Seagate Announces First 8 TB Hard Drive for Enterprise Customers

[HangmanSwingset]

WD has only failed once for me, but it was in the lemon 2006 iMac, so all bets are off there. Just curious, why do you like 2.5" drives in desktops?

Physical space within my case. Since they're designed for portable computers, I have always felt they are more rugged. Lower power consumption. I set two drives in one 3.5" mounting bracket, and set said brackets in a 2 slot 5.25" fan unit which increases airflow in my whole case.

 

[Analog Kid]

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/

Yeah, I'm happy with local storage for both working and backup drives. I'm still using an old Mac Pro, so I have 4 drive bays.

 

[michael_aos]

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.

Read it again. File systems / volumes >16TiB aren't "recommended" (and can be a pain).

 

[shamino]

What was really amusing was when I had a Mac LC II. It had an 80MB hard drive, and I later purchased a ZIP drive to accompany it. So, I had a 80MB hard drive, and 100MB floppies.

My Mac SE shipped with a 30MB drive in it. When it died, I replaced it with a 200M drive, which has proven to be more than I'll ever need for that SE.

When that drive dies (which might be a long time, since I don't turn that computer on that much anymore), my plan is to use one of my SCSI Zip-250 drives as its boot device. As long as I remember to eject the media at shutdown, it should last a very long time. (Yes, I know all about click-of-death. It never hit me, and I've been using Zip drives for a long time. I still use a SCSI Zip-100 drive to boot my Kurzweil synthesizer, since it's much much faster than using its built-in floppy drive.

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!"

And back in 1995, that was all you needed. And FWIW, I never came close to filling the 2GB drive that my old Win95 PC used.

Backblaze used Seagate consumer grade external backup drives for their data centers and pulled them out of the external case. These drives are not designed for data center applications. They used enterprise grade drives from hitachi and WD. It was a really unfair study. All the Seagate drives where also over a year out of their documented life span of 6 years.

Actually, most of their drives are consumer-grade. They use very few Enterprise drives. The economics of their particular usage pattern is such that it is cheaper to replace dead drives than to pay more for a bit more reliability. See also http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/

The study is fine, but you have to realize that their usage pattern - massive arrays of file storage running 24/7, with drives failing and being replaced all the time - is very different from what an individual will have on his personal systems.

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

It really depends on the model.

My experience has been that no consumer-grade drive is very reliable these days. The older ones (that are now over 7 years old) seem to be working great, but the newer ones all seem to fail after 2-3 years. On the other hand, enterprise-class drives do seem to last longer, and the warranties bear that out.

For example the Seagate NAS still advertizes a 1M hour MTBF and has a 3-year warranty. Their Enterprise Capacity drives are advertising 1.4M hour MTBF and 5 year warranty.

They cost more than the cheaper Desktop models, but not a whole lot more. FWIW, these are what I buy when I build new systems or assemble an external drive.

Now the NAS manufacturers need to remove the artificial volume size limit they place on arrays. Currently, you can't have a single volume larger than 16TB on any of the name brand NAS's (Synology, QNAP, Drobo, etc.), even though any modern OS supports volumes in the exabyte range.

That's going to depend greatly on the file system you format the volume with. According to Wikipedia, ext3 goes up to 32TB, ext4 goes up to 1EB (as of version 1.42). XFS goes up to 8EB on IRIX, but the Linux implementation tops out a 64TB. ZFS goes up to a whopping 256ZB. Macintosh Extended (HFS+) goes up to 8EB. NTFS has a theoretical limit of 16EB, but current implementations top out at 256TB.

I would assume that any NAS's limit is going to be based on their choice of file system and its drivers. If you want to roll your own network server by putting hard drives in a computer and running server software, your limits will be based entirely on the capabilities of your RAID hardware/software and the file system you use to format the volumes.

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.

A 32-bit processor doesn't force you to use a 32-bit block number. The C language has had standard support for 64-bit integers since 1999 (e.g. the "long long" type and <stdint.h>'s uint64_t typedef.) It would be pretty bad (and lazy) for a modern implementation to use a type like "int" or "long" for block numbers, which may be different sizes on different CPU architectures.

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. ...

For personal use, perhaps, but there are other applications. For instance, where I work, doing software development, a full build of our product is about 3GB, and it can balloon to about 75GB if full debugging information is generated. Every developer typically works with 3-4 builds at once, and some people have dozens. So we're looking at between 12 and 300GB per user on our file servers. And then couple that with the fact that deleted files don't immediately free up their storage thanks to NetApp's Snapshot hourly-backup software. It doesn't take a lot of users in this environment to require tens of TB of storage for everybody to work comfortably.

Now in contrast, my home server (a Mac mini) containing files for the three members of my family consumes about 350GB for everything, including the OS, applications, two large music collections (to sync to our iPods) and a few VirtualBox hard drive images. I predict that the 1.5TB I've got (two 750G hard drives) will probably be enough to last until the drives die (or we decide to upgrade the computer.) I use larger drives for backup (two 2TB drives for cloning the server, and a 3TB drive for Time Machine) but that's because they store a history of revisions of files, not just the latest ones we use every day. Again, I think they won't fill up before we end up having to replace them due to age or failure.

 

[cmaier]

Read it again. File systems / volumes >16TiB aren't "recommended" (and can be a pain).

Whatever. Here's how one of my synology's is configured. ext4, 20TB volume. No problems at all.

 

[GekiRed]

Think of all the anime and manga scanlations and Japanese superhero shows I could store on one of these bad boys! ^_^

 

[CylonGlitch]

Oh you kids are so funny.

First computer :
8086 (4.77MHz)
128k RAM
dual 360k 5.25" full height floppies
tiny green screen
$4000 pricetag

Second computer
8086 (6MHz)
256k RAM
dual 360k 5.25" floppies
5MB Hard drive
Monochrome display (B&W)
$4500 price
[This was wicked fast and a HUGE hard drive --- I even used the phrase, "More than I would ever need!"]

 

[mawyatt1]

Oh you kids are so funny.

First computer :
8086 (4.77MHz)
128k RAM
dual 360k 5.25" full height floppies
tiny green screen
$4000 pricetag

Second computer
8086 (6MHz)
256k RAM
dual 360k 5.25" floppies
5MB Hard drive
Monochrome display (B&W)
$4500 price
[This was wicked fast and a HUGE hard drive --- I even used the phrase, "More than I would ever need!"]

How about an Apple II (1.024MHz 6502) with 16K (yes that's K) of RAM and no hard nor floppy drive but a cassette deck where the program is stored on a audio cassette cartridge as a series of audio tones. I remember overclocking it to 2.048MHz!!

I remember writing my on "Pong" game in BASIC and storing it on the cassette!!

Geez I am really old!!

 

[cmaier]

How about an Apple II (1.024MHz 6502) with 16K (yes that's K) of RAM and no hard nor floppy drive but a cassette deck where the program is stored on a audio cassette cartridge as a series of audio tones. I remember overclocking it to 2.048MHz!!

I remember writing my on "Pong" game in BASIC and storing it on the cassette!!

Geez I am really old!!

First computer I used was a trs-80 model I. First computer I owned was a TI-99/4A. Old school.

 

[shamino]

Oh you kids are so funny.

First computer :
8086 (4.77MHz)...
128k RAM

You know what they say about people in glass houses?...

My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 attached to a spare B&W TV for a display.

It was soon replaced with a TRS-80 Color Computer with a whopping huge 16K of RAM. I used that machine for many years and wrote hundreds of programs for it. Sadly, they were all on cassette tapes which are pretty much unreadable today.

Then an Apple //c which I used for several years in high school.

It was only when I started college that I got my first "PC", which was an 8MHz 8088 PC (512K RAM, later upgraded to 640K, two 360K floppy drives, CGA graphics and an amber monochrome monitor).

First computer I used was a trs-80 model I. First computer I owned was a TI-99/4A. Old school.

... and as I was saying about glass houses... You got me beat. Your Model I predates my T/S 1000 and CoCo by five years.

(So, is anyone now going to chime in saying they first used an Altair 8080? )

 

[JamesPDX]

Does a dial-u[ teletypr

You know what they say about people in glass houses?...

My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 attached to a spare B&W TV for a display.

It was soon replaced with a TRS-80 Color Computer with a whopping huge 16K of RAM. I used that machine for many years and wrote hundreds of programs for it. Sadly, they were all on cassette tapes which are pretty much unreadable today.

Then an Apple //c which I used for several years in high school.

It was only when I started college that I got my first "PC", which was an 8MHz 8088 PC (512K RAM, later upgraded to 640K, two 360K floppy drives, CGA graphics and an amber monochrome monitor).
... and as I was saying about glass houses... You got me beat. Your Model I predates my T/S 1000 and CoCo by five years.

(So, is anyone now going to chime in saying they first used an Altair 8080? )

An amber monochrome monitor. That's awesome!
Well, it wasn't my own, but the first computer I ever used regularly was an ASR33 (or was it a 32?) Teletype that wasn't just dial-up, it was ROTARY dial-up! My dad had a Morrow later on that ran CPM and Wordstar. My friend had a Kaypro. My first computer that I purchased was a Mac Classic that ran Opcode Vision 1.4 beautifully on System 7. That was a great sequencer that I could slave to the timecode on my 4-track. That was a solid system for many years.

When I was a kid, an iPad was an Etch-a-Sketch.

 

[ChrisA]

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!"

When I got my first computer it had no disk drive. They were incredibly expensive back in the 70's and as large as a home washing machine. The computer itself, an i8080, was affordable but storage was very expensive. RAM was measured in kilobytes and the floppy disk held about 100K give or take.

The computers we had at work were 1000x more powerful.

 

[shamino]

the first computer I ever used regularly was an ASR33 (or was it a 32?) Teletype that wasn't just dial-up, it was ROTARY dial-up!

I assume that was via an acoustic coupler. They worked great for speeds of 300 baud or lower, as long as nobody in the room is making loud noises.

You also had to deal with carbon packing - a lot of phones from that era used a carbon-granule microphone element. After extended use with modem audio, the granules can get packed together, reducing the audio quality and impacting your usable bandwidth. As a long term solution, you would have to replace the microphone element. As a short term solution, you could bang the handset on the table a few times to temporarily loosen it up a bit. One of the few occasions where hitting a defective device can actually work.

 

[gnasher729]

HDD? Where's my 8 TB SSD?

You can buy that without any problem. Maybe you'll have to sell your car, or a kidney, or remortgage the house, but it's no problem to buy one.

 

[CylonGlitch]

My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 attached to a spare B&W TV for a display.

Timex Sinclair came out after the IBM PC (Timex July 1982, IBM August 1981).

----------

How about an Apple II (1.024MHz 6502) with 16K (yes that's K) of RAM and no hard nor floppy drive but a cassette deck where the program is stored on a audio cassette cartridge as a series of audio tones. I remember overclocking it to 2.048MHz!! Geez I am really old!!

That's the machine I wanted to get but didn't; ended up splitting the cost with my father so that he could use it for work during the day and I would use it for my own needs at night. He wanted Lotus 1-2-3 so I got out voted.

Here's an interesting fact, the 6502 processor in those machines (Apple II's) is still used today. Just last year I designed a system around one for a job. Worked like a champ.

 

[Toltepeceno]

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.

My first was dos. I don't remember what size disk drive it had, other thatn it was mb's, but I remember upgrading the ram to 1mb. The mb went out and I upgraded it myself to a 33mhz one.

 

[shamino]

Timex Sinclair came out after the IBM PC (Timex July 1982, IBM August 1981).

That's true, but that wasn't the point. People were describing what their first computers were. And in 1982, as a 13 year old kid, I could afford a Timex, and couldn't even imagine the amount of money needed to get an IBM PC.

You may have forgotten, but at the time, the only people buying PCs for personal use were those who wanted to bring work home from the office. Everybody else was using either an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, or an Atari-800 or a TRS-80 of some kind. IBM's were just too expensive if you didn't have a business need for one.

 

[cube]

How about an Apple II (1.024MHz 6502) with 16K (yes that's K) of RAM and no hard nor floppy drive but a cassette deck where the program is stored on a audio cassette cartridge as a series of audio tones. I remember overclocking it to 2.048MHz!!

I remember writing my on "Pong" game in BASIC and storing it on the cassette!!

Geez I am really old!!

That's an expensive beast. Think about 1K RAM, puny keyboard, and monochrome SDTV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80 Before IBM PC.

 

[shamino]

My first was dos. I don't remember what size disk drive it had, other thatn it was mb's, but I remember upgrading the ram to 1mb. The mb went out and I upgraded it myself to a 33mhz one.

If you were getting a 33MHz machine as a new system, then you were probably getting a late-model 386 or an early-model 486. That would put it at about 1989-1992 (Source: Wikipedia).

At that time, hard drive capacities ranged from about 10MB (for cheap ones nobody actually wanted to buy) up to about 300MB (for expensive high-end models), and a few very high capacity drives not sold commercially, with most people buying drives in the range of 40-80MB. (Sources: Wikipedia, Tom's Hardware Guide, PC Guide and my personal memories from the time.)

...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80 Before IBM PC.

The Sinclair ZX80 came out before the IBM PC. But the Timex-branded spinoff of the ZX81 came out afterward.

 

[Toltepeceno]

Seagate Announces First 8 TB Hard Drive for Enterprise Customers

I ordered a 33mhz motherboard new as an upgrade after the mb I had died. I moved into an apartment and after carrying i t across the carpet it was dead. I don't remember what the original mb was, but I know the 33 was an upgrade, the best at the time. I had a monochrome monitor with dos. The orignal wasn't a 386, maybe an xt. The company I was working for sent me to school for windows 3.3 as we built them to control security systems (we installed the systems) at big companies. I worked there from mid to late 80's into the 90's. I was living in san diego usa at the time. When windows came out there were stores that sold shareware on floppies for a buck a piece. I do remember the motherboard cost over 100.00.

If you were getting a 33MHz machine as a new system, then you were probably getting a late-model 386 or an early-model 486. That would put it at about 1989-1992 (Source: Wikipedia).

At that time, hard drive capacities ranged from about 10MB (for cheap ones nobody actually wanted to buy) up to about 300MB (for expensive high-end models), and a few very high capacity drives not sold commercially, with most people buying drives in the range of 40-80MB. (Sources: Wikipedia, Tom's Hardware Guide, PC Guide and my personal memories from the time.)
The Sinclair ZX80 came out before the IBM PC. But the Timex-branded spinoff of the ZX81 came out afterward.

 

[shamino]

I ordered a 33mhz motherboard new as an upgrade after the mb I had died. I moved into an apartment and after carrying i t across the carpet it was dead. I don't remember what the original mb was, but I know the 33 was an upgrade, the best at the time.

OK. I know that only 386's and 486's were ever shipped with 33MHz clocks. 286's topped out at 25Mhz. Pentiums started at 60Mhz. I suppose an overclocked 286 might've been a possibility, but that wouldn't run Windows version 3, which required at least a 386.

As for the board you replaced, if it wasn't a 386, then it was almost certainly a 286 of some kind. At the time, most aftermarket motherboards were using either the "AT" form factor (clone of the size IBM used for the PC/AT, which was very wide and extended underneath the power supply) or the "baby AT" form factor - which was almost the same, but narrower and did not extend under the power supply.) Any other form factor at the time would have been proprietary and unlikely to be upgradable.

8088 ("XT") motherboards did not use the "AT" or "baby AT" form factor. The slots and the mounting holes were in different places. They also used a different power supply connector. You would not have been able to replace such a motherboard with anything other than another XT board without some rather annoying case modifications. (I did this back in '88 when I upgraded my XT to a 286. I needed to apply electrical tape to keep the case from shorting out the board, and I had to force the power supply's connector onto pins that were the wrong shape. Not something I would ever try to to today.)

WRT the motherboard price, yes, over $100 sounds about right. Back in those days, I built a 286, later upgraded to a 386 and then to a 486. At any given time, a high-end motherboard cost $100-150, including the CPU, but not including any RAM.

 

[Toltepeceno]

OK, probably a 286 originally. I'm getting old and can't remember as well as I could. I do know I upgraded to the 33 though and ordered it. Through the days of paid shareware on disks, dial up bbs and then the internet. I kind of wish I had kept the old computer, I threw it away though some years later. I did go to a color monitor while I was still using it. I also upgraded the memory, I think it was to 1mb. Probablly upgraded the hard drive but no longer remember.

OK. I know that only 386's and 408's were ever shipped with 33MHz clocks. 286's topped out at 25Mhz. Pentiums started at 60Mhz. I suppose an overclocked 286 might've been a possibility, but that wouldn't run Windows version 3, which required at least a 386.

As for the board you replaced, if it wasn't a 386, then it was almost certainly a 286 of some kind. At the time, most aftermarket motherboards were using either the "AT" form factor (clone of the size IBM used for the PC/AT, which was very wide and extended underneath the power supply) or the "baby AT" form factor - which was almost the same, but narrower and did not extend under the power supply.) Any other form factor at the time would have been proprietary and unlikely to be upgradable.

8088 ("XT") motherboards did not use the "AT" or "baby AT" form factor. The slots and the mounting holes were in different places. They also used a different power supply connector. You would not have been able to replace such a motherboard with anything other than another XT board without some rather annoying case modifications. (I did this back in '88 when I upgraded my XT to a 286. I needed to apply electrical tape to keep the case from shorting out the board, and I had to force the power supply's connector onto pins that were the wrong shape. Not something I would ever try to to today.)

WRT the motherboard price, yes, over $100 sounds about right. Back in those days, I built a 286, later upgraded to a 386 and then to a 486. At any given time, a high-end motherboard cost $100-150, including the CPU, but not including any RAM.