[SOLVED] Where are those 20TB drives?

newbie12

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Lots of articles of Seagate and Western Digital releasing them but none of the usual stores I have been on seems to be selling them and I want one! Where do I get one?
 

newbie12

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Only 4?! I thought they'd be more than that.... WD Gold seems to be well received.....so I guess be waiting for a 20TB varient of that...
This Youtuber is a self indulgent prat. I watched half of the clip but got no information. Youtube is a waste of bandwidth and storage. I have no doubt that what he had to say would have amounted to a single paragraph of text. He is part of the reason why we need (?) large storage capacity.
Yeah I remember watching this sometime back last year or whenever. He reckons the more capacity there is, the more chance of hardware failure if I recall. And if that was the case, why are there larger and larger capacity HDDs and SSDs? I remember reading an article where they mentioned there was 100TB SSD and a 540TB tape drive in the makings... WD and Seagate also seems to have a roadmap laid out producing larger capacity drives in future too. So what, is Linus gonna make another video on 22TB, 24TB, 26TB, 28TB, 30TB, etc., drives when they come out? "Oh no, please don't waste your money on that because like my video on the 20TB drives previous capacity drives I spoke about, this one will definitely screw with your data!"
 
At the start of that video the female talking head wasn't sure what he was going to talk about (SSDs or HDDs?). To me it was just blah, blah, blah.

It seems reasonable to expect that higher mechanical complexity will lead to a higher failure rate, but there are significant mitigating factors, not the least of which is cost per TB. In fact I've been watching the drive failure statistics at Backblaze over the past few years and haven't noticed any decline in reliability as capacities have increased. Manufacturers are also quoting higher MTBF's in the range of 2.5 million hours, whether or not these can be believed.

One spec that needs to be considered, even if the internal technology remains the same, is the error rate. Consumer drives have typically had an uncorrectable error rate of 1 error in 1E14 bits read. A 20TB drive consists of at least1.6E14 bits, so statistically one would expect one or two errors when reading the whole drive. Enterprise drives have an error rate of 1 bit in 1E15.

These days the bits are packed so tightly that drives are reading data out of noise. They rely on probability and stronger ECC algorithms. You can see this in Seagate's Hardware ECC Recovered SMART attribute. Most attributes have a normalised values of 100, but the Hardware ECC Recovered attribute is typically 6 in recent models, if it is reported at all.
 

Endre

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At the start of that video the female talking head wasn't sure what he was going to talk about (SSDs or HDDs?). To me it was just blah, blah, blah.

It seems reasonable to expect that higher mechanical complexity will lead to a higher failure rate, but there are significant mitigating factors, not the least of which is cost per TB. In fact I've been watching the drive failure statistics at Backblaze over the past few years and haven't noticed any decline in reliability as capacities have increased. Manufacturers are also quoting higher MTBF's in the range of 2.5 million hours, whether or not these can be believed.

One spec that needs to be considered, even if the internal technology remains the same, is the error rate. Consumer drives have typically had an uncorrectable error rate of 1 error in 1E14 bits read. A 20TB drive consists of at least1.6E14 bits, so statistically one would expect one or two errors when reading the whole drive. Enterprise drives have an error rate of 1 bit in 1E15.

These days the bits are packed so tightly that drives are reading data out of noise. They rely on probability and stronger ECC algorithms. You can see this in Seagate's Hardware ECC Recovered SMART attribute. Most attributes have a normalised values of 100, but the Hardware ECC Recovered attribute is typically 6 in recent models, if it is reported at all.

Hello!

Sorry to contradict you, but Linus Sebastian is making a living over those videos on YouTube, and he has millions of subscribers on his channel(s)!
His videos are entertaining.
He is a rich man!
He’s definitely doing something right!
 

newbie12

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I would rather read something like this from a trusted source:

https://blog.westerndigital.com/hyperscale-why-raid-systems-are-dangerous/

No self-indulgent noise, just facts.
I was actually hoping to use the 20TB (which is really about 18TiB of usable space) in like a RAID6 array and have like up to a good 36TiB of usable storage space across the minimum four drives (according to Seagates RAID calculator: https://www.seagate.com/au/en/internal-hard-drives/raid-calculator/) required for a RAID6 array, for archiving purposes. Of course I would need a minimum of 3 of these for backups incase any one of those RAID6 boxes die or fail even with its two disk safety net. So according to that blog, I would need something like IntelliFlash Data Protection or ActiveScale in he RAID6 box? I don't suppose I'll need to get DAS boxes that have this or is this a software level feature and nothing to do with hardware?
 

newbie12

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Why are you using any RAID for archival purposes?
Ok, tell me how I can achieve more storage space without RAID. :unsure: I could use those $20 quad layer 100GB or 128GB bluray discs....but they seem more expensive than RAIDing 4 20TB drives in RAID6 on a DAS... What about those cheap DVDs or CDs? Surely they're cheap enough to do this with right? Maybe but I don't like having to have multiple file versions just so it can fit on 700MB, 4.7GB and 8.5GB discs when I can just have one big 12GB rar archive in one go on bluray discs or on large capacity HDDs. What could possible b an alterntive to using RAID for archival purposes with redundancy and storage capacity, hmmm?

I'd do this with just three drives but unfortunately I can't access a single 40TB drive since they don't exist(Or if they do exist, no one is selling them at the local/online stores i frequent at the moment)...
 

DSzymborski

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Ok, tell me how I can achieve more storage space without RAID. :unsure: I could use those $20 quad layer 100GB or 128GB bluray discs....but they seem more expensive than RAIDing 4 20TB drives in RAID6 on a DAS... What about those cheap DVDs or CDs? Surely they're cheap enough to do this with right? Maybe but I don't like having to have multiple file versions just so it can fit on 700MB, 4.7GB and 8.5GB discs when I can just have one big 12GB rar archive in one go on bluray discs or on large capacity HDDs. What could possible b an alterntive to using RAID for archival purposes with redundancy and storage capacity, hmmm?

I'd do this with just three drives but unfortunately I can't access a single 40TB drive since they don't exist(Or if they do exist, no one is selling them at the local/online stores i frequent at the moment)...

RAID doesn't make storage space exist. RAID is not a backup solution, it's for data uptime not data integrity.

The choice isn't RAID or using optical discs, it's RAID vs. using your storage drives in a way that actually makes sense for your use case.
 

newbie12

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RAID doesn't make storage space exist. RAID is not a backup solution, it's for data uptime not data integrity.

The choice isn't RAID or using optical discs, it's RAID vs. using your storage drives in a way that actually makes sense for your use case.
Ok, so what do you suggest the proper way that I should do if I wanted an archival storage capacity of about 40TB?
 

DSzymborski

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Ok, so what do you suggest the proper way that I should do if I wanted an archival storage capacity of about 40TB?

If you're just archiving data, and not having to manipulate or transfer large files back and forth constantly after the backup, a simple multi-HD enclosure with enough to store your saved data twice.

Never take a complex solution where an easier one fulfills your needs. You're literally proposing data center solutions or for a situation like Linus's above, where he has a team of editors working with 4K footage all day and needs data to get around immediately or he loses real money. (And note that Linus's RAID solutions also have a significant backup resources, because RAID is not a backup solution).