Pre-order 8TB Seagate HDD for $249 (expected to ship in March)

Indeed -- point is... if you have 8TB of stuff you REALLY can't afford to lose, you buy two drives... (same or different manufacturer) and cover your ass in case of a failure. The odds of both drives failing exactly at the same time due to mechanical issues are astronomical.
 
beowulf7 said:
I don't know about "any time soon", but I read a thread somewhere on [H] that some "expert" thought that SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs per GB by I think 2020, if I recall. That seems too ambitious.

Well about reliability, higher quality HDDs have a higher mean time between failure than lower quality HDDs. Of course, regardless of the HDD quality/reliability, proper backup is important.
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Ssd's will be ideal for when they can mass produce the chips in greater quantity than spinners. Manufacturer's are already pushing more money into SSD production than spinners. It will be the future, we are just now diving into 3d transistor technology.
 
Glad they are up to 8GB, and the price isn't too bad. Not in the market for such a large drive though.
 
DPI said:
Theoretically, sure. But what exactly is "quality"? No large scale studies have been done, so all we have is assumptions and anecdotal "I once had X brand fail, but Y brand is still going strong" bullshit. The circlejerk never ends. Enjoy.
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Empirical data. Not just anecdotal stories.
 
The only people going back and forth on HDD vs. SSD are people who need tons of storage that is very expensive on SSDs. No one else is going back and forth. SSDs are a one way street, once you know about them you long for the day when they will be cheap enough for every device you have to use them exclusively. And with each passing year as they become cheaper more setups convert. This last BF I finally got every computer in my house to have an OS drive SSD.
 
Flogger23m said:
Glad they are up to 8GB, and the price isn't too bad. Not in the market for such a large drive though.
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Im glad they are up to 8GB too. Finally HDDs are catching up to my 5 year old USB Flash Drives. I kid I kid.

On topic, not so sure I can trust Seagate with anything anymore. Their HDDs havent treated me well at all lately.
 
rudy said:
The only people going back and forth on HDD vs. SSD are people who need tons of storage that is very expensive on SSDs. No one else is going back and forth. SSDs are a one way street, once you know about them you long for the day when they will be cheap enough for every device you have to use them exclusively. And with each passing year as they become cheaper more setups convert. This last BF I finally got every computer in my house to have an OS drive SSD.
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Agreed. I'd need a 2TB SSD if I wanted to go SSDs only. I only use a bit over 1TB, which goes down and then back up as I delete stuff. But if it goes over 1TB, then I need a bigger drive. Sadly I don't have $800+ to spend on storage. But once I can, I won't be using an HDD ever again. Not only are SSD's faster, but they don't make any noise. :D
 
I'll probably end up using these drives as archive drives. When my 11TB server fills up, dump the backups to a 8TB drive, rinse, repeat. I already cloud archive my backups to CrashPlan and Google Drive (enterprise)
 
Flogger23m said:
Glad they are up to 8GB, and the price isn't too bad. Not in the market for such a large drive though.
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///AMG said:
Im glad they are up to 8GB too. Finally HDDs are catching up to my 5 year old USB Flash Drives. I kid I kid.

On topic, not so sure I can trust Seagate with anything anymore. Their HDDs havent treated me well at all lately.
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8 TB, not 8 GB. ;) :p
 
Hey guys so I broke down and grabbed the usb version, same internal drive for $260 from newegg business. Shelled it and put it in my media center. Just as a basic test I copied 5TB of media junk to it and it averaged like 40-50 mb/s in the copy. So not too awful ;)
 
rhansen5_99 said:
Hey guys so I broke down and grabbed the usb version, same internal drive for $260 from newegg business. Shelled it and put it in my media center. Just as a basic test I copied 5TB of media junk to it and it averaged like 40-50 mb/s in the copy. So not too awful ;)
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Where was the bottleneck? Was either the reading or writing disk near max utilization? That seems really slow if you're copying large media files which should be sequential read/write.
 
Not really sure, maybe seagate gimped the bios on the usb drive, but the transfer jumps around from say 80 to 20 Mb/s at least in the windows disk resource viewer, although utilization stays at 100 %. Shows up with a Model: ST8000AS0002-1NA17Z , Firmware: AR13
 
I just read that Intel predicts 10 TB SSD drives in the next few years with stacked 3-D Nand.
You might see 3-D Nand drives this year which will have bigger capacities.
 
Comixbooks said:
I just read that Intel predicts 10 TB SSD drives in the next few years with stacked 3-D Nand.
You might see 3-D Nand drives this year which will have bigger capacities.
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3D V-NAND is already being used in the Samsung 850 series, the PRO line of which was launched to consumers in September last year.
 
Armenius said:
3D V-NAND is already being used in the Samsung 850 series, the PRO line of which was launched to consumers in September last year.
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I believe the point is Samsung is likely making a large profit on 3D NAND since they are the only one producing it. When Intel/Micron begin producing 3D NAND we should have some price competition. Although I do not see competition leading to 10TB consumer SSDs any time soon. Enterprise at enterprise prices yes.
 
drescherjm said:
I believe the point is Samsung is likely making a large profit on 3D NAND since they are the only one producing it.
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I have to imagine the R&D costs were substantial however, so who knows if they've actually created a net profit yet. Still, competition will be good.
 
vsboxerboy said:
Most of my retard family and friends. I bought my sister an external to back up her things, but she never uses it.
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same here. what is worse is they cant be bothered to understand how or what to backup. my dad was copying icons off his desktop to a floppy...I explained that is useless and showed him what to backup and he decided that took to long. my sister unplugged the external drive from her machine and never plugged it in again. both of them were stopping the automated backups because it was interfering with whatever else they were doing.
 
Hi All those that ordered... I noticed on their site it is still saying it is not available for order @ B&H Photo. Considering they said the expected ship date on pre-order was 3/2, I am wondering if anyone has received notification that their drive is or has been shipped and when?

I see on google products some 5 other sites (some of which I have not heard of) are selling the drive including ShopBLT.com for $261.45.

Wondering what is the hold-up, I dont see this drive available on Amazon or Newegg authorized Seagate retailers.
 
Josh Hazel said:
Hi All those that ordered... I noticed on their site it is still saying it is not available for order @ B&H Photo. Considering they said the expected ship date on pre-order was 3/2, I am wondering if anyone has received notification that their drive is or has been shipped and when?

I see on google products some 5 other sites (some of which I have not heard of) are selling the drive including ShopBLT.com for $261.45.

Wondering what is the hold-up, I dont see this drive available on Amazon or Newegg authorized Seagate retailers.
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I have had 2 emails stating that it still is not in stock. Sigh
 
Since I missed the deal and B&H didnt have stock on it, I ordered from serversupply.com $299, and it arrived in 3 days.

Im still pissed off considering all the press releases said it was going to be $260
 
Josh Hazel said:
Since I missed the deal and B&H didnt have stock on it, I ordered from serversupply.com $299, and it arrived in 3 days.

Im still pissed off considering all the press releases said it was going to be $260
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Yeah if this was $260, I'd have bought one instantly, $299 though? Pass.

I wish I could find some hard data about the 5TB external drives that seem to pop up every now and again for $110 or $120

found this yesterday - 5TB seagate for $110 after rebate.
http://slickdeals.net/f/7720379-sea...nterface-109-99-after-10-rebate-free-shipping

I hate fucking with rebates though, and I'm hesistant about buying through ebay like that. I'm more of an amazon or newegg guy myself.

Edit: -- if you don't have to have everything in one drive, getting 10TB for $220 is a pretty bitching deal. Also, it seems the shingled recording method of the 8TB can cause problems in certain situations with slowdowns.
 
Just thought I would share my real world transfer rates with everyone... I am running both drives on the same ICR10r chipset. Both drives and ports are SATA3.

After 1 hour 7 minutes of transfer from one 8TB to another 8TB I had transferred 339,501,514,752 bytes. I am estimating that to be ~80.54 MB/sec transfer between the two if my math on the above is correct (I am sure someone will tell me if I suck at math).

After 2 hour 24 minutes I checked again 507,157,143,552 bytes estimating: 55.97948405 MB/sec

After 13 hours 0 minutes I checked again 2,270,946,021,376 bytes copied, estimating: 46.27655758 MB/sec

After 20 hours 20 minutes I checked again 3,389,091,655,680 bytes copied, estimating: 44.22673328 MB/sec

After 40 hours 12 minutes I checked again 6,501,294,723,072 bytes copied, estimating: 42.8421628 MB/sec
 
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I hope these force WD prices to drop soon on their 5 & 6TB drives. The Reds are expensive and considering the quality issues reported with the 6TB model, I've been holding off. But my current drives are full, so I'm just waiting for the day the prices drop to pick some up. =\
 
yacoub35 said:
I hope these force WD prices to drop soon on their 5 & 6TB drives. The Reds are expensive and considering the quality issues reported with the 6TB model, I've been holding off. But my current drives are full, so I'm just waiting for the day the prices drop to pick some up. =\
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SMR drives won't drive prices down on performance based HDD's.
 
I got my two I ordered a while back, using them in raid1 with linux mdadm formatted with XFS... Seems to be just fine for what I'm using it for (secondary storage of disk image backups, write once, read most likely never). Maps as a drive path just fine and works just like a normal drive with some perf characteristics that I don't really care about.
 
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8TB SMR drives feel like an oxymoron to me. I wouldn't want to use a drive so large outside of a RAID but it's recommended that you don't put them in a NAS. I guess they are designed for single drive backups. That way you don't need a NAS and if the drive fails you just lost your backup not your primary data.
 
robothunter said:
8TB SMR drives feel like an oxymoron to me. I wouldn't want to use a drive so large outside of a RAID but it's recommended that you don't put them in a NAS. I guess they are designed for single drive backups. That way you don't need a NAS and if the drive fails you just lost your backup not your primary data.
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I wouldn't *not* use them in a NAS, since manufacturer "recommendations" for the usage of particular productlines are typically guided by marketing departments rather than engineering, but there are plenty of usage scenarios these excel in. And there are more scenarios than just striped RAID or single-disk-backup (nobody has any business running striped RAID for home media storage anyway since it only introduces unnecessary risk).

Something like SnapRAID + DrivePool with a tiered write strategy (fast landing disks that offload to the archive disks at set intervals, or overnight, etc) is absolutely ideal for these drives.

That said, best GB-for-buck remains with the 5TB's, so unless you're very space constrained then the tradeoff for the slower writes and higher pricepoint may not be worth it. But I'll absolutely be migrating from 5TB to these when they get down in the $180-$200 range.
 
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DPI said:
I wouldn't *not* use them in a NAS, since manufacturer "recommendations" for the usage of particular productlines are typically guided by marketing departments rather than engineering, but there are plenty of usage scenarios these excel in. And there are more scenarios than just striped RAID or single-disk-backup (nobody has any business running striped RAID for home media storage anyway since it only introduces unnecessary risk).

Something like SnapRAID + DrivePool with a tiered write strategy (fast landing disks that offload to the archive disks at set intervals, or overnight, etc) is absolutely ideal for these drives.

That said, best GB-for-buck remains with the 5TB's, so unless you're very space constrained then the tradeoff for the slower writes and higher pricepoint may not be worth it. But I'll absolutely be migrating from 5TB to these when they get down in the $180-$200 range.
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Just for reference I probably should have linked the article about not using SMR in a NAS:
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb
I think you are right about 5TB being the best bang for your buck right now. The nice thing about these SMR drives is that they have a 3 year warranty, which is sadly becoming something of a rarity nowadays. On a side note I've been buying drives with my AmEx card lately because they automatically give you and extra year warranty. This can end up giving you your full warranty.

For example: I just bought a replacement hard drive which arrived yesterday. I put the serial number into WD's web site and the warranty expires 12/2016. Since hard drive manufactures start your warranty when the drive leaves the factory you lose a chuck. The drive I bought has a 2 year warranty but I'm losing 3 months of that 2 years. As far as AmEx is concerned the 2 year manufacture warranty expires 2 years from my purchase date and they warranty me from 3/2016 until 3/2017.

I just thought I'd share that because I've thrown drives in the trash because the web site said it's out of warranty. I'm thinking some of those may have been covered by my credit card. Lots of cards other then AmEx give you the same extra warranty for free. Keep it in mind because it's costs nothing. It's just a matter of buying your drive with the right card.
 
Oh and random slightly offtopic note...


Double FUCK YOU to the designers that didn't put the standard screw locations on this thing :| I was only able to use one screw on one side for the drive caddy before I slid it in to my file server.
 
robothunter said:
For example: I just bought a replacement hard drive which arrived yesterday. I put the serial number into WD's web site and the warranty expires 12/2016. Since hard drive manufactures start your warranty when the drive leaves the factory you lose a chuck.
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Warranties start from date of purchase. Inputting a serial into their website is going to calculate the warranty period from when it left the factory because the manufacture doesn't have a record of when you bought it. If your purchase date and the manufacture date are in conflict when it matters simply send them proof of purchase so they can resolve the discrepancy...or you can do it now if you're worried you might lose the proof of purchase over the next three years.
 
After some time researching these 1.33TB platter SMR drives, I decided to take a pass. Seems like rewriting sectors starts to ask for trouble that I don't need. The price is this low probably to entice guinea pigs. Think instead I will wait for helium-based drives to drop in price and stick with 5TB 1TB platter drives in the interim.
 
I just popped one into my Mac Pro for use as local CrashPlan backup. The warranty seems solid enough, and everything on the drive is just a backup archive, so no data that isn't already somewhere else (plus cloud backup).
 
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