WD Rolls Out New 2.5-Inch HDDs For the First Time In 7 Years (tomshardware.com) 63
Western Digital has unveiled new 6TB external hard drives -- "the first new capacity point for this hard drive drive form factor in about seven years," reports Tom's Hardware. "There is a catch, though: the HDD is slow and will unlikely fit into any mobile PCs, so it looks like it will exclusively serve portable and specialized storage products." From the report: Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external storage devices and is not available separately. All of these drives (excluding the already very thick G-Drive ArmorATD) are thicker than their 5 TB predecessors, which may suggest that in a bid to increase the HDD's capacity, the manufacturer simply installed another platter and made the whole drive thicker instead of developing new platters with a higher areal density.
While this is a legitimate way to expand the capacity of a hard drive, it is necessary to note that 5TB 2.5-inch HDDs already feature a 15-mm z-height, which is the highest standard z-height for 2.5-inch form-factor storage devices. As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC. When it comes to specifications of the latest My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs, Western Digital only discloses that they offer up to 130 MB/s read speed (just like their predecessors), feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5 GT/s) interface using either a modern USB Type-C or Micro USB Type-B connector and do not require an external power adapter.
While this is a legitimate way to expand the capacity of a hard drive, it is necessary to note that 5TB 2.5-inch HDDs already feature a 15-mm z-height, which is the highest standard z-height for 2.5-inch form-factor storage devices. As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC. When it comes to specifications of the latest My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs, Western Digital only discloses that they offer up to 130 MB/s read speed (just like their predecessors), feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5 GT/s) interface using either a modern USB Type-C or Micro USB Type-B connector and do not require an external power adapter.
where are the raptors? (Score:3)
where are the raptors?
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Actually, they should fit in most desktop PCs (Score:5, Informative)
I was a bit surprised by the "As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC" comment. While that may be true for laptops, many desktops still have 3.5" and even 5.25" bays, and 2.5" adapters to the larger form factors have been readily available for years. While the >15mm Z-height may be problematic for adapters using removable drive trays, there shouldn't be any problems for internal use, as 3.5" drives are typically 20-26mm high and 5.25" drives are around 42mm high.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
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There are already more efficient uses of 3.5" drive bays with 2TB to 22TB drives available:
https://www.westerndigital.com... [westerndigital.com]
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Depen
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>"Depends on how old the laptop. I have old PATA laptops that do have space for a 15mm drive (most drives were that tall). But only maybe 4 or 5 years later, the height standard moved from 15mm to 9.5mm. "
But these are NOT 15mm drives, they are taller. No laptop (that I know of) was built to accept drives larger than 15, regardless of how old, because that was the maximum of the specification.
Re:Actually, they should fit in most desktop PCs (Score:4)
What specification? If we're talking about old PATA drives I have a Seagate ST9235AG drive (still works!) that's 19.05 mm tall (while being the same roughly on the other dimensions like a "regular" 2.5"). Look it up, the datasheet is still online. It came from a Compaq laptop and of course there were plenty similar ones (both drives and laptops).
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Built to accept vs can accept. There are some where the space is simply a bit bigger and larger drives will fit, or you get a bit of ventilation when using smaller drives.
Re:Actually, they should fit in most desktop PCs (Score:5, Informative)
You can fit more than one "normal" height 2.5" drive in a 3.5" bay, let alone a 5.25" bay [amazon.com], so that would allow greater storage capacity than a single oversize 2.5" drive.
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But why though? If you're going to have a 3.5" bay, just get a 3.5" drive, one that isn't highly specialised, highly expensive, and limits the width. When you remove those 3 components you can simply buy a single 12TB (or larger) driver and call it a day.
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Same for external - they're too fragile to be portable at these capacities anyway. And they're almost certainly SMR, which are already slow at 7200RPM in a larger drive. It's not like these are going inside of laptops anyway.
Re: Actually, they should fit in most desktop PCs (Score:2)
Well, you could run them in a software RAID config for reliability if you have a smaller amount of data that you don't want trusted to one 3.5" drive.
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In fact 2.5" drives are often the only ones that fit into modern desktop cases, as many have not ditched 3.5" bays and only have room for 2.5" SSDs. Often the vertical clearance is minimal, but a 9mm HDD will fit.
I'm interested as they make decent high capacity USB drives. 3.5" ones require a separate power supply because apparently no company has figured out how to make USB PD work with them yet. Or maybe they just don't want to make them because too many people don't know if their laptop's USB C port supp
vs. nvme (Score:3)
I just assembled a 2TB nvme usb 3.2 drive for $129 for desktop backups.
At $229 for the rugged WD spinning rust this drive is going to be very niche.
You can have a 4TB "10 Gbps" drive for the same [amzn.to] money [amzn.to].
I'm guessing it's SMR too? It's probably OK to leave for overnight backups but 130MB/s was exciting in 1999.
Students these days have huge datasets to work on and they're always starved for time.
Re:vs. nvme (Score:5, Insightful)
CMR drives only get 130MB/sec media speeds too. The speed you can read data off the drive hasn't really increased.
SMR drives will just be really slow writing since there's two writes - first to the CMR area for fast writing (most writes are bursty, so the drive can write data to the CMR area to land data at media speeds. Then when the drive is idle it can move that data from the CMR area to the SMR area.
But yes, hard drive speeds haven't really increased - you're still looking at 130MB/sec off the media.
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The benefit of hard disks are cost and that they will hold data for longer on the shelf (SSDs will "erase" themselves in a couple years without power).
Re: vs. nvme (Score:2)
Re:vs. nvme (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need to guess, let alone they don't have the density there to do otherwise they're putting SMR everywhere nowadays, heck there are 1TB and even 500GB drives that are SMR (there's even a WD Black 500GB SMR, freakin' BLACK that was supposed to be the performance line!!!).
130MB/s would be VERY good, low single-MB digit is more of the norm once you used it a little more. It isn't overnight backups (unless it's a tiny incremental) it's more like days for anything sizeable and weeks if you need to refresh a full backup in a somehow more complex way that requires rewriting most of the drive. The test that triggered the "SMRgate" was replacing a zfs drive, a full (4TB in that case) disk write - took well under a day with any other drive and like 1-2 weeks on the 4TB Red SMR. And that was for "only" 4TBs and the 2.5" are of course way worse.
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There's still a market for storage size. The only issue I'm seeing is the lack of overlap with large storage requirements and 2.5" formfactor. Either way 2TB is cute, my last purchase was 16TB drives.
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Colour me disapointed (Score:3)
And here was I, thinking that I could put some of these drives in SAN/NAS enclosures, you know, the ones that have 24 2.5" HDD bays in 2U, and expand their life and storage... But no, WD took the cheap way.
Yes, SAN/NAS controllers with 24 2.5" bays are a daying breed, but that is in large part because there are no more big 7200RPM 2.5 HDDs. Even then, I still recomended those enclosures to strting telcos (In lieu of the 8 bay 3.5" drives), because you could start with the controller only (doing 2 raid 6 of 10~12 drives each), and latter, when your data exceeded capacity, migrate to a 75 drive 4U fibre channel shelf, and use the 24 2.5" bays for SAS SSDs for different types of caches (files, blocks or objects). But alas, those times are long gone.
Now SSDs are nvme, and use a "ruler form factor" to rule them all.
But still there is a population of (still supported) SAN/NAS with 2.5" bays that could use 2.5" dives @ 7200 RPm with higher capacities, even if SATA... Let's hope seagate and/or Toshiba take notice.
PS: If anyone has a doubt after reading this post, this applies to to hybrid SAN/NAS arrays in datacenters, not PCs, Laptops, or consumer/Prosumer NAS/SAN
Re:Colour me disapointed (Score:4, Interesting)
They're only a 'dying breed' because of the bullshit that is SMR 2.5" drives and all the companies refusing to release host-aware zoned drives without charging a literal 400% price premium specifically so the cheap one CAN'T be used in storage arrays.
There's a reason USED Spinrite M9T drives are selling for double what they sold for new, they're literally the last non-SMR 2TB 2.5" drive model ever made.
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It would be really nice if they were CMR and one could do exactly that. Mainly because there are multi-drive adapters, and you can find 3.5" to 2.5" adapters that have built in RAID 1. This would allow one to have a cheap NAS, fill it with drive pairs and adapters, use RAID 0, and have decent protection against disaster without having to go for a more expensive model. It also would allow a desktop computer that doesn't have hardware RAID to have protection against HDD failure as well.
Re: Colour me disapointed (Score:1)
For most if not all datacenter products, SSD is the best option for that size factor. If you need large cheap storage, 4 spinning disks fit in 1U and give you at least 40TB usable space (RAID10), if not more. If you go 12x6TB in that same 1U, you get not much more but you can get SSDs of that size for about the same or lower TCO once you include the 100W delta in power consumption. There is one company weâ(TM)re piloting a 1PB SSD solution in 3U with the back being mostly the power and the 24 ports 400
External drive form factor (Score:1)
Fitting in desktop PCs... (Score:5, Informative)
These drives probably have the USB interface soldered directly onto the PC board instead of using a USB-to-SATA adapter plugged onto the drive internally. These aren't normal 2.5" hard drives with SATA power and data connectors. You might be able to remove the drive from it's enclosure and mount it inside a computer, but you will still have to connect it to the computer with a USB cable and not a SATA cable. Western Digital Black external drives (and most likely the other WD product lines) have been this way for a while.
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They've been power managing hard drives over USB for decades, there is no reason to think that they can't still do that with the USB interface integrated directly onto the drive's PCB.
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The modern USB external drives are USB to the drive itself. It isn't a USB to SATA interface. Shucking it, as you can do with larger external drives, isn't going to provide one with anything useful. Especially the ones like the WD My Passport which have a custom USB controller with always-on AES encryption.
Thanks (Score:2)
But absolutely no one needs or wants this. There are no use cases where I can't get something better for cheaper.
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Yea I've had their 4TB and 5TB versions and they are absolutely useless for anything practical.
Seems nice on paper, but in reality its just useless, even for $90.
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useless for anything practical
Seems like they would work well in an NVR. The non-laptop compatible design doesn't matter. It has the capacity for recording video from a household of cameras and write intensive, streaming applications are one of the few good remaining use cases for a HDD.
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While I don't doubt that they wouldn't work poorly or anything, I can get more, and better, storage for cheaper for all possible applications.
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This is what I thought as well, and in less than a year it all went tits up.
Nowadays I only run 2TB NVMe drives in RAID0.
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Ok, and for the same price I can get double or triple the capacity. This is a useless product release.
Re:Thanks (Score:4)
They are nice for offsite backups, where you just plug the drive in, use whatever encryption you like, throw on a copy of your data, unplug, and throw on a shelf offsite. No need for a power supply, no need for an adapter. However, because capacity is so limited, and for the price of the 6 TB drive, I can buy two reconditioned 10-12 TB drives that have a clean SMART status, I'm better off just using a "toaster" for backups, tossing the drives in a case (or perhaps using the box they came in), and doing that route. As an added bonus, the larger drives are CMR, so I can do things like ZFS or LUKS + dm-integrity, which will detect bit-rot immediately, rather than allow for files to be corrupted silently. "Formatting" one of the 5 TB drives with LUKS + dm-integrity can take a week easily due to SMR.
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That's my point. The capacity and price is absolutely ridiculous. There are bigger and cheaper drives to do it.
Re: Thanks (Score:1)
WD wouldn't release this drive unless there was a need for it.
And, SMR crap? (Score:2)
Because I have found that the only good use these have is as paperweight. I have moved to CMR 3.5" drives, these you can at least fill or erase in a few days.
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SMR is really good at dealing with full disk images. When your files are over 500GB in size, the disadvantages of SMR don't really matter.
Re:And, SMR crap? (Score:4)
Not necessary. I had a pair of Toshiba 5TB drives that I needed to physically destroy, because a linear (!) overwrite would have taken 40 days each and, obviously, secure erase did not work (USB drives). WD SMR is a bit better, but still inferior in linear overwrite to CMR. So, yes, it matters.
Re:And, SMR crap? (Score:5, Informative)
WD and Seagate have multiple lines of these drives. For example, WD has the WD Elements and the My Passport lines. The WD Elements is just a "plain" USB controller, while the My Passport controller has always-on AES-256 encryption that one can cryptographically reset, drop the old keys the controller was using and start with new keys, effectively making all data on the drive unreadable. I like using the My Passport drives for backups, although I do take into account drive failure, because with the PW protection as an outer "layer", if the drive is stolen, most people will guess the password, then click "erase drive", and enjoy the drive. The data on it will be long gone. Of course, I use software encryption, but having the hardware have a layer and provide a (perhaps rather flimsy) defense against brute force is a good thing. Just to reiterate, the always-on encryption can make it impossible to recover, so make sure the drive doesn't have the only copy of critical stuff.
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Yep, did that on two WD passports. Lost them because you could do the first step of the secure erase but not the second. Command not implemented. WD is an utterly crappy company.
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Well in WD's defence, you somehow have a problem with literally every tech company. :-)
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Not really with every one, but I use a lot of tech and I do not like bad engineering one bit. Unfortunately bad engineering is far too common in the IT space.
If you want some things I do like, I still think Lenovo makes mostly pretty good laptops (I have three and two before from IBM), Samsung makes very solid SSDs (lost one so far and it was more than 5 years old, perfectly acceptable IMO given that I have something like 20 in total), AMD makes good CPUs, 3.5" CMR HDDs from WD are ok and unlike 2.5" USB WD
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Not a problem with it being USB. The UASP protocol lets you encapsulate and send any arbitrary ATA command.
Re: And, SMR crap? (Score:2)
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Sorry, since I cannot wait 40 days for a linear disk overwrite and because there were confidential documents on there, I had to do physical destruction. I do not even mind them making SMR, what I do mind is them not clearly marking them in the USB space.
This is just a USB external drive... (Score:4)
From TFA:
"Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external storage devices and is not available separately."
It would be nice if they did offer higher capacity drives in the 2.5" form factor. With NAS drives, one can buy two, use a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter which does RAID 1, allowing for even a single drive server, or just a desktop to have protection against drive failure. 2.5" drives are a lot easier to get into racks and bays as well.
As for this drive, yes, 6 TB is more than five, but it would be nice to see a larger capacity jump. Since the external drive can be its own form factor, why not have it 2-3 times higher, and go crazy with stacking platters, as per a discussion a few years back on a new HDD format for servers.
For external backups, one's best bet is probably an internal drive and a "toaster" SATA to USB adapter, as well as a shock resistant case to put the drive in, if one wants to do offsite GFS (grandfather, father, son) backups. The external USB drives tend to be SMR, which may be good enough to sling data on, move the drive offsite, and toss it on a shelf, but if doing more advanced things like using ZFS or LUKS with dm-integrity (which can provide block level bit rot detection as well as authenticated checksumming), a CMR drive would be better.
4TB Nvmes are cheap now (Score:2)
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Not that cheap.
Yep, the cheapest 4TB SSD (NVME) is £189.
I've 30 years of accumulated crap, including a large DVD collection that has been ripped to MP3, as well as all the other digital downloads, game installers, backups and what not sitting on a 6TB drive (OK, it's about 60% full). I'd like to replace that but the cheapest SSD over 5TB is £525 and that's a Samsung 870 QVO (a performance drive).
Where's the cheap, high capacity SSD storage? An 8TB spinning disk is £125.
Surely I'm not the only pe
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Eh, how reliable are the SSDs, though? I have 30-year old HDDs that function at home and work. My first SDDs are of a model that users claim have failed them after a few years...meh.
I'd honestly say they're as reliable as modern HDDs... pretty reliable but they can both fail without warning (or loads of warning, the predictive failure analysis is getting pretty good these days)... however the defence against failed drives is still the same as it always was... multiple copies on different drives.
The only issue I've ever had with an SSD is the old Crucial 5000 hour bug, but Crucial had a firmware fix for that years before I hit it.
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What's the oldest SSD you'd say you have?
Still running? About 9 years. It's been an OS drive but going to get replaced by a new NVME when I finally get around to re-installing my OSs (yes, I said I'll do it, no need to remind me every six months).
That old Crucial I mentioned was a 2009 vintage if memory serves and I retired it years ago (it was only 240GB)
Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) = Slow 1-3 MB/s (Score:2)
I checked the product pages and data sheets and I don't see WD revealing which of their 2.5" HDD drives are SMR, unlike in their 3.5" HDD line.
Warm up the lawyers since WD got sued for the SMR instead of CMR fiasco and had to reveal the write format on their website but I don't see it anywhere for these drives, not even in the fine print.
If it is anything like their 5TB 2.5" HDD line then it'll probably be a SMR drive so it'll be dog slow on the order of 1-3 MB/s once the drive cache and CMR portion of the
Re: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) = Slow 1-3 M (Score:2)
Linux tools to get the info, hdparm -I and smartctl -x. (Stupid mobile keyboard auto correct.)
SSD Instead
I snagged an older Crucial X6 4TB SSD from Amazon a while back for $149.99 or $169.99 or something like that after I got burned and sick of the slow WD 2.5" HDD SMR writes. Now at least I get ~40 MB/s sustained writes for backups.
My only problem is that the other 4TB faster SSDs that are in external format for backups are way more expensive at $200-$300 USD online if I wanted a newer Gen drive with fas