Seagate Ships First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive 316
MojoKid (1002251) writes Seagate announced today that it has begun shipping the world's first 8 Terabyte hard drive. The 8TB hard drive comes only five months after Western Digital released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate's high capacity HDDs had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.
Re: Switched double speed half capacity, realistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Before SSD's were all the rage, a common thing to get a speed boost was to do 'short stroke' the drive. Essentially, all you do is only partition the first third of the drive and use that space.
The theory is that the head doesn't need to move around as much and speeds up the drive. I've never done it but modders used to swear by it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:multi-drive RV tolerance?? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've got a 32tb array in my RV so that's where my mind went even tho I know it can't be right. :) It's traveled 11,000 miles without a blip and was expanded from 26tb last fall. I don't have any proof to back it up but I'll bet it's one of the largest mobile arrays in the world. Sure, it'd be easy to build a bigger one but who needs that much storage on the move?
Also, I'm getting a kick out of the idea of 8tb drives. Most of mine are 2tb and I just started swapping in 4tb drives last year. Haven't even had a chance/reason to start putting in 6tb drives and now they're up to 8tb. Pretty soon, I'll be able to whittle it down to a mirror.
Re:Porn (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey, porn in not the only kind of data. There are youtube how to videos through dirpy.com, which, like porn, could be up in the air and a future raid into your home by the government might force you to erase those - I hope you could keep the advertising banner like things, promotional material samples, as in, do I get a right to keep copyrighted junkmail I never asked for delivered by the post office to my snail mail post box, similarly do I get to keep spam images in my emails that I never asked for in the first place, or are those copyrighted and they want to make me pay for them? But there is the clear cut clear case of public domain, which they are still trying to assault and undermine. And pure public domain, like Wikipedia pages, and pre-1923 pdfs at books.google.com, those you have a right to keep on your TB harddrive, no matter what, unless they change the law and they say we no longer have nomadic public domain lands, and stick your pole down and claim public domain nomadic lands as your own through homesteading rights, so all public domain stuff might go up on auction sale, and then you will be banned from knowing anything unless you can show a receipt, else you will be forced to stay dumb.
So archive.org sometimes does not bother compressing the ebooks and pdfs like books.google.com does on a lot of stuff, and it's like there is no amount of public domain scientific literature that I'm satiated with having in on my 1TB portable harddrive, the only issue being I requested TWC to take me to a higher plan so I can download more, instead they kept talking about download speed, I'm like keep that the same, I wanna pay more so I don't feel bad so bad about the total monthly data transfer, and somehow it got left at the same rate I signed up at, and I haven't tried again to get on the higher cost plan. I'm still getting a lot of downloads this way anyway, but sometimes I hold back my exuberance thinking about the total monthly data transfer, which they are kind to show you.
Re:Switched double speed half capacity, realistic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pay 2x-3x the amount for a SSD of the same size as the 15k SAS, and you gain 50x improvement in your IOPS. For workloads where that matters, it's an easy choice to make now. As soon as you say something like "we'll short-stroke some 15k RPM SAS drives" - you should be considering enterprise level SSD instead. Less spindles needed, less power needed, and huge performance gains.
The only downside of SSDs is that write-endurance. A 600GB SSD can only handle about 120TB of writes over its lifespan (give or take 20-50% depending on the controller, technology, etc). The question is - are you really writing more then 60GB/day to the drive (in which case it will wear out in 5 years).
And more importantly... will you care if it wears out in 4-5 years? That you could handle the same workload using fewer spindles and less power likely pays for itself, including replacing the drives every 4-5 years.
anyone remember when (Score:5, Interesting)
Which Filesystem? (Score:2, Interesting)
A bit off topic, but what would be the recommended file system to use on a drive like this when you're using it for backups? Something with built-in file checksums or is using ext2/3/4 and writing a script to generate and validate CRC files better?
I bought a 4TB WD My Book yesterday and am slightly concerned about the high failure rates for the 3TB version of the drive. Something about bad controllers...
Re: Switched double speed half capacity, realistic (Score:5, Interesting)