Western Digital readies first 10TB Hard drive

[Dude]

Western Digital’s HGST unit announced on September 9 that the company has
begun to ship a new version of its helium-filled disk drive, the Ultrastar He8—with
8-terabytes of data storage capacity. And the company has an even bigger
capacity drive waiting in the wings. That drive, which uses a new magnetic
recording technology, will have a capacity of 10 terabytes

Source

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Seagate is already field testing 10TB HDDs. I wish WD would hurry up and come out with a 6TB Black. The Greens and Reds are already available to consumers in 6TB.

 

[andrew129260]

I feel like these drives are going to be mad slow since they are so large in capacity.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I feel like these drives are going to be mad slow since they are so large in capacity.

Based on the linked article, methinks you are correct. These enormous drives would probably be of more use for static data in large servers. My gut (keep in mind I'm overweight) says 4-6TB will be the upper practical limit for consumer drives for some time to come.

 

[andrew129260]

I feel like these drives are going to be mad slow since they are so large in capacity.

Based on the linked article, methinks you are correct. These enormous drives would probably be of more use for static data in large servers. My gut (keep in mind I'm overweight) says 4-6TB will be the upper practical limit for consumer drives for some time to come.

Yup, they will also make excellent backup drives though. Speed is not much of a concern there. Longevity is.

It's funny. I remember old 80GB sata hdd always seem faster than 500GB disk etc. Bigger the storage, the slower it gets. At least with HDD. SSD changed all that.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

The biggest drives I have right now are 2TB (Blacks and Greens). Even the Greens are plenty fast enough for writing and reading any data I throw at them. Specs for the 4TB Blacks and Greens are not much different from my 2TBs (the Greens are slow to initially spin up, however); I haven't compared the specs for the 6TB Greens yet and WD hasn't released any 6TB Blacks yet.

As boot drives, the bigger drives would be pathetically slow. That's one reason why I use SSDs for that.

 

[RBS7]

I have two of the WD 4TB Mycloud drives, and I love them. I get transfer rates across our LAN of up to 80-90Mbps, which is plenty fast for me. That depends on which machine i am using though, but even slower speeds are 65+.

 

[OvenMaster]

Just imagine what happens when someone buys one of those, puts their Life's Work on it, and then it crashes. Ouch.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Just imagine what happens when someone buys one of those, puts their Life's Work on it, and then it crashes. Ouch.

One word: backups

 

[lehnerus2000]

Yup, they will also make excellent backup drives though. Speed is not much of a concern there. Longevity is.

It's funny. I remember old 80GB sata hdd always seem faster than 500GB disk etc. Bigger the storage, the slower it gets. At least with HDD. SSD changed all that.

The WD Green I bought in December appears to be ~5% faster, than the one I bought a couple of years ago (according to the specs).

Just imagine what happens when someone buys one of those, puts their Life's Work on it, and then it crashes. Ouch.

I have 5.5 TB in my PC and ~9 TB of external storage.

 

[Pendaws]

I guess the HDD makers are trying to keep people buying their drives as the SSD drives are getting cheaper and they will be LARGER than 1tb VERY soon, add to that, the PCI Express drives @ 10gbps and are more than likely going to get FASTER.

A friend of mine already has his eyes on the 8TB Seagate put out for his adult education material.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Giant SSDs are well out of my price range.

​

I can't even justify the cost of a 250 GB SSD.
I can get a 3 TB HDD for less.

My laptop has a 480 GB SSD in it.
I'd only rate it as OK.
I never take the laptop anywhere, so the SSD's weight and power advantage don't get a chance to impress me.
Since I use as a media centre, it doesn't do anything that would show off it's speed.

If I had it in my desktop, I'm sure I'd notice a difference.

 

[G33kRick]

Stick with SSDs, faster and less fragments.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Stick with SSDs, faster and less fragments.

Sure! You buyin'?

All seriousness aside, the best solution, currently, is to use a smaller (thus, less expensive) SSD for the OS and programs and the more affordable HDDs for storing large amounts of data. Unless continuously transferring enormous amounts of data, there is no noticeable speed difference between a SSD and a 7200rpm HDD; the only advantages to using a SSD instead of a HDD for data storage is reduce power consumption and, possibly, better reliability and life. However, SSDs still aren't cost effective enough for storage primetime.

 

[OvenMaster]

Just imagine what happens when someone buys one of those, puts their Life's Work on it, and then it crashes. Ouch.

One word: backups

I'm assuming that the 10TB drive would be the backup drive.

 

[A Guy]

All eggs...basket...

A Guy

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Just imagine what happens when someone buys one of those, puts their Life's Work on it, and then it crashes. Ouch.

One word: backups

I'm assuming that the 10TB drive would be the backup drive.

All eggs...basket...

A Guy

If data doesn't exist in at least three places (source and two backups), then it isn't safe. The capacity of drives data is kept on and backed up on is immaterial as long as one has proper backups. Splitting up data onto multiple drives only means if one drive should fail, only a portion of your data gets lost. Keeping all your data on one drive and duplicating it on other drives means, if the one drive should fail, you will still have ALL of your data on another drive.

Having ones data one large drive takes up far less physical space and weight than having it spread over several smaller drives. Having that data on a single drive means having fewer backup drives which will, again, take up less physical space and weight and cut down on the amount of handling one has to do.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

Great idea - nothing wrong with these for masses amount of data - however as the HDD sizes increase so does the resulting disaster become if it fails - and the bigger the HDD the bigger amount of backup you'll need.

I'd imagine these will become very popular though on SERVERS where you can attach shedloads of HDD's.

With todays technology I think I'd rather have 4X 2.5GB HDD's where using RAID or some sort of mirroring I would have protection in the case of HDD failure - but I'm not against the idea of large HDD's.

regarding SSD's - I think the sweetspot is already here - 256GB - plenty for the OS and some paging / scratch / temporary storage area.

You don't need mega fast SSD's for playing music, watching video, surfing the net, downloading from torrents, doing email or most office type stuff.

For Photoshop scratch areas, data base queries, running the OS etc an SSD is perfect - until prices come down to equate to HDD's it's not worth putting most types of data on to an SSD (yet).

Longevity wise -- SSD's seem now just as robust as their HDD counterparts - but until they are tested in heavy Disk usage environments such as busy servers we can't yet tell. For domestic computers though no problems here.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

We crossposted.

Hi there

Great idea - nothing wrong with these for masses amount of data - however as the HDD sizes increase so does the resulting disaster become if it fails - and the bigger the HDD the bigger amount of backup you'll need...

Cheers
jimbo

I still fail to see the problem here. If you have, say, 4TB of data spread over, say, four 1TB HDDs, then, to ensure the safety of that data, you would to have eight 1TB HDDs to safely back up that data (keep in mind that even backup HDDs can fail so two backups are much safer than just one). You could also keep a backup for four 1TB HDDs on a single 4TB drive but you would still have four times the bulk in original drives. As long as you have data backed up properly, there will be no disaster if a source HDD should fail, no matter its size.

...I'd imagine these will become very popular though on SERVERS where you can attach shedloads of HDD's...

True that. Large commercial servers are the initial target customers for these newest monster HDDs.

...With todays technology I think I'd rather have 4X 2.5GB HDD's where using RAID or some sort of mirroring I would have protection in the case of HDD failure...

All RAID can do is allow you to keep operating should one of the HDDs fail (something that is merely a convenience rather than a necessity for most people other than businesses). However, drive failure is not the only thing that can cause data failure. RAID will not protect you from data loss due to malware, user error, hardware failure (such as a blown PSU frying all your HDDs), natural disasters, theft, etc.

...You don't need mega fast SSD's for playing music, watching video, surfing the net, downloading from torrents, doing email or most office type stuff.

For Photoshop scratch areas, data base queries, running the OS etc an SSD is perfect - until prices come down to equate to HDD's it's not worth putting most types of data on to an SSD (yet).

Longevity wise -- SSD's seem now just as robust as their HDD counterparts - but until they are tested in heavy Disk usage environments such as busy servers we can't yet tell. For domestic computers though no problems here.

Cheers
jimbo

No arguments there.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

You don't actually need 4 TB ONLINE to be able to backup 4TB's worth of data -- this can be backed up incrementally / gradually etc etc.

Agreed though you need 4TB in total to completely back up 4TB's worth of data (probably more as I certainly wouldn't rely on only ONE backup). This can be spread over loads of smaller HDD's of course.

Raid of course allows your system to keep working in the event of HDD failure. While this might not be so important if you have a lot of smaller HDD's - relying on one mega large HDD will certainly cause a headache.

Baring in mind though that however large an HDD is - it's NEVER enough -- who was it at IBM or ms saying we'd never need a 20 MB (yes Mega byte) HDD.

Knowing on these forums how few people ever backup their data or even their OS - expect to get a lot more panic requests if these large HDD's go on to consumers at affordable prices -- data recovery companies are in for a windfall.

Cheers
jimbo