Seagate now shipping those monster 8TB drives

[jgreco]

http://www.seagate.com/about/newsro...ships-worlds-first-8TB-hard-drives-pr-master/

 

[Yatti420]

Not sure if Seagate changed anything drastically.. We will see how the helium compares long term.. I wonder if the next drives will have the "laser" writing..

 

[panz]

Reading some comments here I noticed that Seagate drives are not very popular in the "professional" NAS field. Same thing on BackBlaze Blog.

 

[cyberjock]

I bought a 6TB Seagate for $200 last night from Best Buy. I will admit though that Seagate isn't my first choice for a NAS. I bought the drive as a spare for my setup and as a way to haul a boatload of data around if I need to.

 

[jgreco]

Reading some comments here I noticed that Seagate drives are not very popular in the "professional" NAS field. Same thing on BackBlaze Blog.

It used to be that there were lots more hard drive vendors to choose from, but now with all the consolidation, there are two primary drive manufacturers: Seacrate and Worstern Digital.

The Backblaze blog isn't half as useful as they'd like you to think. The testing methodology is not particularly scientific and the data is skewed.

Also you have misspelled "hard" as "Seagate"; anyone in the "professional" NAS field knows that hard drives suck and that the best vendor for them is none of the above. At times WD will be better at manufacturing semi-reliable drives, at others, Seagate.

 

[panz]

Omg so you're saying that I have better buying Hitachi Ultrastar drives? ;)

 

[TXAG26]

I am liking the options these 8TB drives open up! 14.6TB RaidZ2 with only 4 drives, or bump it up to a 6-drive RaidZ2 with 29.1TB of available space!

 

[jamiejunk]

Reading some comments here I noticed that Seagate drives are not very popular in the "professional" NAS field. Same thing on BackBlaze Blog.

We've had nothing but good luck with the Seagate SAS drives. I have like 80 of them running 24/7 for years.

 

[9C1 Newbee]

“As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers,”

Read:NSA

 

[jgreco]

Read:NSA

LOL!!

 

[panz]

We've had nothing but good luck with the Seagate SAS drives. I have like 80 of them running 24/7 for years.

80 hard drives are, for what I mean, a low number to build a statistic. I have more of them running into my colleagues' PCs (about 650) and still these are small numbers.

BackBlaze seemed interesting to me because they use a lot of drives, so the "base" for a comparison is good.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, but panz, the problem there is they buy them in batches, install them in a chassis that stands them on end, and put them in a chassis that is almost certainly not designed to minimize rotational vibration issues.

One of my clients bought Seagate 1.5TB drives back when those first came out years ago. They've been problematic for a long time due to certain problems, some of which Seagate has even admitted to publicly. But they're now 8 year old drives. They're currently serving out a life sentence in a ZFS pool somewhere where they're causing grief because they're failing at a pace almost faster than the spares can be resilvered into the array... but this seems not entirely shocking for an 8 year old drive with known issues.

Some of those same model of drives were included in the BackBlaze report.

http://www.enterprisestorageforum.c...ng-a-disk-drive-how-not-to-do-research-1.html

 

[panz]

@jgreco I see your point; I thought that BackBlaze Storage Pods where not "state of the art" chassis for vibration control and, maybe, heat dissipation. But this is a "plus", from my point of view, for looking at their statistics, because of the stress that those environment conditions put on the hard drives.

 

[jgreco]

Perhaps that'd be meaningful if you happened to be Seagate R&D and were looking for ways to increase the reliability of drives.

As for me, I mostly just want storage that doesn't crap out. I want what I've got stored to stay stored, else I wouldn't have stored it. How you treat your spinners is a key factor in how well they fare.

The big problem with the BackBlaze Pod is that it is designed primarily to be cheap. If you think about what is actually going on inside a hard drive, with heads flying over platters separated by a tiny cushion of air, for example, you can picture a bit of what vibration means to a hard drive. There's really not much in the Pod design to reduce vibration. If you look at one of Supermicro's 4U 90 drive JBOD's, there's going to be some vibration there too, but at least each drive is fastened in a tray...!

 

[Z300M]

Reading some comments here I noticed that Seagate drives are not very popular in the "professional" NAS field. Same thing on BackBlaze Blog.

I don't know whether Backblaze has revised its opinion since, but in March they were saying that they had found the 4TB Seagate "desktop" drives (and HGST) to perform well:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4/ (about halfway down the page)

They were planning to try out the WD Reds, and perhaps by now they have done so, but I haven't read their blog lately.

As I wrote in another thread yesterday, the NewEgg feedback on the 4TB WD Reds is not very complimentary: many DOA drives and many that failed very early -- some even before formatting was complete.

Edit: It's just occurred to me to wonder whether some of thoe allegedly DOA WD Reds were connected to SATA ports that can't handle drives that large -- e.g., one of my iStarUSA drive cages cannot handle anything larger than 3TB.