This new 40TB hard drive from Seagate is just the beginning—50TB is coming fast!
1y 20d ago by lemm.ee/u/TheImpressiveX in technology from www.techradar.com
Having been burned many times in the past, I won't even trust 40 GB to a Seagate drive let alone 40 TB.
Even in enterprise arrays where they're basically disposable when they fail, I'm still wary of them.
Still, it's a good thing if it means energy savings at data centers.
For home and SMB use there's already a notable absence of backup and archival technologies to match available storage capacities. Developing one without the other seems short sighted.
I still wonder, what's stopping vendors from producing "chonk store" devices. Slow, but reliable bulk storage SSDs.
Just in terms of physical space, you could easily fit 200 micro SD cards in a 2.5" drive, have everything replicated five times and end up with a reasonably reliable device (extremely simplified, I know).
I just want something for luke-warm storage that didn't require a datacenter and/or 500W continuous power draw.
Cost. The speed of flash storage is an inherent quality and not something manufacturers are selecting for typically. I assure you if they knew how to make some sort of Super MLC they absolutely would.
It's not inherent in terms of "more store=more fast".
You could absolutely take older, more established production nodes to produce higher quality, longer lasting flash storage. The limitation hardly ever is space, but heat. So putting that kind of flash storage, with intentionally slowed down controllers, into regular 2.5 or even 3.5" form factors should be possible.
Cost could be an issue because the market isn't seen as very large.
they make bulk storage ssds with QLC for enterprise use.
The reason why they're not used for consumer use cases yet is because raw nand chips are still more expensive than hard drives. People dont want to pay $3k for a 50tb SSD if they can buy a $500 50tb hdd and they don't need the speed.
For what it's worth, 8tb TLC pcie3 U.2 SSDs are only $400 used on ebay these days which is a pretty good option if you're trying to move away from noisy slow hdds. 4 of those in raid 5 plus a diy nas would get you 24tb of formatted super fast nextcloud/immich storage for ~$2k.
I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.
The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.
EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.
Flash drives are much worse than hard drives for cold storage. The charge in flash will leak.
If you want cheap storage, back it up to another drive and unplug it.
Eh hard drives are archival storage these days. They are DOG SLOW and loud. Any real time system like Nextcloud should probably be using ssds these days.
Hard drives are also relatively cheap and fast enough for many purposes. My PCs use SSDs for system drives but HDDs for some data drives, and my NAS will use hard drives until SSDs become more affordable.
yeah i still use hard drives for storing movies, logs, and backups on my Nas cluster, but using it for nextcloud or remote game storage is too slow. I also live in an apartment and the scrubs are too loud. There's only a 5:1 price premium, so it's worth just going all flash unless you have like 30tb storage needs.
My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.
Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.
I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.
Same here. Been burned by SSD's too though - a Samsung Evo Pro drive crapped out on me just months after buying it. Was under warranty and replaced at no cost, but I still lost all my data and config/settings.
Any disk can and will fail at some point in time. Backup is your best friend. Some sort of disk redundancy is your second best friend.
I feel the exact same about WD drives and I'm quite happy since I switched to Seagate.
Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then. WD is pretty much all good, Seagate has some good models that are comparable to WD, but they have some absolutely unforgivable ones as well.
Not every Seagate drive is bad, but nearly every chronically unreliable drive in their reports is a Seagate.
Personally, I’ve managed hundreds of drives in the last couple of decades. I won’t touch Seagate anymore due to their inconsistent reliability from model to model (and when it’s bad, it’s bad).
Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then
I have.
But after personally having suffered 4 complete disk failures of WD drives in less then 3 years, it's really more like a "fool me once" situation.
It used to be pertinent to check the color of WD drives. I can't remember all of them but of the top of my head I remember Blue dying the most. They used to have black, red and maybe a green model, now they have purple and gold as well. Each was designated for certain purposes / reliability.
Source: Used to be a certified Apple/Dell/HP repair tech, so I was replacing hard drives daily.
Gold is the enterprise ones. Black is enthusiast, blue is desktop, red is NAS, purple is NVR, green is external. Green you almost certainly don't want (they do their own power management), red is likely to be SMR. But otherwise they're not too different. If you saw a lot of blues failing, it's probably because the systems you supported used blue almost exclusively.
I thought green was "eco." At least the higher-end external ones tend to be red drives, which is famously why people shuck them to use internally because they're often cheaper than just buying a red bare drive directly, for some reason.
Correct about the greens. They used to be (might still be) the ones that ran at a lower RPM
You might be right. Although I think it's been pretty hit or miss with which drives they use in those enclosures.
It's always worth paying more for Western Digital.
Same. Between work and home, I've had ~30 Seagate drives fail after less than a year. I stopped buying them for personal use many years ago, but work still insists, because they're cheaper. I have 1TB WD Black drives that are over ten years old and still running. My newest WD Black drive is a 6TB, and I've had it for seven years. I dunno if WD Black is still good, but that's the first one I'll try if I need a new drive.
So all the other hard drives will be cheaper now, right? Right?
A 2tb SSD can now be bought for 100$ at least.
This is good to know. I might need to upgrade the storage for my Monero node.
Just wondering, why do you run a monero node?
How else are you going to bring up Monero in unrelated discussions about computer hardware?
For my wallets
You should ideally run your own node when using Monero
Because with someone else's node, they can potentially track and log the transactions you make
That's the default setting when setting up a local wallet. It is also more private due to not being dependent on someone else's node.
This is how I know I'm getting old, my first thought was "spinning rust for always on long term storage" and then I remembered it's 2025 and SSD's are about equal now.
Get off my lawn, your interrupting Matlock!
Still cheaper though. 4TB you are looking at around 3x the price for it in SSD storage. Although I wonder how the power use compares, might be worth factoring in but probably isn't too massive over it's realistic lifespan
Oh yeah, I run spinning rust in my nas. All data storage for me is on HDDs, only OS date is on the SSD. That's for the nas and my computer.
My main data usage is game installs and pretty unimportant temporary stuff so it doesn't need backup fortunately. Game saves do of course but a simple bash script and the file size for that is tiny in comparison.
SSD performance would be nice to have, but costs extra.
SSDs are getting reasonable, you might want to look into it again if that's your use case.
That's pretty impressive a couple of those and you could probably download the next Call Of Duty.
Incoming 1Tb videogames. Compression? Who the fuck needs compression.
Black ops 6 just demanded another 45 GB for an update on my PS5, when the game is already 200 GB. AAA devs are making me look more into small indie games that don’t eat the whole hard drive to spend my money on, great job folks.
E) meant to say instead of buying a bigger hard drive I’ll support a small dev instead.
That is absolutely egregious. 200GB game with a 45GB update? You'd be lucky to see me installing a game that's around 20-30GB max anymore because I consider that to be the most acceptable amount of bloat for a game anymore.
Agreed, it’s getting out of control. The most annoying thing is I’m not interested in PvP, just zombies, so probably 80% of that is all just bloat on my hard drive.
Thanks I’ll check it out. The gf and I like to shoot zombies but were it not part of PS Plus I surely wouldn’t give them $70. I’ve been playing a lot of Balatro recently, poker roguelike from a sole developer with simple graphics but very fun special powers
Do you have time to talk about our Lord and Savior FACTORIO? Here; just have a quick taste.
I haven’t played much since my curved monitor got broken but between Stellaris and Rimworld I don’t know if there’s enough time in a day for another build queue. I’ll check it out at some point and fall into the rabbit hole I’m sure.
Ok, I’m sorry, but… HOW???? How is it possibly two hundred fucking gigabytes?!?!? What the fuck is taking up so much space???

More than triple the next largest game. All I want is the zombies mode and space to install other games, I could probably cull 80% of the COD suite and be just fine, but I have to carry the whole bag to reach in 🤷♂️
The game is 50GB, the other 200GB is just "fuck you" space.
It’s mostly textures, video, and audio.
The game code is probably less than 10gb
Change languages in your game, I am willing to bet it doesn’t download a language pack for whatever language you choose.
You need multiple textures for different screens, resolutions, etc. to provide the best looking results. Multiply by the number of unique environments…
Additionally, it’s not like they can only use “high” or “low” assets, as they progressively load different level of detail assets depending on the scene or distance.
Same with all of the video cutscenes in games, they play pre-rendered videos for cutscenes.
Did it use 45 GB extra or were there just 45 GB worth of changes?
Requires an additional 45 clear to accommodate the update file and is currently sitting at 196.5. Deleting Hitman and queuing it up after the update is simple enough technically for someone like me with a wired high speed connection and no data cap, but still a pain in the ass and way too big for a single game.
Clean up assets, are you kidding? Gamers have enough disk and time is money! /s
Oh, they'll do compression alright, they'll ship every asset in a dozen resolutions with different lossy compression algos so they don't need to spend dev time actually handling model and texture downscaling properly. And games will still run like crap because reasons.
Games can't really compress their assets much.
Stuff like textures generally use a lossless bitmap format. The compression artefacts you get with lossy formats, while unnoticable to the human eye, can cause much more visible rendering artefacts once the game engine goes to calculate how light should interact with the material.
That's not to say devs couldn't be more efficient, but it does explain why games don't really compress that well.
When I say "compress" I mean downscale. I'm suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions (number of polygons, pixels for textures, etc), instead of handling that in the code. I'm not exactly sure how they currently do low vs medium vs high settings, just suggesting that they could solve that using a ton more data if they essentially had no limitations in terms of customer storage space.
Uuh. That is exactly how games work.
And that's completely normal. Every modern game has multiple versions of the same asset at various detail levels, all of which are used. And when you choose between "low, medium, high" that doesn't mean there's a giant pile of assets that go un-used. The game will use them all, rendering a different version of an asset depending on how close to something you are. The settings often just change how far away the game will render at the highest quality, before it starts to drop down to the lower LODs (level of detail).
That's why the games aren't much smaller on console, for exanple. They're not including all the unnecessary assets for different graphics settings from PC. They are all part of how modern game work.
"Handling that in the code" would still involve storing it all somewhere after "generation", same way shaders are better generated in advance, lest you get a stuttery mess.
And it isn't how most game do things even today. Such code does not exist. Not yet at least. Human artists produce better results, and hence games ship with every version of every asset.
Finally automating this is what Unreals nanite system has only recently promised to do, but it has run into snags.
When I say "compress" I mean downscale. I'm suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions.
Yeah, that's generally the best way to do it for optimal performance. Games sometimes have an adjustable option to control this in game, LoD (level of detail).
I don't know about that. These are spinning disks so they aren't exactly going to be fast when compared to solid state drives. Then again, I wouldn't exactly put it past some of the AAA game devs out there.
Yeah, I'd expect the bloat to hit when there is a boost in SSD sizes. Right now I think the biggest consumer-grade SSDs are 8TB and are still rather expensive.
10 of these in a raid6?that's 4x speed and 400tb.
Of it's raid6 it's 320tb or so.
Optimizations are relics of the past!
Why in the world does this seem to use an inaccurate depiction of the Xbox Series X expansion card for its thumbnail?
This picture: brought to you by some bullshit AI
CAN WE PLEASE JUST GET 3.5" SSDS. PLEASE
Best I can do is a 3.5'' inch SATA to USB adapter case with one of these tiny SSDs glued in
Don't forget to include the hacked controller firmware that reports the drive size as triple what it actually is.
My manager ordered four "4TB" external SSDs from AliExpress a few weeks back. He paid £60 total for them, delivered.
My Sus alarm started clanging, so I grabbed one off him and ran some tests on it.
After a couple of days of the tests chuntering along, I ended up reasonably convinced that they're - at most - 40GB. And even at that capacity they're useless, transferring at around 10MB/s
Yeah, in my last IT job I tried to get my manager to run the big purchases by me first. Eventually he started to see why.
(He was a good manager, just not a huge hardware nerd)
Triple? That'd rookie numbers.
Aren't a lot of the 2.5" ones already empty space?
How big, and how expensive, would a 3.5" SSD be, if it actually filled enough of the space with NAND chips for the form factor to be warranted?
Well, Kioxia sells a 30TB 2.5in SSD right now for about $5k. I'm sure they could make a 60+TB SSD by just stacking 2 of them in a 3.5in case.
I feel like heat would start to become a serious issue at that point.
Put a fan in it, you have space
I know right. Why is this not a thing already? I mean I understand the various U.2, U.3, and EDSFF are great for high density data center installs. We have a 1U box in production that could be as high as 1 PB given current densities with E1.L drives but that’s enterprise level stuff. I just want a huge 3.5 SSD I could put in these pro-consumer level NAS boxes or maybe even one I could build myself for my home lab.
Thru exist but they're all several hundred dollars and 480 GB for some reason.
I have a few 960GB (ish? can’t remember exact size) 2.5in at work that are almost useless.
Yeah, why aren't there any?
There are: https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/specifications/
They are just not listed in shops for poor people. (joking)
64TB and 100TB, niiiice
I just addressed that in a post above yours.
https://lemmy.world/comment/17434700
Basically, smaller form factors are probably just better in this case. 3.5" drive bays were designed with more complicated mechanical drives in mind, and given how nand flash memory works, they don't make as much sense for SSDs.
Well, 3.5" SSDs are certainly possible, but 2.5" (or in fact m.2) might just be a better form factor for SSDs. The thing is, an SSD is just a bunch of chips on a PCB, so they really don't need the extra height afforded to them by a 3.5" bay.
You could probably fit 2 pcbs one on top of the other within a 3.5" drive, but that would probably need a third PCB to connect the two which would be more complicated to manufacture and be worse for cooling than using two individual 3.5" or m.2 cards.
Also, for a bunch of reasons smaller is usually better. Generally, it tends to be cheaper to use a few large capacity chips on a small board than it is to use a lot of lower capacity chips on a larger board. Of course fewer parts also means fewer potential points of failure, so better for quality control. And again, smaller cards are better for case airflow and cooling.
And they’d only be like $5k each. HDD prices have gone ridiculous. I’d just like 20TB drives to be reasonably priced. 10TB drives are twice the price they were 5 years ago.
I’ll finally have enough space for my meme screenshots.
Or the 8k photos of vacation dinners.
Oh wow does it come with glowing green computery looking stuff like in the picture
I do like that the picture on an article about a 40 TB drive is clearly labelled as 1 TB. Like couldn't they have edited the image?
I've been buying computer stuff for like 30 years and never once has any of it had any weird glowing stuff like on the box
We seem to be headed in that direction though. My most recent motherboard has built in LEDs for no practical reason other than "ooh shiny". Took me a minute to find the UEFI setting to disable that. "Stealth mode" apparently.
It's also increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find wired mice, keyboards and headsets in that ever-increasing gulf between "all singing, all dancing, expensive gaming device full of unnecessary LEDs" and "cheap, awful, bare minimum". If it plugs in and there's a 5v rail nearby, gotta draw on that to be shiny! Anything else would be sacrilege!
I want everything wired, antennas and batteries usually don't make that stuff any better
Yeah but it's not hovering or rotating unsupported in the air. The box said it was going to do that stuff. I'm pretty sure this doesn't even have any weird runes on it either
You need to be getting the radon infused versions.
The image is literally just the proprietary xbox drive plugged into an xbox
I had an Xbox and it didn't do that either!!!
Thank you! I lol'd at the guy with one in his main PC lol. Like why?
I expect many are not upgrading every small incremental improvement too. It's the 20TB HDDs that are ready to replace.
I'd buy two and only turn the other on for a once a month backup. For one lone pirate just running two drives, it would be endgame basically. You're good.
I wish. I've got 6000 movies, 200 series, 300k songs, games, etc. pushing 30tb usage. I need to redo my setup, right now it's raid 10. I know it's not the most efficient with space, but I feel much better about redundancy.
We all prioritize the data we want. I don't carry ps3 games because I have zero interest in them, and several shows I'd never have interest in, and I don't bsckup FLAC, I downsample to 320kbps so I doubt I'll break 25TB any time in the next five years.
I'm still waiting for prices to fall below 10 € per TB. Lost a 4 TB drive prematurely in the 2010s. I thought I could just wait a bit until 8 TB drives cost the same. You know, the same kind of price drops HDDs have always had about every 2 years or so. Then a flood or an earthquake or both happened and destroyed some factories and prices shot up and never recovered.
I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the "deathstars" (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I'd personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.
Many people can't accept that one drive model isn't going to kill a company or make everything from them bad.
The exception being the palladium drive. Although its not directly attributed to the fall of JTS, who at the time owned Atari. Its was clear from the frontline techs these things were absolute shit. The irony is that 1 out of say 10,000 was perfect. So much so I still have one of the 1.2 gig's that still spins up and reads and writes fine. Its nearly a unicorn though.

I had one of these, it worked perfectly for years. I might even still have it. I remember it being a significant leap in size and cost per MB.
We had failure rates over 90% on them. We sold around 8000 computers on contract to the local schools that year and took a hit to our rep. We started going from school to school replacing them before they could fail.
The drive in the picture is dated mar 16 97. I'm pretty sure it was one of thousands of warranty replacements we received. Like I said its still good but really hasn't been in service in over 30 years. I keep it because its a reminder of how bad, bad can be.
JT storage went out of business in 98. When we heard they had no one was surprised.
That is an absolutely wild fail rate.
i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.
Seagate have never once secretly changed the underlying disk technology on a NAS grade drive to one utterly unsuited for use in a NAS drive and then sold it as a NAS grade drive at a premium price because it's a NAS grade drive. So there's that.
I have killed every single type of magnetic platter drive from every brand they are all bad
Not "bad", consumable.
Maybe consider looking at what all those had in common... Ie you
The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it's all anecdotal, and I've had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I've owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven't had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can't recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the "bad" gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM's derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi's HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.
It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.
I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.
It’s all anecdotal for the most part. I’ve had two DOA WD drives in a row before, but no dead seagates.
As a side note, I hope you have those two WDs backed up, they’re overdue for a death.
Trust me, I've been waiting for those ancient WDs to die. I'm actually using them in a raid 1 config, so if one dies the other remains. I've also got anything really important backed up to cloud storage. I've worked in software (games) for 20+ years. I'm very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Anyway, much of my opinion on seagates comes from people I know who work in render farms and IT guys who manage entire studios. So its not really that anecdotal.
I'm very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Backs up anything "really important" to cloud storage
Yes, I do believe you are very well accustomed to data loss.
Almost every bit of data i have is redundant. The stuff I back up to cloud storage is the stuff I would care about if my house were to burn down. But that stuff is all double, and triple backed up, locally as well.
There are loads of people who think a company is bad because of one product, one service etc. A friend of mine hates Seagate, but he bought 10 drives of the same model. Pretty sure he even bought some after the first one failed ... or people (like me) put desktop drives in a NAS or service with other drives. While mine are still good I expect them to fail any time since well they are not desinged for the use case I am using them for.
Imagine how long it’ll take to rebuild your raid array after one fails lol
underrated comment. i'd much rather clone a 16 tb drive than 50 tb one. Also better speeds considering the use of more drives. That said, if I can save on electricity, noise, enclosure space, and very importantly, money, it could be pretty cool. Just need to wait and see how reliable these things are and if they are going to carry a price point that makes them make sense.
I mean personally, for long term data hoarding, I dislike running anything below raidz2, and imo anything less than 5 disks in that setup is just silly and inefficient in terms of cost/benefit. So I currently have 5x16TB in raidz2. The 60% capacity efficiency kinda blows, but also I didn’t want to spend any more on rust than I did at the time, and the array is still working great, so whatever. For me, that was a reasonable balance between power draw, disk count, cost, and capacity.
honestly though. I kinda dislike that a 40 or 50tb mechanical drive is even a thing. What we really need is larger, more affordable solid state drives. Mechanical drives have had their place, but their limits are fairly clear at this point. And your point about rebuilding an array makes that obvious. They are just too slow. This move by seagate to make ridiculously large mechanical drives, should not be the beginning, as this article suggests. It should really be the end.
They’re slow, but they’re WAY more robust than most SSDs - and in terms of $/TB, it’s not even close. Especially if you’re comparing to SLC enterprise-grade.
I've definitely seen more hdd failures than ssd failures in my life, that said, enterprise storage is indeed very robust. My WD red pros have all been workhorses. And right now the price per dollar is definitely in favor of HDDs. That really needs to change though. The raw materials alone make HDDs more expensive to produce, the problem is only that there are less manufacturers with the means to actually produce the chips necessary for SSDs because HDDs have been around for a million years. Once that changes, I think HDDs will and should go the way of every obsolete storage medium thats existed prior.
i remember bragging when my computer had 40gb storage
I bought my first HDD second hand. It was advertised as 40MB. But it was 120MB. How happy was young me?
Upgrading from 20MB to 40MB was so fucking boss.
I remember switching away from floppies to a--much faster, enormous---80MB hard drive. Never did come close to filling that thing.
Today, my CPU's cache is larger than that hard drive.
i can finally seed every spn season
If EA or Ubisoft don't get their shit together this won't be enough.
If 50TB is coming fast, then so am I
Wow great. From seagate. The company that produces drives with the by far lowest life expectancy compared to the competiton
And IIRC moved their headquarters to some Caribbean island to avoid paying US corporate taxes.
They're called Seagate, not Landgate.
Pretty sure they are fiscally located in Ireland like a lot of big companies for tax reason and for EU VAT reasons.
You are now correct. They move a lot. https://storageioblog.com/seagate-to-say-goodbye-to-cayman-islands-hello-ireland/amp/
I think people say this because there was one specific 6TB model that does really poorly in BackBlaze reports, combined with a generally poor understanding of statistics ("I bought a Seagate and it failed but I've never had a WD fail").
I will also point out that BackBlaze themselves consistently say that Seagate and WD are pretty much the same (apart from the one model), in those exact same reports
Repair technicians see by far the most of seagate drives
I've had at least 6 seagate drives over the past 20 years. none of them survived more than 2 or 3 years. Meanwhile, i have two almost 15 year old WDs sitting on my desk still going strong.
Imagine losing a 50tb drive because you choose to use Seagate.
Seagate Exos is usually ok. Their generic stuff, is sometimes crap, but that's true of all manufacturers, really.
That being said, I'd be nervous with a single huge drive, no matter where it's from. And even as part of a redundant structure, the rebuild times would be through the roof.
exos are fine if you don't mind them being loud as hell.
They're not really meant for desktop use, so not really an issue. Also don't keep your servers under your bed, the ventilation is quite bad.
Yup, if you can put em in a closet or something, you're golden.
thats a lot of porn high quality videos
Hey! You! Get offa the Cloud (and grab yourself one of those drives). You can keep your thoughts to yourself, now you can keep your data to yourself, like in the recent old times.
Best to get at least 2 so you have a backup
Your own lil cloud
No thanks. I'd rather have 4TB SSDs that cost $100. We were getting close to that in 2023, but then the memory manufacturers decided to collude and jacked up prices.
I thought prices seemed to be taking a while come down on 4TB SSDs as I had been looking at them for a while.
Don't really want it enough to spend £200 though. Would be to replace a 1+2TB HDD LVM. Now that I think about it, I have never copied a few TBs of data in one go.
I just recently replaced a bunch of 1TB and 2TB drives with an 4TB SSD and 8TB HDD pretty cheaply back in December. I was trying to get those in before tariff shenanigans. Technically, those old drives are still in use, just for redundancy now. Even the scary old Seagate drives!
UK so hopefully not too much of an issue with tariffs here. Also tempted by an N150 miniPC, could stick proxmox on that.
To be fair, I believe the increased pricing then was mostly due to sales, and thus production, tanking post COVID along with the big inflation for a couple of years. There was almost certainly greed from the most prominent memory makers tackedo n though.
Memory manufacturers purposely cut production to help justify cost increases: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/memory-prices-rebound-due-to-reduced-production-increasing-demand
But yeah, they'll also take advantage of demand (real or imaginary) to jack up prices: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/micron-confirms-memory-price-hikes-as-ai-and-data-center-demand-surges
I deal with large data chunks and 40TB drives are an interesting idea.... until you consider one failing
raids and arrays for these large data sets still makes more sense then all the eggs in smaller baskets
You'd still put the 40TB drives in a raid? But eventually you'll be limited by the number of bays, so larger size is better.
They're also ignoring how many times this conversation has been had...
We never stopped raid at any other increase in drive density, there's no reason to pick this as the time to stop.
Raid 5 is becoming less viable due to the increasing rebuild times, necessitating raid 1 instead. But new drives have better iops too so maybe not as severe as predicted.
Yeah I would not touch RAID 5 in this day and age, it's just not safe enough and there's not much of an upside to it when SSDs of large capacity exist. RAID 1 mirror is fast enough with SSDs now, or you could go RAID 10 to amplify speed.
tbf all the big storage clusters use either mirroring or erasure coding these days. For bulk storage, 4+2 or 8+2 erasure coding is pretty fast, but for databases you should always use mirroring to speed up small writes. but yeah for home use, just use LVM or zfs mirrors.
When setting up RAID1 instead of RAID5 means an extra few thousand dollars of cost, RAID5 is fine thank you very much. Also SSDs in the size many people need are not cheap, and not even a thing at a consumer level.
5x10TB WD Reds here. SSD isn’t an option, neither is RAID1. My ISP is going to hate me for the next few months after I set up backblaze haha
But have you had to deal with the rebuild of one of those when a drive fails? It sucks waiting for a really long time wondering if another drive is going to fail causing complete data loss.
Not a 10TB one yet, thankfully, but did a 4TB in my old NAS recently after it started giving warnings. It was a few days iirc. Not ideal but better than the thousands of dollars it would cost to go to RAID1. I’d love RAID1, but until we get 50TB consumer drives for < $1k it’s not happening.
Of course, because you don't want to lose the data if one of the drives dies. And backing up that much data is painful.
depends on a lot of factors. If you only need ~30TB of storage and two spare RAID disks, 3x 40TB disks will be much more costly than 6x 10TB disks, or even 4x 20TB disks.
The main issue I see is that the gulf between capacity and transfer speed is now so vast with mechanical drives that restoring the array after drive failure and replacement is unreasonably long. I feel like you'd need at least two parity drives, not just one, because letting the array be in a degraded state for multiple days while waiting for the data to finish copying back over would be an unacceptable risk.
I upgraded my 7 year old 4tb drives with 14tb drives (both setups raid1). A week later, one of the 14tb drives failed. It was a tense time waiting for a new drive and the 24 hours or so for resilvering. No issues since, but boy was that an experience. I've since added some automated backup processes.
Yes this and also scrubs and smart tests. I have 6 14TB spinning drives and a long smart test takes roughly a week, so running 2 at a time takes close to a month to do all 6 and then it all starts over again, so for half to 75% of the time, 2 of my drives are doing smart tests. Then there's scrubs which I do monthly. I would consider larger drives if it didn't mean that my smart/scrub schedule would take more than a month. Rebuilds aren't too bad, and I have double redundancy for extra peace of mind but I also wouldn't want that taking much longer either
I guess the idea is you'd still do that, but have more data in each array. It does raise the risk of losing a lot of data, but that can be mitigated by sensible RAID design and backups. And then you save power for the same amount of storage.
These are literally only sold by the rack to data centers.
What are you going on about?
I can't wait to upgrade my NAS to a 200Tb Setup
Great, can't wait for it to be affordable in 2050.
cool 50tb. i can now download more stuff.
You thought 50TB was it? LOL! Hold on to your butts because 53.713TB SSDs are coming! These will cost you all your vital organs at 35years of age. Brains included.
I can't wait to lose even more data when this thing bricks
You do realize that there is probably a fair chunk of people on here who can say that unironically?
I've only got 32tb in the family Raid 5 (actually 24TB since I lose a drive to parity), but my girl really loves her trash TV while she works so we're on like 90% full.
And I'm just a podunk machinist.
Ah yes. Seagate. The trash storage device company. If you want to burn your money, just throw it into a fire before buying this e-waste.
Can not recommend.
They're mechanical drives, every mechanical drive company has issues. I have had 4 of the 20tb drives in a truenas setup since last summer with zero issues. Drives in this size should be redundant and under warranty, expect drives to die, they're consumables. Replace, resilver, move on with life.
Sure. But in my experience Seagate drives are significantly worse. So why spend money on a shit company producing shit drives, if I can spend it on products of another company where I get more use and lifetime out of the product?
So let's just trash this company but not recommend something better?
I think you're just wanting to be negative today. I've used WD/Hitachi/Samsung/crucial drives the same way, everything dies. Resilver the data and move on, don't expect drives to last more than a decade at the very most.
You're listing a lot of brands that are mostly known for their ssds / NVME drives. This convo is about mechanical drives. By their very nature, SSDs are bound to be more reliable than HDDs.
However, when it comes to mechanical drives, western digital is waaaaaay more reliable than Seagate. Always has been. Maybe a lot of people don't use mechanical drives anymore, so their frame of reference is skewed -- but seagate makes trash mechanical drives. They have NEVER been reliable when compared to WD.
Anyway Hitachi made/makes shit mechanical drive and Samsung was never really known for HDDs. Crucial only makes solid state drives.
I didn't want to share a recommendation. I saw a post about Seagate and wanted to share my opinion about them.
Do you want a recommendation from me?
Idk, why you're repeating yourself. If you have the option to choose between two products and you know from experience that one of them is useless earlier than the other, then it would be a waste of money to buy the inferior product as you would have to replace it sooner and therefore loose more money.
My recommendation is none of them last forever. Get what is available, decent price and warranty, replace when needed. Drives are consumable.
Yes, if you have money to burn, sure. I'll go with the financially better approach.
I specifically said to go off price and availability, just have a backup because they will fail.
Sure, they will. But some sooner than others. Therefore, you can save money by buying the more reliable alternative.
the people downvoting you are the inexperienced.
Oh thank God, 40,000 gigabytes was not enough
start building a media server. space goes quick. I'm sitting at about 100 TB right now and I'm running out of space.
My 14TB are almost full but I can't fathom what you'd use 100TB on??
8K ultra high def 3D hentai?
Right now I have about 3000 movies, mostly 4k, and about 500 TV shows. As well as a pretty massive music library. No room for the hentai.
Then I see why you need moar disks. But seriously, are you ever gonna watch 3000 movies and 500 TV series?
That's about 25000 hours of content. If you watch 3 hours per day it will take you 23 years to watch it all.
Are you okay, brother?
Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I'll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10's of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.
I can see both sides though. There's certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume--and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I'm not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.
I've almost entirely ditched streaming because of my library. I like to think I've learned how to encode media at a quality better than most services stream. Only service I still subscribe to is crunchyroll. I also run a plex server and share access with my family, so it's got its uses. Its not just me watching all of it. But I'm probably adding around 5 movies/tv shows to my server almost every day. The threat of ever dwindling disk space looms large.
Same here. I initially had high hopes that my family would take advantage, but apparently my parents would rather bug my siblings monthly for their Hulu/Netflix/Max/Disney+/Prime logins than install Plex or Jellyfin lol.
one day you will get to move out and then you can build any kind of server you want
I've been moved out for 25 years 😂
I just hoped that my family would take advantage of me offering up my server for them to stream from.
lol, gotcha.
Not sure how you're doing your math, but I've probably watched about 85% of it. And a lot of it I've watched multiple times.
But no. I am not ok. lol.
cool. now I can lose even more data when it dies.
no thanks...
…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.
Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.
i don't mind that, if it means that lower capacity drives will get cheaper

20 of them? Just curious, how would you use 800 or 1600 TB of storage?
A mirror of Anna’s Archive.
Information is meant to be free.
Oh, nice idea! Maybe that's kind of what Simon on Firefly meant by a "source box".
4k Blu-ray rips? Naw, probably porn.
they have to make it at all before they make it cheap
Hope you have a database for file management at that point.
Can't wait to see how these 40 TB hard drives, a wonderment of technology, will be used to further shove AI down my throat.
phrasing
I have a 20TB seagate exos drive in my main pc and I hate it. Partly due to my case, but it’s noisy and does an obnoxious head reset (or whatever) every 7 minutes or so. It’s so loud.
These drives aren't for home desktops, they're more for server setups with large datasets and redundancy. Lol why do you need a 20tb drive in your main PC?
I have 4 x 20tb drives in a truenas where I have backups, movies, and music, network accessible for the whole house.
Yeah Exos are enterprise drives, so there's no point in making them quiet like they do with lower speed desktop stuff.
Is it a mechanical drive?
Show me a 40tb ssd lol
How about a 122.88tb SSD? Large SSDs are pretty common in the enterprise market and arguably much easier to manufacture since you only need to put a bunch of nand chips on a pcb.
I mean comparatively to HDDs.
Of course there are also challenges to making a high capacity SSD, but i don't think they are using fundamentally new methods to achieve higher capacities. Yes they need to design better controllers and heat management becomes a larger factor, but the nand chips to my knowledge are still the same you'd see in smaller capacities. And the form factor has the space to accomodate them.
If HDDs could just continue to stack more of the same platters into a drive to increase capacity they'd have a much easier time to scale.
Sure, but those that know of this, know that these news articles aren't talking about ssd. This is hype news for consumer stuff.
Oh wow. Riveting
