Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB 3.5 HDD v4

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The crew at Overclockers Club seem mighty impressed with the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB v4 hard drive they just reviewed. If you need a high capacity hard drive, you'll surely want to give this review the once over.

Compared to your standard consumer level 3TB drive this thing is double the capacity and brings home the money with the performance. To have capacity and performance at the same time is the golden ticket. Although this drive has the added cost of being an enterprise drive, having dealt with some enterprise drives I can say it is well worth it if longevity and long up time is what you are looking for.
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Bone_Enterprise said:
Would love one of these but not ready to pay the new drive premium just yet.
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I am more worried about reliability. Although with the current funding situation (medical imaging research) I do not see playing with any of these for a few years at work.
 
I don't understand what the drive (heh) for this size increase is... Instead, they (and everyone else) should focus on making larger 2.5" drives bigger... Or better, make thinner 2.5" drives that would allow an even higher density. I would much rather have 2x 2.5" 3TB drives instead of a single 3.5" 6TB drive.

The problem with drives this big is that when you have a RAID array (which enterprises of course use) and you're using RAID 6, you lose 12TB no matter what! Want a hot spare? now you're at 18TB lost. If instead you had used smaller 2.5" 3TB drives, you would save 9TB. This is compounded by the fact that most SAN vendors will have many smallish volumes, each with their own parity drives.
 
I see the biggest problem with that is price. I mean 2.5 inch SAS drives are/were very expensive compared to 3.5 inch SATA or SAS.
 
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Oof. 6TB. That's so much disk. Can't wait for the price to come down and get 4-8 of these.
 
Wonder what the rebuild time is on one of these @ 80% full... I think you'd need hotspares for your hotspares for your hotspares.
 
Brahmzy said:
Wonder what the rebuild time is on one of these @ 80% full... I think you'd need hotspares for your hotspares for your hotspares.
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Unless some mechanical miracle happens, it'll only get worse with HAMR moving to 10-50TB+. HDD's will become the new less crappy Tape replacement, but still crappy, as we move into higher densities.
 
Wonder what the rebuild time is on one of these @ 80% full...
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I expect around 24 hours to rebuild these when in RAID6 provided your raid is set to rebuild as fast as it can and there is little disk activity during the rebuild.
 
I'd like to see these kinds of capacities in SSD at sane prices. We know that insane capacity SSDs can be made easily enough, but they need to tone down the "ultra high capacity" price premiums.
 
mynamehere said:
but they need to tone down the "ultra high capacity" price premiums.
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NAND manufacturers do not like selling their products at a loss. Remember a SSD is made from expensive NAND chips where a hard drive is made from much less expensive technology to manufacturer.

Although with that said Samsungs 3D stacking in the 850 pro has the ability to drastically reduce the cost. I believe they will be making a large profit on these.
 
Awesome. Love seeing these leaps in storage cap. Only thing that gives me pause is the manufacturer. Have had enough problems with seagate drives over the years to actively avoid the things now.
 
mynamehere said:
I'd like to see these kinds of capacities in SSD at sane prices. We know that insane capacity SSDs can be made easily enough, but they need to tone down the "ultra high capacity" price premiums.
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Give it a few years, but it's coming. We just had this on [H] .. http://www.kurzweilai.net/rices-silicon-oxide-memories-catch-manufacturers-eye
 
Brahmzy said:
Wonder what the rebuild time is on one of these @ 80% full... I think you'd need hotspares for your hotspares for your hotspares.
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It's probably similar to the 4TB since these 6TB drives are a decent bit faster. 216MB/s sustained for this one.
 
Burticus said:
You lost me at Seagate.
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LOL.....

I'm sure HGST and WD are currently working on their own version.
Competition is good and will bring the price down.

I notice the new 1TB SE drive comes with 128 cache so that line looks to be getting a refresh soon.

The 1TB is also on a 1TB platter and not 800 so they should ramp up the line.

5x1TB for a 5TB SE could be out here shortly.
 
Yeah, I was gonna say, the consumer version came out way back in April and it's been $299. Saw it on sale once for $289.
 
DracoDan said:
I don't understand what the drive (heh) for this size increase is... Instead, they (and everyone else) should focus on making larger 2.5" drives bigger... Or better, make thinner 2.5" drives that would allow an even higher density. I would much rather have 2x 2.5" 3TB drives instead of a single 3.5" 6TB drive.

The problem with drives this big is that when you have a RAID array (which enterprises of course use) and you're using RAID 6, you lose 12TB no matter what! Want a hot spare? now you're at 18TB lost. If instead you had used smaller 2.5" 3TB drives, you would save 9TB. This is compounded by the fact that most SAN vendors will have many smallish volumes, each with their own parity drives.
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I am not following you, the capacities stay relative. A RAID6 with 6TB drives will lose 12TB of space to parity, sure. But if you have 5 of them, that means you still have 18TB useable. Where as your 3TB drives will require twice as many drives to have to same amount of useable space, with exactly the same amount lost to parity.

There is also usually a limit to number of ports that are useable within a computer/server. Not everyone has access to or space for expanders and backplanes to put in 10's of hard drives.
 
BladeVenom said:
Less than twice the price of a 3TB hard drive. Otherwise I might as well just buy two 3TB drives.
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OK, but that's never been the case for hard disks. The highest capacity disk always has an additional premium simply because it's the highest capacity one. You won't see the best $/TB for 6TB disks until 7 or 8TB disks come out.

3TB disks were a lot more than 1.5TB disks when they came out and didn't get competitive with 1.5TB disks until 4TB came out.

Also you have to factor in the cost of connecting and maintaining many disks. I have a 20 bay case and it gets expensive for the SAS HBAs, SAS expanders, and SAS cables needed to connect so many drives so it can be economical to buy fewer larger disks even if they cost more.

It's currently $220 for 2 3TB Seagates, and $299 for 1 6TB Seagate.
 
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