Seagate 14TB Damn My 8 TB drives look small now.

Lazybones · September 10, 2018, 01:51:30 PM

https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/internal-hard-drives/hdd/?elqTrackId=2de6a8e45a50404084a2e113b70b5199

Going back and watching the 8-Bit guy or LRG talk about hard drives in the MB size being large for the time it reminds me how fast things are changing..

Thorin · September 10, 2018, 03:52:39 PM

JEEBUS

I wonder how much they cost. I have this ancient Drobo FS, slow processor so slow reads/writes. I wonder if it can handle a 14TB drive... I think if I had the money now I'd go to a Synology or Qnap 8 bay enclosure, given that they now allow hot-swapping and different sized disks and dual disk redundancy, right? Then get 3+ of these 14TB drives... OH YEAH, the storage. And then find a way to back it up <sigh>.

Melbosa · September 10, 2018, 04:56:29 PM

Quote from: Thorin on September 10, 2018, 03:52:39 PM
I think if I had the money now I'd go to a Synology or Qnap 8 bay enclosure, given that they now allow hot-swapping and different sized disks and dual disk redundancy, right? Then get 3+ of these 14TB drives... OH YEAH, the storage. And then find a way to back it up <sigh>.

Yeah this is where I am at, 8 bay synology, and I use cloud storage for selective backup (only what I really want to keep is Cloud Synced to a couple dropbox accounts). I just bought my forth 8TB for it to replace aging (but still fine) 4TB disks. I have mine set to single redundancy but you can configure for multiple redundancy.

Lazybones · September 10, 2018, 05:26:45 PM

Quote from: Thorin on September 10, 2018, 03:52:39 PM
different sized disks and dual disk redundancy, right?

Under the hood Synology uses fairly basic linux RAID but if you use its native SHR or SHR-2 it will try and merge multiple raids automatically. It isn't as flexible as UNRAID or SNAP RAID however.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator

Melbosa · September 10, 2018, 05:30:38 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on September 10, 2018, 05:26:45 PM
Quote from: Thorin on September 10, 2018, 03:52:39 PM
different sized disks and dual disk redundancy, right?

Under the hood Synology uses fairly basic linux RAID but if you use its native SHR or SHR-2 it will try and merge multiple raids automatically. It isn't as flexible as UNRAID or SNAP RAID however.

That being said, for most people, myself included (and I very versed in many RAID technologies out there), it works just fine without any knowledge of RAIDs to technical implementation of various RAID/RAID replacement solutions required.

Lazybones · September 10, 2018, 05:42:31 PM

I agree it is easy and works. I use SHR with no hot spare. It is good enough and if I have three days to a week to kill I can hot swap all my drives, one at a time till they are larger.

The big difference is wasted space which is why I linked the calculator.

If you have wonky size mixes there will be more waste as it is still making equal size stripes.

Tom · September 11, 2018, 10:32:31 AM

Interesting, they managed to get 14TB out of a non shingled drive. I'm surprised. Seems it uses "TDMR" (Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording) which means narrower tracks and multiple read sensors per head to cancel out the increased intra-track interference from having narrower tracks. Clever. Uses two sensors, but they see growing to 3+ sensors as tracks get even thinner.

Basically the tracks are thinner than they can realistically get the head, so they put multiple read sensors on the head overlapped across more than one track, and they do some math (which may actually be analog level "math", it'd make sense, but could be digital math inside the drive's controller but that'd make the heads and controllers significantly more complex...) between the sensors data to cancel out most/all of the overlap.

Clever indeed.

It's like an evolution over SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) where tracks were written extra wide, but overlapped and any writes actually had to re-write neighbouring tracks. So its density was high, but write performance was BALLS due to all the copy-on-write shenanigans. I think TDMR came about cause SMR did so poorly in every market segment. Was terrible in everything but maybe archival or cold storage senarios where drives were written very few times, and read occasionally. Even then though I think some places preffered buying bulk cheap disks over them and others still had massive tape farms that already do archival/cold-storage very well.

Review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13340/seagate-barracuda-pro-14tb-hdd-review

Wow, min speed is faster or as fast than my old <= 1TB disks. Max speed is reaching SATA II speeds. wow.

Darren Dirt · September 11, 2018, 07:31:29 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on September 10, 2018, 01:51:30 PM
https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/internal-hard-drives/hdd/?elqTrackId=2de6a8e45a50404084a2e113b70b5199

Going back and watching the 8-Bit guy or LRG talk about hard drives in the MB size being large for the time it reminds me how fast things are changing..

Melbosa and I chipped in 200 bucks each, a few decades ago (!) ... to buy a 200MB portable hard drive.
And I think that model series of Zip Drive even reportedly suffered from the Click Of Death, if I'm not mistaken. #GoodTimes

Tom · September 12, 2018, 08:28:11 AM

I'm still happy with my 4x5TB raid array. 19TiB of usable space. And I'm "only" using 61% of it. and I know a bunch could be cleaned up. This array will do me/us for quite some time I think.

I remember back when I was super enthused about HDDs reaching under $1/GiB (I think I bought a 40 or 80GiB drive at that point) . Now SSDs get down to like $0.20/GiB. how time flies.

Thorin · September 12, 2018, 12:27:11 PM

What RAID are you in that 4x5TB gets you 19TiB usable? I like setups where I can lose a disk or even two disks and not lose my data, so for instance my 3x5TB+2x1TB in my Drobo gets me 6.35TiB usable, but any two drives can fail without any loss of data and I can just hot-swap the bad drives.

Tom · September 12, 2018, 01:32:21 PM

Quote from: Thorin on September 12, 2018, 12:27:11 PM
What RAID are you in that 4x5TB gets you 19TiB usable? I like setups where I can lose a disk or even two disks and not lose my data, so for instance my 3x5TB+2x1TB in my Drobo gets me 6.35TiB usable, but any two drives can fail without any loss of data and I can just hot-swap the bad drives.

4x5TB usable. It's actually got 5 drives in there in RAID 5.

I also used to have a complete backup for it as well on my older home server, but since it had no other real use anymore, I decomissioned it. Also stole its CPU for the NAS. quad core xeon vs a dual core i3 pos. More cpu power, but the heat is something I need to look into. It likes to throttle. Need to get in there and clean it all out, and potentially find a smaller psu to open up some air flow. It's in a super small case with a low profile cooler iirc. (or maybe intel stock? Can't recall atm, either way it needs more flow....)