1w ago

Seagate Sets New Record With 36TB Hard Drive And Teases Upcoming 60TB Model

techcrawlr.com Seagate Sets New Record With 36TB Hard Drive And Teases Upcoming 60TB Model

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I’m going to remind you that these fuckers are LOUD, like ROARING LOUD, so might not be suitable for your living room server.
- DON'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN HANDLE!! I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR ME, MY PC'S FANS ARE A LITTLE NOISY!!

OK...what's this HAMR technology and how does it play compared to the typical CMR/SMR performance differences?
- Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording. It uses a laser to heat the drive platter, allowing for higher areal density and increased capacity.
  I am ignorant on the CMR/SMR differences in performance
  
  I fear HAMR sounds like a variation on the idea of getting a coarser method to prepare the data to be written, just like on SMR. These kind of hard drives are good for slow predictable sequential storage, but they suck at writing more randomly. They're good for surveillance storage and things like that, but no good for daily use in a computer.

What about the writing and reading speeds?
- If you care about that, spinning rust is not the right solution for you.
  
  I mean, newer server-grade models with independent actuators can easily saturate a SATA 3 connection. As far as speeds go, a raid-5 or raid-6 setup or equivalent should be pretty damn fast, especially if they start rolling out those independent actuators into the consumer market.
  As far as latency goes? Yeah, you should stick to solid state...but this breathes new life into the HDD market for sure.
- It has some.
- The speed usually increases with capacity, but this drive uses HAMR instead of CMR, so it will be interesting to see what effect that has on the speed. The fastest HDDs available now can max out SATA 3 on sequential transfers, but they use dual actuators.

Now you can store even more data unsafely!
- You are not supposed to use these in a non-redundant config.
  
  Especially these, ye
  
  Even in an array I'd be terrified of more drive fails in a rebuild that is gonna take a long time.

I would not risk 36TB of data on a single drive let alone a Seagate. Never had a good experience with them.
- They seem to be very hit and miss in that there are some models with very low failure rates, but then there are some with very high.
  That said, the 36 TB drive is most definitely not meant to be used as a single drive without any redundancy. I have no idea what the big guys at Backblaze for an example, are doing, but I'd want to be able to lose two drives in an array before I lose all my shit. So RAID 6 for me. Still, I'd likely be going with smaller drives because however much a 36 TB drive costs, I don't wanna feel like I'm spending 2x the cost of one of those just for redundancy lmao
  
  I'd want to be able to lose two drives in an array before I lose all my shit. So RAID 6 for me.
  Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup solution, RAID is a high-availability solution.
  The point of RAID is not to safeguard your data, you need proper backups for that (3-2-1 rule of backups: 3 copies of the data on 2 different storage media, with 1 copy off-site). RAID will not protect your data from deletion from user error, malware, OS bugs, or anything like that.
  The point of RAID is so everyone can keep working if there is a hardware failure. It’s there to prevent downtime.
  
  Could you imagine the time it would take to resilver one drive.. Crazy.
  
  I use mirrors, so RAID 1 right now and likely RAID 10 when I get more drives. That's the safest IMO, since you don't need the rest of the array to resilver your new drive, only the ones in its mirror pool, which reduces the likelihood of a cascading failure.
- The only thing I want is reasonably cheap 3.5" SSDs. Sata is fine just let me pay $500 for a 12TB SSD please.
  
  Yeah, nvme drives show how little space the storage takes up. Just stick a bunch of them inside the 3.5" format, along with a controller and cooling, and that would be great for a large/slow (relative to NVME) drive capped by SATA speeds.
  I don't miss the noise hard drives make, plus it's nice to not really worry as much about what kind of magnetic activity might be going on around it, like is my subwoofer too close or what if my kid somehow gets her hands on a powerful magnet and wants to see if it will stick to my PC case.
- You couldn't afford this drive unless you are enterprise so there's nothing to worry about. They don't sell them by the 1. You have to buy enough for a rack at once.
  
  100%. 36tb is peanuts for data centres
- Ignoring the Seagate part, which makes sense... Is there a reason with 36TB?
  I recall IT people losing their minds when we hit the 1TB, when the average hard drive was like 80GB.
  So this growth seems right.
  
  It's raid rebuild times.
  The bigger the drive, the longer the time.
  The longer the time, the more likely the rebuild will fail.
  That said, modern raid is much more robust against this kind of fault, but still: if you have one parity drive, one dead drive, and a raid rebuild, if you lose another drive you're fucked.
  
  I recall IT people losing their minds when we hit the 1TB
  1TB? I remember when my first computer had a state of the art 200MB hard drive.
  
  It's so consistent it has a name: Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
  I heard that we were at the theoretical limit but apparently there's been a break through: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-bits-atom.html

I'm still not buying a seagate.
- Why?
  
  I bought a seagate. Brand new. 250gb, back when 250gb on one hard drive cost a fuckton.
  It sat in a box until I was done burning the files on my old 60gb hard drive onto dvd-r's.
  Finally, like 2 months later, I open the box. Install the drive. Put all the files from dvds onto the hard drive.
  And after I finished, 2 weeks later it totally dies. Outside of return window, but within the warranty period. Seagate refused to honor their warranty even though I still had the reciept.
  That was like 2005. Western Digital has now gotten my business ever since. Multiple drives bought. Not because the drives die, but because datawise I outgrow them. My current setup is 18TB and a 12TB. I figure by 2027 I'll need to update that 12TB to a 30TB. Which I assume will still cost $400 at that point.
  Return customer? No no. We'll hassle our customer and send bad vibes. Make him frustrated for ever shopping our brznd! Gotta protect that one time $400 purchase! It's totally worth losing 20 years of sales!
  
  I've bought 2 Seagate drives and both have failed. Meanwhile, I still have my 2 15yo WD drives working.
  I hope I didn't just jinx myself. Lol
  
  They have had reliability issues in the past.

Wonderful. Storage is a great thing, and I'm happy to have it.

me: torrents the entire spn series

Managing that many files becomes the challenge

Only ssd for me
- Yeah, but I can't afford 2TB of SSD, and I need to expand soon.
- You can't get SSDs that big except for some extremely expensive enterprise drives.

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