Seagate Shipping 8TB Hard Drives for Testing

[cmartin011]

SSD are the future period. But long term storage will be left to HDD for the next 50 years I bet. pricing will always be left to the user's needs commercial or private . Be a while till 8TB drives hit the market in SSD form

 

[belardo]

Imagine... an 8TB drive failure.... 8 TB of your porn collection... 🙁

 

[InvalidError]

Imagine... an 8TB drive failure....

That's why important data stored on HDDs/SSDs should be in a RAID 1/5/6 setup and really important data ends up on mirrored arrays, preferably located in different server rooms.

 

[somebodyspecial]

But the fact of the matter is that this is a dead technology. In the enterprise sector the pricing for high quality HDDs is not that much different from SSDs anymore.

There are tons of archival situations were cost per byte is far more important than speed or latency. In those situations, spinning disks still have a 5-10X cost advantage over SSDs. Decent quality HDDs do not fail that often when treated correctly unless you get a defective unit and today's lowest-power 7200RPM 3.5" HDDs operate in the 5-8W range, which is not that bad compared to 3-5W active power from SSDs.

The only HDDs SSDs might kill any time soon are those overpriced 10-15k RPM monstrosities.

As far as reliability goes, if your data is really important, you should be using RAID6 or some other forms of logical and physical redundancy regardless of whether you choose to use HDDs or SSDs anyway.

Is there really a market for consumer 8TB HDDs? I just assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that drives this size would only have a real use in more enterprise style solutions where the price per GB is closer to $0.20-.30/GB rather than consumer drives where data is a mere $0.05/GB. SSDs may still be more expensive than that, but in another year or so when these drive hit the market SSDs will have made up most of that difference while offering a host of other benefits (including reliability which HDDs just can't offer at those sizes).

The other big supposed use for these kinds of drive is surveillance so that you can store several months, or even a year of video on a drive. But this is Seagate, King of the 2 year warranty. Are we really going to see 2 year drives being thrown into appliance settings that may have lifespans of 5-10 years? How out of balance is that?

About the only use for these things is cold storage where you have a massive collection of movies that you don't watch all that often, but don't want to get rid of. And even there I would like to think I have a decent movie collection (granted I am not a big movie buff) and can easily fit all of my movies in ~1.3TB of space at native quality. I suppose I would need more space if more of my collection was in bluray, but even if it was we would be talking about ~2-3TB of storage... not 8TB.

I guess I am just confused as to who actually buys these things in enough bulk where it could be cheap enough to sell as a consumer drive, which is why I assumed it would be more expensive.

I have 7 3TB drives and all full. Can't wait for 8TB, and could use two now...LOL. I'm sick of having to delete stuff I'd like to keep (or commit it to bluray, which just sucks as far as piling them up goes). I also have 7 other externals (smaller, mostly 1TB). Again all full. I just hope these things aren't $1000. Something tells me I'll be moving to buying 4-6TB drives when these 8's hit probably because they'll be outrageous. There's also stuff I'd like to do that I just can't without buying more storage. Not sure there really is an amount that will ever be "enough" ROFL.

 

[InvalidError]

I just hope these things aren't $1000.

Since those will be enterprise-oriented at first, I would expect the cost to be around $0.10/GB like most other no-frills enterprise drives so you would indeed be looking at the better part of $1000 for one of those. You will have to wait a year longer for the consumer version probably around $500.

 

[dgingeri]

I didn't mean a _consumer_ version of LTO6, I meant an entirely different tape tech aimed specifically at consumers.
LTO6 is, from the ground up, not suitable. Btw, I don't for a moment believe the production costs are really that high.
Markups on tech tend to be huge, with pricing set to what the market will tolerate. It has little to do with what
something costs to make. LTO6 is expensive, like every other pro tape tech, partly because it can be.


BullZerker, also consider NASA. Various ongoing projects acrue enormous amounts of data every day, while just
one vehicle launch generates massive quantities of video (very high res cameras).

Ian.

Out engineers have looked into this repeatedly. The way the heads work, by the time the cost is cut down to make it feasible for even small businesses (around $1000 tape drive that fits in a 5 1/4" bay and runs on SATA and stores 160GB on a DAT size backup tape, in the last attempt in 2008) the heads don't record reliably enough, and the backups took so long that the focus groups just weren't interested at all. Trying to go lower cost than that for regular consumers will just not work at all. It was just wasted money to even attempt it. Further attempts in my company have been shot down by management repeatedly because of past experience. They know better by now.

The last consumer level tape backup system that had any success at all was a $600 DC2120 (120MB tapes) controlled through the floppy connector, and that was during a time when mainstream hard drives were 500-750MB, so it would take multiple tapes to backup. Few people were willing to wait for the five hours it would take to fill one tape, then swap it for another, twice, to back up their systems on a weekend. It was very unpopular, but did actually sell a little bit. CD-R came out shortly after that, and most people were more willing to back up to that than tape.

 

[somebodyspecial]

I just hope these things aren't $1000.

Since those will be enterprise-oriented at first, I would expect the cost to be around $0.10/GB like most other no-frills enterprise drives so you would indeed be looking at the better part of $1000 for one of those. You will have to wait a year longer for the consumer version probably around $500.

Agreed, like I said, probably just moving to 4-6TB soon for me. At some point I see totally dumping my disc collection and just putting it all on say a dozen 6TB drives or something and just loading a season or movies on flash drives when needed to be played. I cringe at buying anything but games on disc these days or DRM FREE when I can from gog so I can just save them anywhere without worry of them going belly up one day or the discs that I do have getting damaged. You can image the games anyway though (disc ones) so it's kind of the same.

I'll be praying for your year later $500 guess to come true though...LOL. Then again if 4TB approaches $100 soon (not far now) I'll just buy 5 of those instead of a single 8TB for sure. 4TB seagate externals are already $130 now, so even sitting there for a while I'll just buy 4 vs. the single 8TB at $500. Not to mention I think I have a bit of fear of an 8TB crashing...LOL. Which is why I like the cheap ones as I can have a double of anything important (4x4TB allows me a 8TB+a complete copy of it). Kind of important for backing up bluray seasons and dumping the discs. I just need a faster ripping machine to get this job done...LOL. C'mon broadwell hurry up and get here 😉