while, avoiding having to do full backups, without the restore time growing out of bounds.
      With nine tapes or three HDDs, you can also have redundancy against backup media failures.

    33. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It took me about 24 hrs to fill one of their 8TB drives...so easily 2 days to fill a 16TB.

      You must watch a lot of porn!

    34. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      on 16T, whaddya amateur, or something?

    35. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hehe right. But most of those specialty products exist and consumers can't afford them. Talking about lto tape drive replacement are talking about enterprise and they don't need that weird shit.

      That's why they off what they offer and don't offer what they don't. Nothing new here for decades on Hhds. Just capacity and a little more speed. At least they are advancing more than the CPU market.

      And new tech is hard to come by now. Why is that?

    36. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Give is 5.25 8tb SSD (Samsung of course). That would be nice. And no, stop saying bla bla don't use high performance disk for storage. Stop being poor.

    37. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Speaking of nonsense, that's like saying since a car can drive on only three wheels, there's no reason to get tires that won't go flat in 6 months. This is Seagate we're talking about.

    38. Re:Great! by h4ck7h3p14n37 · · Score: 1

      How safe is it to run the drive 100% busy for an extended time period? I've always heard that's a bad idea with consumer drives; they just aren't built to withstand the workload.

    39. Re:Great! by TWX · · Score: 1

      And three 6TB tapes and the drive that can use them are neither inexpensive no "a single go".

      My point is, the average PC user has no simple way to back up this data. I am well enough versed with tar that I could do what you say, but I still have to have this tape drive and I still have to change tapes. One of the biggest reasons to avoid backing up to a second identical disk in the same computer is vulnerability of that disk to site problems that take out the computer, to theft (as it's in the PC itself or right next to it to be stolen), or the hard disk as a device with moving parts could suffer mechanical failure just as readily as the original disk inside of the computer, presumably being left in one place.

      Commercial/industrial backup solutions are complex. I've seen problems with conventional EMC and Isilon not working properly or where someone has a significant component of their job duties dedicated to managing the backups and dealing with failed disk arrays in the server room. Obviously the home user is not going to work at that level.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    40. Re:Great! by TWX · · Score: 1

      Pirated? I have around 1800 movies on physical media in my movie collection. I would love to have it electronic for ease of access but even if I limit encoding to just those that I have on DVD and Blu-ray I'm still looking at 900 titles to contend with.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    41. Re: Great! by TWX · · Score: 1

      Sometimes I wonder if that's why the 2.5" form factor has made its way into server rooms, since four, six, and eight bay configurations are common in 1U boxes, and with 2U boxes you can get loads of drives on-end in a single server.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    42. Re:Great! by TWX · · Score: 1

      I have never liked MTBF. Operate 1000 drives for 100 hours and count the failures and do the math and you get MTBF! Congratulations, you've now identified little more than DOA defects from manufacture...

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    43. Re:Great! by TWX · · Score: 1

      At least it's not Quantum, where your hard disk drive literally would go flat... or the IBM Deskstar series that had a failure mode more like their near-homophone Deathstar during Luke's trench run...

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    44. Re: Great! by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      So that I do not need to buy new drives every time I want to add a file.

      Also, when there is not that much free space left, zfs fragments badly, resulting in slower speeds. A slightly bigger hard drive (or more of them) is usually cheaper than putting the entire storage on SSDs, especially if I do not need the SSD speed.

    45. Re:Great! by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      > Point me to a local backup solution that can handle 16TB in a single go.

      Are you kidding? Something as primitive as rsync can manage that. The real problem is that it will just run forever. If you have a good OS, a batch job that runs for days is not really a problem.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    46. Re: Great! by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2

      Or you could use tape. You can recover what you want, and its cheap.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    47. Re:Great! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Operate 1000 drives for 100 hours and count the failures and do the math and you get MTBF!.

      No! That is NOT how MTBF is calculated. Here is how it is calculated: Engineering designs a HDD. Manufacturing builds it. Then the marketing department decides on what MTBF to print on the box. They want three price points: good, better, best. But it is not cost effective to design and manufacture three different drives, so they actually only design one, and the drives sold at each price point are identical except for the MTBF printed on the box, and the warranty.

      Longitudinal data has repeatedly shown that "enterprise" drives have no technical or reliability advantage over consumer HDDs, and the extended warranty is never worth what you pay for it. The MTBF printed on the box has no correlation whatsoever with the actual reliability of the drive.

    48. Re:Great! by Khyber · · Score: 1

      Fail. RAID is quite often used as backup especially in the case of hot-swappable drives and filesystems that support it in certain RAID configurations.

      Anyone that doesn't know how to do this is a n00b that should probably be restricted to MS-DOS only.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    49. Re:Great! by Khyber · · Score: 1
      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    50. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My point is, the average PC user has no simple way to back up this data.

      The average home user doesn't generate 16TB a day. The actual average person doesn't back their shit up at all, those that do can buy a USB3 external drive and backup to it at ~100MB/sec, 6GB/min, 360GB/hr, ~7TB a day. Let's call it 3TB a night while they sleep. So the average user has no practical limitation on the ability to do nightly backups using MS Backup, Time Machine or whatever.

      Commercial/industrial backup solutions are complex.

      No, idiots who don't understand data are unable to simplify seemingly complex things.
      Tip: Buy 2 10GBit NICs, a patch cable and an extra hard drive for a junker box ($200 AMD APU or $300 i3+).

      Beyond that, clustering is the solution, or the above plus clustering.

      Basically you sound like the whiners complaining about how their are no skilled employees available for hire, but fail to mention that your "generous" benefit package of up to 140 days a year off consists of Saturdays and Sunday.

      There is a clear market shortage of 600 horsepower, 0-60mph 3.0 second 8 passenger minivans for $0.99 too.

    51. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Number of 750 MB Zip Disks needed for backup: 21,333 & 1/3rd.

    52. Re: Great! by amorsen · · Score: 1

      The reason why 2.5" became popularin servers is that servers usually care about IOPS ratherthan capacity. For capacity, they tend to access storage somewhere else.

      If you open a 15K 3.5" drive from back when those seemed like a good idea, you'll discover that it consists of a less-than 2.5" drive and a bunch of eitherair or metal around it. No one managed to make an ACTUAL 3.5" 15K drive, the forces involved are just too great.

      There also wouldn't be any market for it, as practically all potential customers would be short-stroking it to lower worst-case latency.

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
    53. Re: Great! by amorsen · · Score: 3, Informative

      Please provide a link where I can buy a cheap 16TB tape drive. Even an LTO-7 is too small, so you have to play tape jockey, and the tapes cost about the same per TB as the disks. And that is after you find the extortionate amount for the drive.

      Tape possibly makes sense if you can afford an autoloader. HP has a LTO-6 autoloader for $4,239.99 that will do 20TB really (50TB fake). It will, however, only backup/restore 560GB per hour. Let us hope you have a slowly changing dataset and incremental backups are your thing...

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
    54. Re:Great! by jwhyche · · Score: 0

      Hey. That is just for my donkey porn buddy.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    55. Re:Great! by TWX · · Score: 1

      I have a Jaz2. I only need 8192 2GB cartridges...

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    56. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can take your useless reply, turn it sideways, and stick it right up your ass.

      So you can only hope for a product if you're going to make it yourself? Fuck off.

    57. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not about being poor, it's about overpaying for something with no apparent benefit.
      Unless you're working with many small files and 10GBe or higher network speeds, the faster latency and disk speeds from the SSD won't come into play.

      So for the typical consumer, don't use SSD'S for storage, unless you're an idiot.

      I've only seen SSD's die outright. I've seen many hdds that could recover data that wasn't specifically on bad sectors. So for long term data storage, I'd much rather take spinner in raid than an SSD.

    58. Re: Great! by Swave+An+deBwoner · · Score: 1

      5.25" 1TB hard drives?

      Anyway, if it took all night to transfer 500GB I'd check the syslog for drive errors and run diagnostics on them (both the source and the target).

    59. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      5.25"? (DVD rom size)

      Shit's been 3.5" for ages.

    60. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty sure you'll need to use the whole zip drive, they don't break down into thirds.

    61. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      few decades ago they created this concept called RAID. If you have lots of data and lose data with a single failed disk then you probably should be letting someone else or a cloud provider look after your data as you are not competent enough to do it.

    62. Re:Great! by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      No, it's like having a car with 5 wheels bearing the load in such a way that if 1 fails, the load is still carried by the other 4. And then you change the 5th tire.

      --
      I come here for the love
    63. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sounds like this should be illegal, it essentially amounts to false advertising.

    64. Re:Great! by kimvette · · Score: 1

      > Longitudinal data has repeatedly shown that "enterprise" drives have no technical or reliability advantage over consumer HDDs

      Either they are lying, or you are, because there are firmware differences. Build a RAID5, RAID10, or RAID 6 array with consumer desktop drives, then build the same with NAS or enterprise drives. You will find that the consumer drives frequently get kicked out of the array due to timeouts on error correction, while the NAS and enterprise drives do not.

      The differences are minor and firmware-related, but there are differences. You _can_ adjust the timeouts to make the desktop drives behave better in a RAID, but it won't be perfect and you still might encounter drives' dropping out of your array.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    65. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How long will it take to rebuild a raid array with discs that size? Even with only raid 1 I'd think the times would be horrendous.

      Just use RAID 0 and then you don't have to worry about rebuilding!

    66. Re:Great! by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

      The 10TB drives benchmark at around 240 MB/s on their outer track. Figure a 16 TB drive with 1.6x the areal density will be about 25% faster, or 300 MB/s. That's the speed of the outer track. The inner track is half that, or 150 MB/s. And the circumference is proportional to the radius, so the integral between these two speeds (taking into account more data being stored on outer tracks) yields an average speed 1/3 of the way from 300 to 150 MB/s, or 250 MB/s.

      So a straight sector-by-sector (sequential) copy of 16 TB drive to another 16 TB drive would take 16000 GB / 250 MB/s = 64000 seconds, or just under 18 hours.

      So when are we going to have dual head hard disks. The hard drive logic determines which of the two drive heads can get to the data in the least time.
      Why not also include RPS (Rotational Positional Sensing)

      --
      Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
    67. Re: Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, sorry, but RAID is NOT backup. A backup protects you when someone accidentally deletes the wrong file. How, pray tell, would RAID do that?

      One more time - RAID is NOT backup.

      N00b.

    68. Re: Great! by denbesten · · Score: 1

      Please provide a link where I can buy a cheap 16TB tape drive.

      In a sense, TFA is the link you requested. Back in "the day" large data sets were stored on tapes and backed them up to additional tapes. Nowadays, large data sets are stored on HDDs and are backed up to additional HDDs.

    69. Re: Great! by Khyber · · Score: 1

      You didn't read and understand my comment, obviously. Key words - Hot-swap drives. You can pull one directly out of the RAID and have an instant backup right then and there. Plug in another drive, it syncs up with the rest, you continue on.

      You are a complete n00b if that simple leap of logic escaped you, and doubly so if you've never attempted building such a backup system. Back to MS-DOS for you.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    70. Re: Great! by Askmum · · Score: 1
      So Linus really was 20 years ahead.

      Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it

      Never had problems with failing harddrives and subsequent dataloss since.

    71. Re:Great! by freak0fnature · · Score: 1

      lol, it's a Plex server!

    72. Re:Great! by freak0fnature · · Score: 1

      I've never had a problem copying several TB at once. My only drive failure in recent memory was a 1.5TB that I bought in 2009 that had clicking issues from the beginning, but it still lasted until 2016 serving as a backup drive.

    73. Re:Great! by MooseTick · · Score: 1

      "Point me to a cloud backup solution that can handle 16TB over entry-level cablemodem bandwidth"

      You are an extreme edge case. 99.99% of people don't have 16TB of data at home and the few that do likely don't have "entry-level cablemodem bandwidth."

      Mirror your setup and physically haul it offsite weekly. I highly doubt there would be much lost in a weeks time.

    74. Re:Great! by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Never ; I remember a comment about a dual head hard drive being tried and that makes it an unreliable, expensive mechanical monster. Cheaper to use two hard drives, short-stroked if you will.

  2. from tfa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    working to make 1tb the minimum size? Stopping making anything less then 1tb?

  3. Hope and fear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hope it will be stable and safe, but fear it'll crash and burn.
    I've lost too many Seagates full of po- I mean ART to buy one ever again.

  4. Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My U160 SCSI Cheetah 15K7's on a Mylex controller. For speed that's still a hard combo to beat.

    1. Re:Still using by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 1

      My U160 SCSI Cheetah 15K7's on a Mylex controller. For speed that's still a hard combo to beat.

      Ouch. I didn't think people still use parallel SCSI.
      Been 20+ years since I worked on FW for those.

      --
      ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
    2. Re:Still using by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 0

      SSDs are way faster at both access and raw transfer speed. Your drive, at best, gets 800 maybe 1000 IOPs. An SSD drive gets upwards of 100,000 iops (or more).

      There is almost no reason to buy Spinning drives at this point.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    3. Re:Still using by EvilSS · · Score: 1

      My U160 SCSI Cheetah 15K7's on a Mylex controller. For speed that's still a hard combo to beat.

      Yea but who worries about speed from spinning disks anymore, outside of some enterprise uses and those are shrinking fast as cache and solid state storage are both quickly dropping in price. If you need speed, you go SSD.

      --
      I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
    4. Re:Still using by sims+2 · · Score: 1

      Relatively cheap long term storage is the only reason I am aware of.

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    5. Re:Still using by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 1

      I still have a few 15K SCSI drives on 320 MB/s. They used to be my primary drives in several machines. But since I switched to SSD for the primary system, the wok great as swap space.

    6. Re:Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had to buy a SCSI controller to get some critical files off a Jaz drive. That's the last time I touched that crap - like 15 years ago.

      I remember the external SCSI cables were approximately the diameter of a sewer pipe.

    7. Re:Still using by tuffy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Spinning drives are still the way to go for bulk storage because the cost-per-gigabyte remains far, far cheaper than SSD and will seemingly remain so for the near future.

      --

      Ita erat quando hic adveni.

    8. Re:Still using by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      No really it isn't.

      To read something from a hard drive you have to seek to the right track and wait on average half a rotation for it to come under the head. So a 15KRPM hard drive maxes out at under 500 IOPS. A raid array can help a bit provided the host can queue up enough operations at once that all the drives stay busy.

      15K RPM hard drives have been basically squeezed out by falling SSD prices. The SSDs now offer a comparable cost per gigabyte and far higher performance.

      --
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    9. Re:Still using by ShooterNeo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, deal prices for HDDs have yet to drop below ~$30 a terrabyte. This is 2010 era pre-flood/pre-consolidation prices. I haven't seen a price for a new drive from a quality brand dip below that.

      While I've seen SSDs hit $200/terrabyte. So the price delta is 6-10x at this point. It's rapidly shrinking.

    10. Re:Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is due to Duopoly --- no competition.

      We are down to WDC and STX for major disk manufacturers; due to consolidation/acquisitions.

      go ahead and look at their stock charts, it's been beaming with the delight at this realization.

    11. Re:Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Spinning drives are still the way to go if you value the ability to "securely delete" files (eg, 'srm').

    12. Re:Still using by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      So the price delta is 6-10x at this point

      That's a pretty good reason to buy spinning disks. By strange coincidence I actually bought one early this aternoon for backups. My plan is to buy two in the 5-6TB range from different manufacturers and use rsync with --link-dest for incremental backups.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    13. Re: Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Our sink?

    14. Re:Still using by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      You realize that spinning disks that size are "archive" only usage. Not actual usage. By that measure, tape is really cheap. There is a reason why you hardly see that any longer.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    15. Re:Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Actually, deal prices for HDDs have yet to drop below ~$30 a terrabyte. This is 2010 era pre-flood/pre-consolidation prices. I haven't seen a price for a new drive from a quality brand dip below that.

      I've seen well below $30/TB. This last black friday I picked up ten 5TB NAS drives for $100 a piece, those would be $20/TB. And not including Black Friday, I frequently see 5 TB desktop class drives hit $26/TB.

    16. Re:Still using by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1

      But its way more fun to take a chain saw to a pile of LTO tapes!

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    17. Re:Still using by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      You realize that spinning disks that size are "archive" only usage. Not actual usage.

      Given the way I said I was using it for backups, yes, I'm pretty sure I know that it's for archival usage, since ya know, that's what I got it for.

      By that measure, tape is really cheap

      Not for me. In the kind of quantities I need, a 6TB LTO approaches the same price as a 6TB external USB hard disk, and that's of course excluding the tape drive. Then there's the pain in the arse factor and time (which isn't free). With incremental backups that 5TB drive will back up my laptop's two SSDs, my other laptop, my SO's laptop, misc photos, my previous backups, my web host and my email, leaving plenty of spare capacity for a number of incremental backups on the two laptops.

      Then add one or two more for redundancy.

      At my kind of scale, hard discs are the best archival option.

      For bigger things, yes, tape is a better option and still a big seller. Not as common as it used to be, but for long term, reliable storage and price per bit in huge quantities it's still king of the hill.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    18. Re:Still using by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      This is 2010 era pre-flood/pre-consolidation prices

      Sorry but prices were never that cheap. Pre-2010 the average desktop drive was closer to $60/TB with some cheap ones in the $50 range. We surpassed that mark again early last year, not to mention that you can get 8TB drives for around $220 if you shop at the right places which is below your $30/TB mark.

    19. Re:Still using by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should switch to borg-backup instead of rsync. Compression, deduplication, bitrot detection, far more efficient over the wire, you can mount the archive as a file system (or mount *all* the archives). Client-side encryption if you don't trust the server.

    20. Re:Still using by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 2

      You realize that spinning disks that size are "archive" only usage. Not actual usage. By that measure, tape is really cheap. There is a reason why you hardly see that any longer.

      Typically "archive" hard drives mean that they have relatively poor performance, not that that they're bad. For instance, if you're looking to put together a NAS to store a bunch of media like TV shows or movies, they're just fine. You're going write infrequent changes, mostly when you're adding new content, and you're going to read sequential streams, both of which archival drives are just fine for. That's actual usage. They are not intended for, say, write once, then store in a closet offline for years. They're not like "archival" quality optical media, which is intended to not decompose for a longer time than non-archival media.

      Just keep your high IOPS activities like databases off them and they're an excellent tool.

      --
      "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."
    21. Re:Still using by ShooterNeo · · Score: 1

      Sorry but I have the Newegg.com invoice to prove it? I paid $65 for 2 TB in 2010.

    22. Re:Still using by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      So a one off special? Or can you point me to all bottom of the range drives being that price range?

      In that case I got one for you. I bought 6x 100GB HDDs in 2000 for $9ea, but that wasn't a market rate.

  5. /. Editor: Crappy Summary by mykepredko · · Score: 2

    Why are the two ending sentences there on SSDs?

    It made the summary confusing and off point.

    1. Re:/. Editor: Crappy Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So that we could post about it. Same reason Apple seems to come up in many articles. Clickbait.

  6. how much porn is that? by known_coward_69 · · Score: 2

    and will it be enough for the digital hoarders out there?

    1. Re:how much porn is that? by mykepredko · · Score: 3, Funny

      11Mpussy if you use MKS units. Slightly less if you use imperial.

    2. Re:how much porn is that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      For the less technical inclined, that is about 350 MWanks.

  7. ceph with smaller disks over 3 or nodes by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    ceph with smaller disks over 3 or nodes

  8. Too expensive... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

    I typically replace my home file server hard drives every five years or so. More out of necessity because the hard drives start failing like dominos. I buy whatever hard drives I can get for $50 each. Last year I replaced Seagate 320GB hard drives with Western Digital Red 1TB hard drives. Maybe four years from now I'll get 16TB hard drives — or 1TB+ SSDs — for $50 each.

    1. Re:Too expensive... by omnichad · · Score: 1

      I'm on a similar schedule - though I went for ~$100 each for 3TB drives since I have (presumably) higher storage needs and only 4 SATA ports available for RAID. The low end hasn't dropped fast enough (and I need more storage) and you get more bits for your buck at the higher price if you need it.

      You'll be lucky if even 3TB drives hit the $50 mark in the next 3 years. In fact, the 3TB drives I bought almost 2 years ago are still over $80.

    2. Re:Too expensive... by freak0fnature · · Score: 1

      I snagged an 8TB from newegg last black friday for $169, and there were some clearanced WDs that were through office max earlier this month, 6TB for $109 and 4TB for $79. They are externals, but easy to disassemble.

    3. Re:Too expensive... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      They are externals, but easy to disassemble.

      That might be fine for single drives. For a RAID configuration, you want identical drives under warranty. Popping open an external drive probably voids the warranty.

    4. Re:Too expensive... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      You'll be lucky if even 3TB drives hit the $50 mark in the next 3 years.

      1TB+ SSDs will probably be more affordable in the next few years.

    5. Re:Too expensive... by omnichad · · Score: 1

      The mid-range flash cells have been stagnant on price for a while. The 250GB Samsung 850 EVO spent most of 2015 and 2016 at $90. Now it's $100. Sure there are a lot of cheaper options, but at this rate of change, I don't have much hope for 1TB coming down in price any time soon.

    6. Re:Too expensive... by omnichad · · Score: 1

      I take that back. 2015 was the 120GB model at that price, but 250GB was still under $140 back in 2014.

    7. Re:Too expensive... by arth1 · · Score: 1

      For a RAID configuration, you want identical drives under warranty.

      No. You want identical in size and performance, but not identical drives if you can help it. Certainly not drives from the same production run. Good system providers will shuffle drives so you get different ones, or at least from different production runs.

      The reason is that you don't want drives failing at the same time. From a drive has failed until a hotspare has been fully populated and tested, you're the most vulnerable.

    8. Re: Too expensive... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sounds like mer cheapo will loose data soon. Those external drives have short warrantees for a reason.

      And the Frankenstein setup of mismatch hard drives you can't even mirror or backup. Dude, get a better job and don't cheap out on electronics.

      Cheap shit always fails. Always.

    9. Re:Too expensive... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      You want identical in size and performance, but not identical drives if you can help it.

      When I replaced the hard drives in my home file server, I bought four locally over a six month period when they were on sale and the store had to restock each time. Two from Newegg about nine months apart. All the serial numbers are quite different.

      From a drive has failed until a hotspare has been fully populated and tested, you're the most vulnerable.

      Not with a RAID-6 configuration (a second hard drive would have to fail). I also have a full backup on a separate hard drive.

    10. Re:Too expensive... by freak0fnature · · Score: 1

      No RAID for me. These are for movies so the data doesn't change once its full. I make a backup and pop it in the fire safe. As far as opening them, as long as the disk itself has not been opened or physically damaged, then it is fine.

  9. What are the use cases for these drives? by mykepredko · · Score: 1

    As many a wag has pointed out, that a 16TB drive means that there is more of your data to lose in a crash. I also have to think that the latency for finding specific files on the drive - especially in a server - is going to be a concern.

    I guess for the home user, this might be a great way to store 100 or more Blu-Rays for streaming around the house but I have to wonder if these drives are reaching sub-optimal sizes for server farms/cloud based storage.

    1. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      a 16TB drive means that there is more of your data to lose

      In most cases, if you can fill a 16 TB disk, that data isn't actually yours.

    2. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's why you get two and mirror.

      With "more data to lose logic", we'd clearly be better off have tens of thousands of 1 GB hard drives!

    3. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is if you buy your games ftom GOG and not Steam.

    4. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You would get a heck of a lot more than 100 Blu-Ray movies on that! 16TB / 100 is 160GB. A double-layer Blu-Ray disc is 50GB and single layer is 25GB. I'd say you could store an average of about 500 Blu-Ray movies at full quality (ISO images).... that's awesome for a single 3.5" drive.

    5. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      A photographer could easily fill a 16 TB disk with RAW files and whatnot.

      As an amateur I have only a few hundred GB's. I have friends that need to swap between several TB+ disks for their work.

    6. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by jason777 · · Score: 1

      I've been ripping all my (legally purchased) DVDs and Blu-rays to MKV files. I completely filled up twp 6tb drives. And I'm not even close to done.

    7. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by Solandri · · Score: 2

      I just upgraded our building's 1080p security camera system storage from 4TB to 16TB (2x8TB). With 8 cameras recording at 6 fps, half of them on motion detection all the time, the others half the time, 4TB held about 35 days of video. We kept missing important footage due to the motion detection not triggering in time or not at all. I tried reducing the h.264 codec quality, but small details like license plate numbers started to become unreadable. 16TB should let us store 45+ days of always-on footage. Maybe even increase the framerate (not that we need smoother video, but more frames means more chances to get a legible still frame grab of a crucial license plate).

      This is just 8 cameras. The amount of video storage a place like a shopping mall needs must be mind boggling.

    8. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by pr0fessor · · Score: 1

      I probably could, not that I would... but I'm sure 4 IR security cameras @1080p recording 24/7 wouldn't take that long to fill up 16TB.

    9. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why are you doing that to yourself? Are you Asperger or something?

    10. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oh fuck off. With 360 video becoming a thing, we are going to need 16k cameras to capture reality in decent fidelity. My personal raw 4k footage already vastly exceeds the 2 TB of backup media content i maintain.

      I store my physical CDs as straight up .wavs at this point. My home surveillance package could fill a 16 TB quickly, even quicker if i upgrade to higher resolution cameras.....You lack imagination.

      --
      Good-bye
    11. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by known_coward_69 · · Score: 1

      for when you download every movie, song and tv show there is even though it's impossible to actually consume it all within a human lifetime but you still do it because it makes you feel superior

    12. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      .wavs? really? why on earth not flac? lossless format which supports tags as a bonus.

    13. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not worth the hassle I would assume.

    14. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I store my physical CDs as straight up .wavs at this point.

      Why?!?!

    15. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by gravewax · · Score: 1

      absolute bullshit. with Ultra HD video, hi res photography etc 16TB is no longer something just hosters would need. I have 21TB in my home NAS and it has been bordering full for the past 12 months where I am deleting stuff so I can put new stuff in which is anything but ideal. This scenario is only going to get worse over the next year. I have been waiting to upgrade storage till drive sizes got big enough so that my upgrade could at least double my capacity without insane investment. 10-14TB drives should be able to achieve that, 4 drives for data, 2 for hot spare/raid

    16. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      It's not a big deal if you don't do it all at once. It's like using iTunes or Netflix but without the network or the problem of things "going away".

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    17. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      > In most cases, if you can fill a 16 TB disk, that data isn't actually yours.

      You're projecting. You're the thief and you think everyone else is.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    18. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by CommanderRyalis · · Score: 1

      pr0n

    19. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i follow dog philosophy, if i got the hd in my dirty paws and i can wank to its data, its MINE!

      woof!!!

    20. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      No *you* can't seem to generate 16TB of your own data. Most of the rest of us could easily do that. Heck for $400 you can buy a camera that shoots 4k 240FPS. Everytime I click the shutter on my camera I get a 60MB file. Canon just teased a camera that clocks in at 120mpxl with a 232MB file size per photo. When I do astronomy I typically generate a 45GB data set per picture and I currently have a 1TB drive completely fully of just one session with my telescope in the bush.

      One thing I don't really have is much of a games library, but with games pushing 60GB per game now I can see the avid gamer filling his drive too. And all of this is before we get into continuously recording systems just as home security cameras which are now also getting very cheap at full HD and high frame rates.

      If you can't generate 16TB of your own data, you probably shouldn't be on a technology forum.

    21. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by JThundley · · Score: 1

      I know an AC already asked this, but it bears repeating: wav?! really? You know flac exists, right? Ignoring the file size savings, don't you still want tags and bus transfer speed savings? The cpu used to decode flac is next to nothing.

    22. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by TheSync · · Score: 1

      If nothing is moving, increasing the frame rate should only slightly increase your bit rate, because H.264 is pretty good at predicting form past frames, especially with a GOP size of 128 frames.

    23. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      .wav takes no processing power. Its basically a bit for bit copy and anything will play it. Song matching databases get around the need for metadata

      --
      Good-bye
    24. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      .wav support is so ubiquitous as to be considered ambient. Its the raw file off the disc. I can always make a FLAC from it later.

      --
      Good-bye
    25. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 1

      As many a wag has pointed out, that a 16TB drive means that there is more of your data to lose in a crash. I also have to think that the latency for finding specific files on the drive - especially in a server - is going to be a concern.

      If the choices are: 1} do not have anywhere to store data, and 2} have somewhere to store data but it might be lost, #2 is preferable. Also, how much data at risk of loss is an acceptable amount? Perhaps we should have stuck with 20MB hard drives because anymore more would just be more data to lose in a crash. I think this is a silly way of looking at things.

      Also, as for performance, typically finding specific files on a drive, a.k.a. random seek time, is mostly a function of rotational speed and head traversal speed, not data density. The head traverses to the cylinder necessary, the drive rotates until the data blocks are under the head, and the data is read. If the drives stay 3.5", the head traversal won't change, and if the rotational speed remains the same (typically 7,200 RPM), the random seek times will remain roughly the same as smaller drives. Server or not. What is nice, is that as density increases, typically sequential transfer rates increase. So there's a net win as drives get bigger, typically.

      --
      "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."
    26. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      It's still not your data. As long as you keep the originals, you can do it again.

    27. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Like I said, in "most" cases. There are always a few elite users like yourself who can pride themselves on generating so much material, not even a 16TB disk can hold it.

    28. Re:What are the use cases for these drives? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      If you can't generate 16TB of your own data, you probably shouldn't be on a technology forum.

      True. That's why I'm on slashdot.

    29. Re: What are the use cases for these drives? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wrong. I purchased andisc with data. Thats my data. Nowhere did it say i purchased a license. Now, you cannot sell it, but ripping it is ab
      bsolutely fair use.

  10. And you still can't back it up by RedMage · · Score: 1

    Where are you going to put that kind of data, should you manage to fill one of these? In the cloud? No way, and your ISP will love the data cap overage charges if you try. Another drive? Well, unless you buy at least three of these then that will get expensive fast, requiring multiple older drives per one of these. Tape? Have you looked at LTO or similar prices? Not gonna happen for home users, even most businesses. So, when your rust stops spinning and the data is at rest, where do you turn?

    --
    }#q NO CARRIER
    1. Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Buy 2

    2. Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Where are you going to put that kind of data, should you manage to fill one of these?

      I never buy the most recent gen because they're expensive. But these will push the price down on the current 4-6 TB drives. If you buy 1 or 1.5 gen behind the current tech, you can buy 3 drives for a quite reasonable cost, and then use them to mirror each other.

      I'm doing that now with 3's and 4's, which were pricey on release but cheaper now that higher capacities are out.

    3. Re:And you still can't back it up by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Funny

      I just divide it into two equal partitions, and make copies of everything.

    4. Re:And you still can't back it up by Phics · · Score: 1

      This won't be made primarily for _you_, its real value is _in_ the cloud. Lower overall power usage in a high-density environment, and in spite of what some might think, even a high cost drive will save money when you scale out, as long as its benefits can be felt on that scale, (lower wattage, better rack utilization with more TB per U, fewer individual points of failure per PB, lower overall cost per GB on the PB scale, (and probably on the TB scale as well)).

      --
      There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
    5. Re:And you still can't back it up by networkBoy · · Score: 2

      Where are you going to put that kind of data, [...] Another drive? Well, unless you buy at least three of these then that will get expensive fast, requiring multiple older drives per one of these.

      Well, My use case makes this what is likely to happen.
      I'll drop one of these in the system and it will act as the WORM drive for bulk data.
      As the data is created it is written to smaller/faster disks (still spinning rust, whatever 2.5" is cheapest/gig, or even previously used drives that have been tested clean). Once a dataset is complete it will be written to the WORM drive, once the smaller disk is full it is pulled from the system, put on the shelf and a new blank put in in it's place. Instant offline backups.

      There is an SSD who's entire existence is dedicated to maintaining the table of datasets -> offline disk # & Hash of dataset for bitrot checks. It's an old 40 gig Intel disk.

      I've found that as particularly larger disks come out I migrate the WORM to a new larger WORM and now I have the old WORM + initial creating disks all available as backups. It's a system that I've been using for about 6 years now without any issue (and with a couple disk failures and bit-rot incidents to validate my system).
      -nB

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    6. Re:And you still can't back it up by fafalone · · Score: 1

      That used to be how it worked. Now the older drives stay the same price and the price of the newest just gets higher and higher.

    7. Re:And you still can't back it up by MrEdofCourse · · Score: 1

      Just in case you aren't joking, that's a *really* bad idea.

    8. Re: And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A worm drive is a drive that physically will not allow rewrites. Just because you call it worm, doesn't make it so.

      And I see your description that took time to write - you think its clever but its not. Even wasting time on a old near failure 40gb disk is stupid. Its not worth the bay space it occupies.

      No one cares what stupid shit you do. They just read the word worm and figured you for a retard.

      I have free time so ill call you out as a retard. Retarded thinking. The word retarded. Look it up. Since its obvious you don't know definitions and the dictionary is your sworn enemy.

    9. Re:And you still can't back it up by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Lots of people have terabytes in the cloud. I've got about 4TB backed up (encrypted of course). Took a few months to upload.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:And you still can't back it up by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      No way, and your ISP will love the data cap overage charges if you try.

      Depends on the ISP. I uploaded ~100TB last 31 days, no overage charges from the ISP. Still, I would not want to put my backups on a server I do not control.

      I am thinking about tape, I used tapes in the past for archiving, it is not that expensive (not the latest gen, but I do not need the latest gen, currently all my data would fit on one of those 16TB drives, though my storage server uses raidz2 of 3TB drives) and since my data does not change much, the tapes could do double duty as archive (I certainly would not need to do a full backup very often) and have the advantage of being completely offline when not in use.

      However, for now I cannot figure out a convenient way to automate all this (incremental, differential backups) on Linux. In the past my storage server was Windows and I used Windows software to do this, but now the storage server is Linux (and zfs) and I would like to attach the tape autoloader to the server.

      Or, I guess I could get a small backup server with a few of these drives in raidz2, but it would most likely be more expensive than the tape autoloader with 20TB of tapes.

    11. Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just in case you aren't joking, that's a *really* bad idea.

      I'm pretty sure he means he used 2 partitions on each drive for data, and a third partition for parity. For best result, you should add a VHD file to each partition, mount that and use that for your files. That way the cluster size won't matter and you can use SW mem for caching writes. If you want to be extra safe, make six partitions per drive and RAID6 them for TREMENDOUS reliability.

    12. Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes but strangly enough with the way hard drives fail it would be effective.

    13. Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Depending on your needs, borg-backup is probably what you want if you're not going the tape route. It does compression, variable block size deduplication, and every backup is a full snapshot. Very few files created on the storage server (unlike rsnapshot, which creates 10x-20x the number of original files that you have), very efficient over the wire.

    14. Re:And you still can't back it up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I actually did this on 3.5" floppy-disks. They were so unreliable I had to put three or four copies to be sure I could read back the files.
      Worked very good :)

  11. 16TB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Almost enough for my entire porn collection!

  12. Sigh by Locke2005 · · Score: 1, Funny

    My first computer was a 386 with a 30MByte disk... and I was PROUD of it!

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    1. Re:Sigh by PRMan · · Score: 2

      I had a 286 with a 20...

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    2. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh stahp! Someone will come in bragging about their magnetic tape drive or their punchcard or some fuckery.

    3. Re:Sigh by ls671 · · Score: 1

      Yep, mine too was a 20MB and I was all excited when I got it. It cost me 600$ back then too!!!

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    4. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At a place I worked in the late 80s that has a Sol on he shelf with dual 8" drives. They actually took it off the shelf to get some data from some disks once.

    5. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had an 8088 with a 5MB Shugart drive.

    6. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I had a stone tablet with 5 commandments!

    7. Re:Sigh by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      The first in my house was a 286 w/ ST 225, but my first that was *mine* was an older 8088 with an ST512 FH 5MB disk. I was so f-ing proud of myself for that machine (built with hand me down parts and bits I bought/was given at the old swap meet I went to).

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    8. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    9. Re:Sigh by mykepredko · · Score: 1

      Home built Apple ][ (6502) with a cassette tape.

    10. Re: Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ok, hard drive didn't even exist for my first computer... Tapes, yes, cassette tapes were the only option. I'm sure there are even older dudes out there. Just don't go there, it just makes us feel so old. Damn.

    11. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ti 99/4a with Cassette tape drive...

    12. Re:Sigh by Dr.+Bombay · · Score: 1

      My first computer was a home built SWTPC 6800 with static RAM and audio cassette for storage.
      It was stolen along with my second computer that was a S-100 8088 system that had a hard drive.
      With a 10 MB maybe 20 MB hardrive, too long ago to remember.

    13. Re:Sigh by Striek · · Score: 1

      Mine was a 286 without a hard drive. We called loading anything on that machine doing the "diskette disco".

      We bought a 40MB hard drive some years later, as an upgrade.

      --
      "Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
    14. Re:Sigh by davidwr · · Score: 1

      Mine was an abacus. Granted, it had very limited storage but it was decimal. Okay, quasi-decimal - it had a "5" marker and four "one" markers per column. I think it had between 10 and 20 columns.

      I assume we are talking about data storage devices here, right?

      --
      Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    15. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I started on a z80 (microbe 32) with battery backup - that's 32 glorious kb* of sort-of non-volatile ram that might last a few days memory - and a tape drive.
      Then I moved to a really advanced computer (microbe 256tc) with dual built-in *double sided, double density* floppies.
      Much later I proudly forked out $300 for a huuuge 1GB drive, thinking confidently that it would take *years* to fill up that much space.

      16TB big? Meh, I'll give it maybe 5 years before we think 16TB USB sticks are impractically small.

    16. Re:Sigh by fnj · · Score: 1

      It was almost certainly an ST412 10MB. I had one of those. The ST506 was the 5MB. It was slower than grass growing. The 412 was a hotrod in comparison.

    17. Re:Sigh by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 1

      PDP-9 with paper tape...

    18. Re:Sigh by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      I believe you may be correct on the models and my brain merged them together.
      I had a 5MB, and later acquired a 10.

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  13. Not what we need. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Back in the day, we would have the newest capacities come out to replace the previous generation at that same price point, and the price all of the other lower capacity drives would fall in order. That hasn't been the case lately. Who needs to buy a $900 16TB drive when you could do that in RAID with 4TB drives for $750? Nobody. What we need is these new drives to come out at $500, and push the cost of 8TB drives down to the $150 range.

    1. Re:Not what we need. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Places that only have so much space for data storage will welcome this with open arms and budgets! It's still cheaper than moving.

  14. Downsides to SSDs (besides cost) by davidwr · · Score: 1

    * Flakey controllers or firmware can cause huge problems. True for platter-drives as well but it's rare on those devices.
    * Wear-leveling makes "deletion" permanent. No more going back and "un-deleting" files a week later.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    1. Re:Downsides to SSDs (besides cost) by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Wear-leveling makes "deletion" permanent

      That was always a bug and not a feature. If you want a backup, set up a backup.

    2. Re:Downsides to SSDs (besides cost) by gosand · · Score: 1

      They don't start to die... they just die.
      Platter drives will start to give you problems, at which point you can usually buy another drive and transfer your data.
      If an SSD goes, it's gone. poof. I had it happen on a work laptop once. That was about 6 years ago, so maybe they have gotten a little more reliable since then. At home, on my machine, it's all platter drives.

      --

      My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

    3. Re:Downsides to SSDs (besides cost) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not always true. Many just go into 'read only' mode.

  15. Bake your SSD in an oven by emil · · Score: 2

    Strange that the discrete 800 degree heating units haven't been integrated AFAIK. However, 250 degrees in an oven for a day fixes most of them.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20579077

    Heat has long been known to help heal degraded materials in old flash memory. But because the heat healing process meant baking the memory chip in an oven at 250C for hours, few saw it as a practical solution... Briefly heating those locations to about 800C returned damaged memory locations to full working order.

    1. Re: Bake your SSD in an oven by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You must be stupid. All the components will melt.
      Yes, stupid.

  16. Makes No Sense by Phics · · Score: 2

    Most of the comments so far seem to be about 16TB being a bit on the ridiculous side for PCs and even small servers, etc. What these are exciting for aren't RAID or traditional PC's but for high density storage for Big Data, which typically doesn't use RAID, and generally only looks at SSDs as a "hot tier" solution. 16TB spindles sound great to me, but I'd never stick one in my home PC.

    --
    There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
    1. Re:Makes No Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With Samsung already having 16TB SSDs, why would anyone use 16TB spinning rust?

    2. Re:Makes No Sense by davidwr · · Score: 1

      With Samsung already having 16TB SSDs, why would anyone use 16TB spinning rust?

      * Cost
      * Cost
      * Did I mention cost?

      Sure, we don't know pricing yet, but for the next few years, spinning rust will be significantly cheaper up-front than "ordinary" (non-helium) spinning rust.

      I can see plenty of use cases for a 16TB device, including video recording (think: security cameras systems that record several TB/month, high-capacity DVRs, etc.), second-tier data-warehouse applications, and scientific applications that generate lots of data (tens of TB per day). In some of these cases, it's worth paying more for silicon storage, but in others it's better to save your money and go with spinning rust.

      --
      Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    3. Re:Makes No Sense by jwhyche · · Score: 0

      Well when we consider that a 7 TB Samsung SSD costs 11,000 bucks, I believe we can see why.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    4. Re:Makes No Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Samsung's 16 TB drives cost more. My wife only needs her movies and TV shows to play in real time, and doesn't care whether they can be read twice as fast as that, vs 200 times as fast.

      2 sec == 200 sec, but $200 < $20000.

    5. Re:Makes No Sense by gravewax · · Score: 1

      we passed 16TB for SSD's in the big data side a few years ago, these are completely useless in that area. 16TB though is great for home storage for large video libraries.

    6. Re:Makes No Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      when you are looking at big data the cost of slower disk is far more excessive than the cost of putting it on SSD.

    7. Re:Makes No Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In the Big Data scenario the OP described you would absolutely NEVER use spinning rust, it would not make sense. however the area he disparaged as not needing it is EXACTLY where you would use it, in home or small business scenarios the cost 16TB or 32TB SSD's is simply not financially viable.

    8. Re:Makes No Sense by davidwr · · Score: 1

      when you are looking at big data the cost of slower disk is far more excessive than the cost of putting it on SSD.

      If you mean "big data" that is actually in use, e.g. for "crunching the data" as implied by the term "Big Data" - then yes.

      If you mean "big storage" where you can take a one-time hit of a few seconds per MB (or whatever) to move it from "slow" storage (read: platter drives) to "fast" storage (read: SSD) then maybe not so much. If you mean "big offline storage" then it's almost always cheaper to go with platters unless you are willing to pay for cubic inches (you can store a lot more per cubic inch on commercially-available silicon than on commercially-available spinning disks). However, in that case, tape may be a better option.

      --
      Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    9. Re:Makes No Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I mean what I said. Big Data, not big storage. The parent was originally discussing Big Data. For big Storage then yes large spinning tin makes sense but that wasn't what was being discussed.

  17. Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for backup by davidwr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd love to see someone come out with a cheap, trivial-to-use "WORM* USB stick" along with "plug and play" backup software.

    Such backups would be impervious to being over-written by ransomware. If using them became commonplace, it would cripple that industry.

    Such media could also be used for security systems or any other kind of data-logging system: Record everything to write-once media (along with a copy of recent data to a cached journal, so changing media doesn't cause interruptions).

    There is a good business case for this: It provides a nice "give away the flashlight, sell the batteries" profit center for vendors: People would need to replace the USB sticks when they filled up. The key is that it will have to be no more expensive than ordinary USB sticks of the same capacity.

    Before you mention "data retention/deletion policies" I'm envisioning this for home users and some types small businesses, not large businesses or those subject to government-driven data-deletion policies.

    ----

    * By "WORM" I mean the actual hardware/firmware enforces the write-once aspect, not just a USB stick with an OS-level device driver that makes it "write once." This should actually be cheaper to manufacture than typical USB sticks since you would not need to provide "erase" circuitry nor would you need to have wear-leveling logic in the device's firmware.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  18. Now it's helium-filled drives. by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

    But when will we see hydrogen filled drives?

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    1. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      Probably never. Hydrogen is reactive and will also migrate easily into other materials.

    2. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, you're right... stupid safe helium.

    3. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

      But when will we see hydrogen filled drives?

      Never. The drives would just hover away :-)

    4. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably never. Hydrogen is reactive and will also migrate easily into other materials.

      And disk failures will not only be frequent but spectacular.

      Hydrogen embrittlement of the metal, then blue flames when it fails!

      Q: "What happened?"
      A: "Your datacenter went Hindenberg on you."

      What's not to like?

    5. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Shouldn't that be true for helium as well? And wasn't it long ago that on /. there was an article about the global shortage of helium? Methinks they should focus on SSDs, where all you have is silicon

    6. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably never. Hydrogen is reactive and will also migrate easily into other materials.

      Unless it's metal hydrogen

    7. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by garryknight · · Score: 5, Funny

      My friends speak quite highly of helium.

      --
      Garry Knight
    8. Re:Now it's helium-filled drives. by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      Unless the government is regulating the prices of helium to be artificially low, it seems, at least for now, that making a helium filled hard drive is cheaper than making a SSD with the same capacity.

  19. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by Phics · · Score: 1

    Another case, while we're at it.... datacenters.

    This would be cool for archival or cold tier storage solutions, where the data is flagged as having some acceptable degree of permanency is moved onto these WORM devices. I can think of all sorts of applications - financial, backup, legal, content libraries with immutable data, (like old documents, manuals, videos, etc.).

    You could focus more on read speeds and less on write issues, and while I'm no expert, I imagine there are plenty from an engineering point of view.

    I bet YouTube and Netflix would go nuts over things like these...

    --
    There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
  20. MTBF? by Chas · · Score: 1

    4 days?

    Sorry, but it seems like the bigger Seagate drives get, the less reliable they become.

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  21. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by networkBoy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This should actually be cheaper to manufacture than typical USB sticks since you would not need to provide "erase" circuitry nor would you need to have wear-leveling logic in the device's firmware.

    Former Flash validation engineer here...
    Sadly not the case. The erase circuitry will still be needed if only so you can adequately run test patterns on the parts. Have to return the device to 0xFF's after testing so your customers can use it.

    That said, there is the ability to disable erase in the field by setting a bit in the FACS array as the last step of testing.

    --
    whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  22. And only 30 months after Samsung by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Remember, Samsung announced the 16TB SSD around the tail end of 2015, and was selling them by March of 2016.

    http://gizmodo.com/samsungs-16tb-ssd-is-now-an-actual-thing-people-can-buy-1762536707

    WTG Seagate, by the time you release your 16TB spinning rust, Samsung will have their 32, 48 or possibly 96TB SSDs available...

  23. Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why not? I am sure we will find ways to waste.. I mean use the space. For example 8K 360 VR movies.

    1. Re:Nice by davidwr · · Score: 1

      Why not? I am sure we will find ways to waste.. I mean use the space. For example 8K 360 VR movies.

      That's movie, singular. :)

      Okay, maybe movies, plural, if by "movie" you mean "short film."

      --
      Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  24. All of them? by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    Point me to a local backup solution that can handle 16TB in a single go.

    Pretty much anything?

    But mainly it will all work because most backup systems are incremental. I can easily maintain a backup for a 16TB drive because week to wee I'll not have 16TB to back up...

    I back out to an offsite drive about once a month. Even then I'll have perhaps 500GB to transfer, which is easily manageable in an evening.

    Point me to a cloud backup solution that can handle 16TB

    But that's a problem today, and is irrelevant to the size of drives you store things on locally. It's not like having larger drives MAKES you have more data. It's just helpful for storing what you have on fewer drives.

    If you have a lot of data and want cloud backups there's just no replacing a station wagon full of hard drives...

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:All of them? by TWX · · Score: 1

      You still need an initial snapshot on which to base the incremental diffs though. This means that you still need that 16TB capability in your backup medium.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  25. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by unixisc · · Score: 1

    What sort of file system are you thinking about for WORM - OpenZFS? You'll need a copy-on-write filesystem to justify a WORM

  26. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by davidwr · · Score: 2

    That said, there is the ability to disable erase in the field by setting a bit in the FACS array as the last step of testing.

    For all practical purposes, is this an irreversible step?

    If not, I would prefer some other method, such as cutting a trace or burning out a fuse so that the drive was guaranteed to be "write once, erase/delete never."

    For "forensic" purposes, "guaranteed non-erasure" is a hard requirement.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  27. Large capacity disks by pjv936 · · Score: 0

    are only useful for videos. The pipe from the disk to the computer is too narrow to make them useful for anything else. The mainframe at my jobs still use disk drive with 1G capacity to maximize thruput for processing online transactions.

    1. Re:Large capacity disks by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      Not just videos. There are other uses where you have a lot of data, but do not necessarily need very high speed.
      Backups, especially if you want to keep them for longer, archival storage, as a third/fourth tier storage (RAM cache, SSD cache, hard drives).

  28. Use ECC RAM with ZFS! by h4ck7h3p14n37 · · Score: 2

    Install ZFS on your Linux box.

    If you're going to do this for anything other than experimental purposes, be sure you're using ECC RAM. You probably aren't and your current board most likely doesn't support it, so you'll need to get a new motherboard, possibly a new CPU and new RAM.

    ZFS does something no other filesystem you’ll have available to you does: it checksums your data, and it checksums the metadata used by ZFS, and it checksums the checksums. If your data is corrupted in memory before it is written, ZFS will happily write (and checksum) the corrupted data. Additionally, ZFS has no pre-mount consistency checker or tool that can repair filesystem damage. [...] If a non-ECC memory module goes haywire, it can cause irreparable damage to your ZFS pool that can cause complete loss of the storage.

    A Complete Guide to FreeNAS Hardware Design, Part I: Purpose and Best Practices

    1. Re:Use ECC RAM with ZFS! by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      This is one of the things I love about the AMD Am3 platform, the majority of their boards support ECC right out of the box. Its great for building low cost file and media servers,$25 for an Athlon 65w X4 and $40 for a 4 slot board that supports 32gb of ECC and there ya go, low cost file/media server. Slap on a passive heatsink and stuff it in a case with dual top mounted fans and you have a system you can just stuff in a closet and forget about.

      As for TFA I'm personally shocked that 500Gb HDDs are still the norm on the low end PCs, its not like the OEM HDD manufacturers are saving any money making a 500Gb versus a 1TB so hopefully they'll be able to get rid of 500Gb being the baseline.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  29. Yes , of course but... by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    You still need an initial snapshot on which to base the incremental diffs though.

    Yes, and???

    It's not like you are going to have 16TB on day one, is it? So then you just have the initial time to move whatever to a newer drive, then incremental costs after... In fact you do not HAVE to have a 16TB capability on the backup until the content you are backing up reaches that point. I've taken that approach before, which is a good idea as it staggers out the drive purchase baking it more likely you get drives from different batches and different stages of manufacturing reliability.

    Or if you are because you are just coalescing other backup drives, then you just pay that penalty a single time (because you could back up to multiple drives at once) and then distribute the now full drives to safe places ad leave them alone.

    A single cost of a day or two of data transfer is meaningless over the course of a few years.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  30. Big data and slow storage by davidwr · · Score: 1

    I agree that for most "Big Data" applications, you will want speed over price.

    However, there is a case for using SSDs for archival data or backups.

    For example, if you are doing an experiment where each run creates, say, 1000TB of raw data in a short period of time (minutes or less). You'll probably filter out some percentage of that data before it is ever stored and store the rest (say, 500TB) for a few hours while you post-process it, then store the "potentially good stuff" (say, 250TB) for at least a few more days while you do further post-processing (call it 3 days). You'll wind up keeping only the data you know you can make use of (call it 125TB).

    You will almost certainly need 825 TB worth of extremely fast storage to do this right (remember, the bulk of the data will be discarded before it is ever stored).

    After a few hours, the bulk of that space - 500TB in this example - becomes available for the next experimental run.

    After a few days, another 250TB becomes available for future experimental runs.

    Wouldn't it be nice if you could buy some not-so-expensive drives to save some of this data that would otherwise be thrown away in case it turns out to be useful later? The answer is of course "it depends."

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  31. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by davidwr · · Score: 1

    What sort of file system are you thinking about for WORM - OpenZFS? You'll need a copy-on-write filesystem to justify a WORM

    I am thinking of applications where files are never deleted and which the filesystem - if it exists at all - is only appended to. Basically, a character device in Unix/Linux. The "canonical example" would be an archiving/backup application which did not support erasure or media re-use.

    Perhaps the best analogy would be a hypothetical tape drive in which write-head could not erase data once it was written, and writes could only occur in fixed-sized blocks immediately after the last block that was written to.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  32. Just as important by seven+of+five · · Score: 1

    Introducing the 16TB drives will make everything less than that, cheaper.

  33. Will GB price change? by Bender+Unit+22 · · Score: 1

    While the capacity of spinning disk have gone up, the price pr. GB seems to have been the same for some years now. I wonder if it ever will change og be cheaper?

  34. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by erice · · Score: 2

    I'd love to see someone come out with a cheap, trivial-to-use "WORM* USB stick" along with "plug and play" backup software.

    You may be waiting a while. Flash isn't cheap enough and it has data retention problems. Phase change memories (of which 3D Crosspoint seem to be a variant) also have difficulties with long term retention. If you don't need it to be a USB stick, WORM behaviour is a commonly available in optical storage media, including Blu-Ray.

  35. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by denbesten · · Score: 1

    Most people that care about "forensic purposes" purchase a device called a "hardware write blocker".

  36. Re:Slightly off-topic: I want "WORM SSDs" for back by networkBoy · · Score: 1

    yes, once the FACS is locked a fuse is blown preventing any changes to the FACS array, so while its cells are Flash (and technically erasable) the ability to write or erase them is hardware blocked. The enforcement on the rest of the memory arrays is firmware blocked based on the FACS settings. Of course you lose the ability to TRIM, and if you don't write an entire block you lose the remainder (flash must be written block at a time, so to write a partial block it's a read-erase-write step, usually implemented as read-modify-write[another block]-erase[initial block]).
    -nB

    --
    whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump