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cmaier

Suspended
Jul 25, 2007
25,405
33,471
California

That's 6TB disk x 4 bays, is all. In other words, up until today, that was the most disk you could fit in the box. It's not the maximum volume size (which is determined by the OS and is currently 108TB).

(Note that it doesn't say that's the maximum volume size - it just says "up to 24TB personal media bank" which means that's the amount of disk you can fit in it).
 

furi0usbee

macrumors 68000
Jul 11, 2008
1,790
1,382
It's kind of crazy when you think about it. When I first got my computer back in 1995, it had Windows 95 on it, and had a 4GB hard drive.

4GB HDD??? That was 10x what I had on my first computer. Packard Bell Legend Supreme 1956. It was running a 486 with DX/2 technology. It was 25MHz but it used some magic to get it to 50MHz. The drive was 400MB, and I never filled it! That was back in March, 1994. I was a senior in H.S. at the time. I also paid $400 (well my father) for 16MB of RAM. Ouch. $795 for an Epson scanner. Ouch again!

Now, I have 8000MB of RAM and 256,000MB of HDD storage. That's over 600 times the HDD and 500 times the RAM. That's what 20 years will do.

Oh, I had Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
 

Blackforge

macrumors 6502
Mar 8, 2008
290
19
That's 6TB disk x 4 bays, is all. In other words, up until today, that was the most disk you could fit in the box. It's not the maximum volume size (which is determined by the OS and is currently 108TB).

(Note that it doesn't say that's the maximum volume size - it just says "up to 24TB personal media bank" which means that's the amount of disk you can fit in it).

True, you're going to hit the ext4 volume size limit of 16TB. Since it uses a 32-bit processor as well, any other file system would be limited to the same limits.
 

cmaier

Suspended
Jul 25, 2007
25,405
33,471
California
True, you're going to hit the ext4 volume size limit of 16TB. Since it uses a 32-bit processor as well, any other file system would be limited to the same limits.

According to Wikipedia, the ext4 volume size limit is 1 EiB, which makes more sense than 16TB since my synology's are using ext4 and each have volume sizes slightly north of 20TB. Of course, my synology's are using 64-bit Intel i3's.
 

the8thark

macrumors 601
Apr 18, 2011
4,628
1,735
It's kind of crazy when you think about it. When I first got my computer back in 1995, it had Windows 95 on it, and had a 4GB hard drive. The salesman at Sears told me "4GB is all you will EVER need!"



Now, we're at 8TB hard drives. I know they aren't producing them for consumers yet, but still. Wow.
4GB? My first computer, 512k Mac, upgraded from a 128k didn't even have a hard drive. It was the OS on a floppy disc in the internal drive and the apps you wanted to use on an external drive.
Then I moved to an SE with a 40MB Hard drive I think. etc etc you get the point. HDDs will keep improving till you hit some physical/chemical hard limit to increasing their size in the current format.
 

repentix

macrumors regular
May 26, 2013
205
2
What is The difference between the helium method used on The WD and the other method from Seagate?


Anyway, I thought helium supply is going to run out in 2030
 

Dilster3k

macrumors 6502a
Jul 20, 2014
790
3,206
That's just insane, not too long ago GBs were so expensive. In the near future we'll be getting SSDs with massive TB amounts for low prices.
 

Quu

macrumors 68040
Apr 2, 2007
3,423
6,824
The Backblaze study really hurt poor Seagate's reputation. People forget that the drives they used (and studied) were the highest capacity-to-price ratio drives that the manufacturers offered.

It certainly made me think twice about replacing my faulty stock MBP Seagate with another Seagate. I didn't. But I really hope that Seagate can build its reputation back up. It's clearly a great innovator in the HD industry.

Seagate used to offer 5 year warranties to consumers. Now they offer only 1 and 2 year warranties.

How can we trust their products if they don't? Corsair offers 7 year warranties on their AX series Power Supplies you can be sure the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) on those is over 10 years, it says so right on the box.

Hitachi offer 3 and 5 year warranties on their Hard Drives. This encourages confidence in their products.

Here is a quote from Seagate announcing their warranty changes in December 2011:
Effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from a 5 year to a 3 year warranty period for Nearline drives, 5 years to 1 year for certain Desktop and Notebook Bare Drives, 5 years to 3 years on Barracuda XT and Momentus XT, and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics.
- Quote from TechPowerUp

On a personal note, every single seagate drive I have ever owned has died or shown near death (below 30% on SMART health data) within the first 12 months of ownership. I have never had that happen on any of the 15+ Samsungs 10+ Western Digitals of 9+ Hitachis I've owned. I will never buy a Seagate drive again.
 

JamesPDX

Suspended
Aug 26, 2014
1,056
495
USA
That's pretty close to right. For me it's twice as much as the last generation disk.

My pattern has been that when my working drive fills up, I buy two of the latest gen drives and make them my Time Machine drive. I then take the Time Machine pair and promote it to be my new working drive. It's worked about right for a few generations now.

On a related topic, I'd been using a QNAP TS-419PII with 3TB Hitachi Ultrastars (via ethernet) for Time Machine (don't); but it's never really been reliable past Snow Leopard even with AFP enabled, so it's just for major storage. (It's really too bad that I can't use it for Lightroom.) Time Machine backups are now 100% local and I'm using a separate drive with scheduled Carbon Copy Cloner backups. My backup system? -Trust, but Verify.

I want something from here: http://www.small-tree.com/
 

mrxak

macrumors 68000
Crazy. I hadn't even seen any 6 TB drives for sale, yet. I figured those were the next big thing and still a year or so away from being reliable (word of advice, never be a hard drive capacity early adopter, I've been burned).

Anyway, at this point in time, I find 3-4 TB drives to be the sweet spot. I have no idea what my overall data storage is right now minus back-ups, as I have a ton of hard drives, but if I was going to pick up another drive today I'd probably go for 4 TB and be comfortable for a good while. 8 TB is likely to be prohibitively expensive for the speed at which I'd actually use it up. In a couple years, or if 4K video content starts to really take off in the consumer space before then, I could see 8 TB being the standard for my use cases, but I'm just not there yet.

If I was in the market for another 8 TB of storage, though, I'd probably go for two 4 TBs, instead, and either RAID them or just have two disks. Probably would be cheaper and certainly I'd feel safer with them. I'm not working with multi-terabyte files (yet), that actually require an 8 TB single volume.
 

dabotsonline

macrumors member
Apr 14, 2014
46
13
That's 6TB disk x 4 bays, is all. In other words, up until today, that was the most disk you could fit in the box. It's not the maximum volume size (which is determined by the OS and is currently 108TB).

(Note that it doesn't say that's the maximum volume size - it just says "up to 24TB personal media bank" which means that's the amount of disk you can fit in it).

You're right:

Robust Scalability


With 12 HDD trays and up to 216TB of total storage capacity2, RS3614xs/RS3614RPxs is designed to grow with businesses and provides the ability to seamlessly expand a single volume up to 108TB on the fly.
RS3614xs/RS3614RPxs supports up to 36 HDDs or SSDs for flexible capacity and balanced performance to meet the needs of varying applications and processes. When the storage capacity of RS3614xs/RS3614RPxs nears its limit, expansion is easily accomplished with Synology RX1214/RX1214RP via specially-designed connection cables to maximize data transmission throughput between main server and expansion units.
Management of the large storage space on RS3614xs/RS3614RPxs is simple and flexible. Multiple Volumes on RAID allows users to create more than one volume on a RAID structure, providing a flexible and efficient way to manage the storage across all hard drives. When the need for more space arises, the volume could be easily expanded without any service disruption.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/overview/RS3614xs

The Max File System size (or the Max Volume size) doesn't equal to the Max Internal Capacity, which is limited by the aggregated space of installed drives.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/spec/RS3614xs

216TB is based on 36 x 6TB HDDs in RAID-0, therefore 36 x 8TB HDDs will be 288TB. Hopefully DSM 6.0 will have full support for btrfs RAID-6 (SHR-2 style) to allow volume sizes above 108TB!
 

wikiverse

macrumors 6502a
Sep 13, 2012
691
958
It's kind of crazy when you think about it. When I first got my computer back in 1995, it had Windows 95 on it, and had a 4GB hard drive. The salesman at Sears told me "4GB is all you will EVER need!"



Now, we're at 8TB hard drives. I know they aren't producing them for consumers yet, but still. Wow.

I had a 286 dos PC with a 1MB hard drive. The drive was about the size if six 3.5" hard drives.
 

Ed217

macrumors 6502
Nov 7, 2012
341
79
Virginia
Every Seagate drive I ever owned died an early unfortunate death. I stick with WD drives, which work well and WD is a company with great support.
 

Lancer

macrumors 68020
Jul 22, 2002
2,217
147
Australia
Back in my day... we were downloading Mandrake Linux in 5-7 days on Dial-up!

I remember the first Mac the family bought came with a 20Mb external SCSI HDD.

The good new with 8Tb is the 2-3-4Tb ones will be coming down in price even more.
 

Steve121178

macrumors 603
Apr 13, 2010
6,434
7,103
Bedfordshire, UK
It's kind of crazy when you think about it. When I first got my computer back in 1995, it had Windows 95 on it, and had a 4GB hard drive. The salesman at Sears told me "4GB is all you will EVER need!"



Now, we're at 8TB hard drives. I know they aren't producing them for consumers yet, but still. Wow.

4GB would have been enough for the lifetime of that PC.

My first Windows 95 PC came with a whopping 750MB HDD :cool:
 

matrix07

macrumors G3
Jun 24, 2010
8,226
4,892
It's kind of crazy when you think about it. When I first got my computer back in 1995, it had Windows 95 on it, and had a 4GB hard drive. The salesman at Sears told me "4GB is all you will EVER need!"

My first computer had 512 MB. hard disk and I was never sure I'd be able to fill it up. :D
 

ArtOfWarfare

macrumors G3
Nov 26, 2007
9,568
6,072
I wonder when we'll be getting 8TB consumer SSD's. 4-5 years? I know Moore's law is slowing down so maybe 10-15 years.

I would estimate never. We've had 1 TB hard drives for a few years now and I haven't heard anyone complain about running out of space on them. Further, as we accelerate into the cloud, individuals requirements for storage space is going to continue going down. I expect that we're probably going to settle down around 128 GB in a few years. It'll be enough for your OS and apps, plus the other files that you always need access to, and everything else will be on the cloud, where you'll have a video and music streaming service (IE, Netflix and Spotify), plus a service where you upload your pictures and videos to (IE, flickr and YouTube), plus someplace where you share your documents (iCloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive).

So the cloud companies will obviously want these 8 TB drives because customer demand for their cloud storage is going to be going up, but customers will probably never want them.

There will probably be other specialized professionals that will want 8 TB drives. IE, people with artistic jobs, where they need to deal with a lot of raw, uncompressed, media that is of the highest quality possible.
 

Lancer

macrumors 68020
Jul 22, 2002
2,217
147
Australia
The one other thing I wish I'd done with my 2012 iMac is up the HDD to 3Tb along with the Fusion. Lucky I have a number of external HDDs for most of my media files.
 
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