Question 24tb Hard Disk

[tashimee]

Are there any differences between using a 24tb internal hard disk and say, a 10tb hard disk?

 

[rgd1101]

about 14tb space

 

[USAFRet]

Are there any differences between using a 24tb internal hard disk and say, a 10tb hard disk?

More than double the space?

What would you think any difference might be?

 

[Eximo]

Potentially performance differences. A lot of the big drives use Shingled recording, meaning they have to erase multiple lines of data to record new information. Not a big deal when a large chunk of the drive is empty, but as it gets more full it will have to read data into cache, erase the old data, and then rewrite data along with new data. This is much slower than just writing normally. So CMR vs SMR drives.

Not sure if the HAMR drives have made it to consumers yet, not usually looking at those drives. But they have to heat the platter to write, so there may be small delays on those drives.

 

[evermorex76]

So CMR vs SMR drives.

But if you compare a CMR drive to a CMR drive, or SMR to SMR, same rotation speed, with only the capacity being different, the larger drive could have higher throughput depending on the platter count. If both drives had the same number of platters and read/write heads, that would mean the larger drive had more than double the media density, allowing the heads to read or write more than twice as much data per rotation of the platter. In practice, the larger drive will probably have 50% more platters or even double, so you wouldn't actually see it getting twice the throughput, and it would only help when sequentially reading, but it could still be significant.

 

[Eximo]

That is true. It really depends on the drive's use case. Bulk storage, I wouldn't really worry about it.

 

[tashimee]

Potentially performance differences. A lot of the big drives use Shingled recording, meaning they have to erase multiple lines of data to record new information. Not a big deal when a large chunk of the drive is empty, but as it gets more full it will have to read data into cache, erase the old data, and then rewrite data along with new data. This is much slower than just writing normally. So CMR vs SMR drives.

Not sure if the HAMR drives have made it to consumers yet, not usually looking at those drives. But they have to heat the platter to write, so there may be small delays on those drives.

So, how do you keep from losing data?

 

[USAFRet]

So, how do you keep from losing data?

A comprehensive backup routine.

 

[Eximo]

So, how do you keep from losing data?

Do you mean how Shingled recording works? More or less described there. It reads the data, caches it, or re-writes to a empty section of the drive, then takes the data and re-writes the tracks so that they overlap again and are more dense.

The read write head can only write somewhat large track widths, but it is sensitive enough to read narrower ones. So it writes a track, then writes over half of it. It can read that data fine, but if it writes directly to the same area it would erase data. Instead it copies that data before erasing it.

When the drive is empty though, it can just put data wherever it pleases and would be equivalent performance to a CMR drive.

If you mean a personal question. I keep loose hard drives for making irregular system image backups of my other systems. And I tend to keep archived drives of older data that is a subset of my current data. Critical data gets backed up immediately to multiple systems and a USB flash drive.

I'm not much of a data hoarder though. My main backup drive is only 4TB. I don't bother backing up my gaming system except for my profile/account data.

I believe I have two 4TB, two 3TB, a total of 4TB of active SSDs, 2 old 1.5TB drives, a portable 1TB drive (also quite old). And a small pile of older 80-500GB IDE drives from old systems that I will probably test here before the end of the year and see what is good. 4 old 256GB SATA SSDs from various systems, all nice MLC drives that should last another few decades.