Seagate 10-14TB Helium drives...

T

The Cobra

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
3,182
So I currently use a Western Digital 4TB Enterprise drive that I paid around $450 5 years ago. It currently holds around 3.5TB of data: Movies, Music, Programs that have been downloaded, ext....

I have seen the new Seagate Exos 10-12-14TB Enterprise grade drives on Newegg between $300-$450 depending on the size. Def looking to purchase one of these replace my current drive that I would like to copy the information from and place it on the new drive and place the old one in cold storage.


I don't really need a ton of drive space or a NAS or anything raided, just more simple storage.

Anyone have any perspective on these drives or used them in the last few months?

Thx for any information.
 
I just think they're a hair overpriced, because the 'consumer space' hasn't really really caught up to the double digit TB storage market, especially when you move past the 10TB line. 10TB can be had for ~$300, but jumping to 12 bumps the price up to ~$400.

As for being enterprise grade, or helium filled, none of that really matters on the scale of a single drive. Being 'enterprise' in the name may or may not buy you anything at all, and helium filled nets you a minor drop in power and heat, which doesn't matter unless you've got a bunch of the things.

On the scale of a single drive, all drives are essentially equal. You can't really look at the average drive failure rates and such because they're all low enough that owning one drive and then having it fail (thus giving you a personal 100% failure rate) would be a statistical anomaly regardless of whose drive you purchase. If you had 9000 drives you needed to buy, then you might care about the difference between drives with a 1% yearly failure rate versus a 3% yearly failure rate, but the math just doesn't scale down.
 
#MirrorAllTheThings

...that said, it doesn't matter much. They're all nice now. Actually like the Ironwolfs personally. But do look into making sure that you have multiple copies of the important stuff.
 
A single drive failing for a single person might be 100% for him/her but this just adds up to the common statistics. The two things don't collide or fail to "scale down", it's just different things.
When purchasing a drive, the regular user will always be interested in failure rates, it's just probability - the probability the drive with 3% failure rate to fail on him is higher than that with 1%. It's even common sense. Even if the '1% drive' fails on him this doesn't change things of sanity. Yes, those 1% of people with failed drives might think of getting the other brand.... but not all.
As to helium and minor drop in heat etc.... all this contributes to better reliability after all, at least when talking about those direct effects. At the same time they probably lessen the gap between head and platters and this negatively affects reliability and helium is a way to negate this effect...
Seagate has been known with bad drives last years so I will never buy again a SG drive. Well, never say never but... at least many many years to come. Until then SSDs might have gained more affordable terabytes to phase out HDDs but again, I will buy other brand's SSDs :) . Does SG have SSDs?! :)
 
tedych said:
A single drive failing for a single person might be 100% for him/her but this just adds up to the common statistics. The two things don't collide or fail to "scale down", it's just different things.
When purchasing a drive, the regular user will always be interested in failure rates, it's just probability - the probability the drive with 3% failure rate to fail on him is higher than that with 1%. It's even common sense. Even if the '1% drive' fails on him this doesn't change things of sanity. Yes, those 1% of people with failed drives might think of getting the other brand.... but not all.
As to helium and minor drop in heat etc.... all this contributes to better reliability after all, at least when talking about those direct effects. At the same time they probably lessen the gap between head and platters and this negatively affects reliability and helium is a way to negate this effect...
Seagate has been known with bad drives last years so I will never buy again a SG drive. Well, never say never but... at least many many years to come. Until then SSDs might have gained more affordable terabytes to phase out HDDs but again, I will buy other brand's SSDs :) . Does SG have SSDs?! :)
Click to expand...

That is funny because I buy ONLY Seagate drives; Backblaze reports be damned. I work in a computer shop in Europe and they are the most reliable consumer drives in our experience, above WD and Hitachi/HGST and far ahead of Toshiba (Toshiba is BY FAR the least reliable; even the ones that are 'good' tend to be excruciatingly slow). Could it be that there are different factories for the Seagate hard drives sold in Europe as opposed to those sold in North America?
 
tedych said:
When purchasing a drive, the regular user will always be interested in failure rates
Click to expand...

I'm not saying it's not useful information to have, and obviously feel free to go with the drive with the lowest average failure rates. But outside of anomalies (like the Seagate 3TB drives a few years back), it's generally a surprising and unpredictable event to have any particular drive fail. It's like playing Hard Drive Roulette; you know some drive is gonna die, but the odds of it being the one specific drive you put all your chips on is pretty low, and the manufacturer of that individual drive likely has less to do with it than other factors or sheer chance. If you're talking about the 1% drives vs the 3% drives, well, it's a bit like lottery tickets; you can triple your chances by purchasing three tickets, but if you win the lottery by purchasing 1 or 3 tickets, it's still a freak event.

I have plenty of cognitive dissonance about this topic myself. I tend to buy HGST drives because of 1) inertia 2) good personal experience 3) good reliability stats. Nearly every WD drive I've ever personally used has shit the bed on me. I'm aware WD owns HGST. I still won't touch a WD branded drive; that's my superstition.

I also really like Toshiba drives, except their warranty procedure is absolute ballsack (save your receipt, you'll need it). I buy a lot of Toshiba 2/3/4TB drives as 'throwaways' for my job; if they fail, we just toss them rather than spend the time on the warranty claim.
 
wyqtor said:
Could it be that there are different factories for the Seagate hard drives sold in Europe as opposed to those sold in North America?
Click to expand...

You can be certain that there's more than one factory, but as far as which drives or drive batches go which way, as they're all manufactured in Asia...

Think it's probably more luck than anything else, but what works works. I'd lead WD for anything by default, only because HGST is usually more expensive, but WD has been higher enough that I've bought all Seagate lately.

Biggest issue is just to make sure that you don't get SMR drives if you need more than archive/media performance.
 
Seagate announced four 14tb hard drives not long ago. Barracuda, Skyhawk, Ironwolf and Exos X14. Out of those, I think it is only the Exos X14 which uses the new Multi Actuator Technology which allows a real jump in data transfers, up to 480 Mb/s. https://blog.seagate.com/enterprises/mach2-and-hamr-breakthrough-ocp/
Anandtech reviewed Barracuda 14tb, but that one is only able of a maximum of 261mb/s according Hdtune in that review. https://anandtech.com/show/13340/seagate-barracuda-pro-14tb-hdd-review That is actually somewhat faster than the max 250mb/s which Seagate claims in their own specifications for it. https://seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/barracuda-pro-14-tb-DS1901-8-1807GB-en_GB.pdf
Brian on Storagereview said in a thread that they have, what I believe, is one of the Seagate 14tb drives in for review although he didn't mention which of them. Of course I hope it is the Exos X14 which by far is the most interesting of them. http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php?/topic/40406-14tb-performance-reviews/
 
sinisterDei said:
I'm not saying it's not useful information to have, and obviously feel free to go with the drive with the lowest average failure rates. But outside of anomalies (like the Seagate 3TB drives a few years back), it's generally a surprising and unpredictable event to have any particular drive fail. It's like playing Hard Drive Roulette; you know some drive is gonna die, but the odds of it being the one specific drive you put all your chips on is pretty low, and the manufacturer of that individual drive likely has less to do with it than other factors or sheer chance. If you're talking about the 1% drives vs the 3% drives, well, it's a bit like lottery tickets; you can triple your chances by purchasing three tickets, but if you win the lottery by purchasing 1 or 3 tickets, it's still a freak event.

I have plenty of cognitive dissonance about this topic myself. I tend to buy HGST drives because of 1) inertia 2) good personal experience 3) good reliability stats. Nearly every WD drive I've ever personally used has shit the bed on me. I'm aware WD owns HGST. I still won't touch a WD branded drive; that's my superstition.
Click to expand...

Bad news, WD has retired the HGST brand. They may still use some HGST sub-brands though.
 
Luke M said:
Bad news, WD has retired the HGST brand. They may still use some HGST sub-brands though.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I know. Hasn't hit me yet though, since the HGST Deskstar NAS drives are still available in capacities up to and bigger than I need. But it'll be a sad day.
 
wyqtor said:
That is funny because I buy ONLY Seagate drives; Backblaze reports be damned. I work in a computer shop in Europe and they are the most reliable consumer drives in our experience, above WD and Hitachi/HGST and far ahead of Toshiba (Toshiba is BY FAR the least reliable; even the ones that are 'good' tend to be excruciatingly slow). Could it be that there are different factories for the Seagate hard drives sold in Europe as opposed to those sold in North America?
Click to expand...

I find it funny you poo poo Backblaze reports. How many drives do you have running compared to Backblaze?
 
Farva said:
I find it funny you poo poo Backblaze reports. How many drives do you have running compared to Backblaze?
Click to expand...

Does anybody ever actually look at the Backblaze reports? People still harp on Seagate because of the high failure rates of the 1.5TB and 3TB drives from Backblaze's data 4 years ago. Last time I checked the 10+ TB drives were doing just as well as anybody else's drives. And technically the "all powerful" HGST brand was suffering at a higher rate once you got above their admittedly great 4TB drive.

https://www.techpowerup.com/243840/backblaze-releases-q1-2018-hard-drive-longevity-reliability-stats
 
Man for the price I'd get two 6tb drives and mirror them, doesn't sound like you'll need the extra 2.5gb before the prices come down again on 10tb+ drives, and I'd rather have backups.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top