Seagate Selling Affordable 8TB Hard Drives

Depends on how much work they do.
I have Seagates, WD, Hitachi and Samsung and none have failed.
They spin 24/7, stay cool but are not accessed constantly as they would on a server.

Current highest hour drive I have, Seagate 320GB with 65K with zero smart issues.
 
I currently have three data drives of varying size in my desktop with three similar drives hooked up to my server via eSATA backing up the first three.
I've been looking for something to consolidate the many drives I have. It would be nice to get rid of 6 drives and slim down to just two.
Two being the main one with all my data on it, and the second as a backup to the first.
 
I've actually had a reasonable experience with ~ 32 seagates from the 7200.8 through their current 4TB drives ripped out of USB enclosures, running 24/7 in raid5/raidz arrays. Perhaps 4-6 failures in the entire batch over so many years? In contrast, i have 16 hitachi 5k3000s and only had one failure (but those are much newer). It doesn't seem like the seagates are that much worse than the hitachis that were so well rated, considering the timespan. They have been more frequent lately, and I seriously believe the failure rates on their retail drives increased when they went from large well padded foam boxes with about 2" of foam each each side, to the new boxes that are only about an inch larger than the drive. I've received drives packed in a newegg box with airbags that promptly popped and the hard drives slamming into each other, and i've watched UPS guys throw boxes off the rear deck of the truck (imagine a whole shipment of these things). It's this whole green initiative, just like removing the larger air bubble in bottled water to save plastic, but now they leak with only moderate pressure because (gasp) water is incompressible.
 
Upon further thought, this offering from Seagate should be welcomed no matter which brand you prefer. $1000 is such an extreme premium over a $260 unit of the same capacity that the other brand will have no choice but to reduce their price.
 
evilsofa said:
Upon further thought, this offering from Seagate should be welcomed no matter which brand you prefer. $1000 is such an extreme premium over a $260 unit of the same capacity that the other brand will have no choice but to reduce their price.
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I think I'm with you on this, I may get four of these in raid 6 and give it a shot.

3 year warranty would be a good cover I think.
 
Domingo said:
If only they weren't from Seagate. I've had too many issues with their drives going all the way back to the 90's. Unless they've made a total 180 in the last 1-2 years, I'll never buy a Seagate.
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Same here, won't touch another Seagate drive. Had so many fail I thought they may have substituted old IBM deathstar drives.
 
Way too much data for a single drive , or even a single PC imo.
maybe as a cheap part of a raid array for a small business for backup only purpose, maybe.
for my home i can see this in my HTPC to keep all my stuff incase i dont care if it gets lost.
 
not sure why people keep saying that these are bad for pcs/storing your data whatever, they are clearly marked as archive/cold storage drives...

8Tb for <$300 is amazing.... a server with 16 of these in a raid 60 would net you 96Tb of storage! for a lot less money than buying DLT libraries and tapes etc
 
ICOM said:
My Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 - 1 TB is hauling the mail. 4 years old! Backing my Crucial M500 240 GB SSD.

Don't know what the problems is. Fast, Big, Quiet. Reliable. :confused:
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agreed. i have two 1TB drives and 2 TB drives that seem happy to just keep on spinning.

the 1tb drives were even the 7200.11's that were famouse for hitting a read limit and locking.... never even blinked.

also have a 2tb barracudda XT drive that has been going for at least four and a half years.

neurobash said:
Same here, won't touch another Seagate drive. Had so many fail I thought they may have substituted old IBM deathstar drives.
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I also was lucky enough to own a 40GB IBM deathstar bought for my first PC (athlon t'bird 1200 back in 2001), went on to give over six years of sterling service.
 
T_A said:
Way too much data for a single drive , or even a single PC imo...
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Not at all in my case. I'm a regular PC user but I'm doing a project in digitizing all family memories which is all photos, negatives, and videos going digital, and I prefer to scan or capture them in the highest setting with losless compression. Also I like take photos and keep the RAW files. With that kind of routine a terabyte gets used really quickly :D
 
I had an array of 4 x 4TB Seagate drives, they all died within 1 month of each other 6 months into service, all from different batches.

Never again will I touch them, doesn't matter how cheap they are having to buy new ones negates any savings.
 
Domingo said:
If only they weren't from Seagate. I've had too many issues with their drives going all the way back to the 90's. Unless they've made a total 180 in the last 1-2 years, I'll never buy a Seagate.
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Had a 3TB from them go bad. Shit happens...whatever. refurbished arrives DOA. smfh.
 
FLECOM said:
not sure why people keep saying that these are bad for pcs/storing your data whatever, they are clearly marked as archive/cold storage drives...

8Tb for <$300 is amazing.... a server with 16 of these in a raid 60 would net you 96Tb of storage! for a lot less money than buying DLT libraries and tapes etc
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The underlined and bolded is the most important part people are failing to realize.

This drive is not meant for your gaming PC and fast speeds.

This drive is not meant for your IMMEDIATE backup or VM use in a RAID where you need near limitless IOPS and legendary reliability.

This drive is meant solely to write once to and leave slowly spinning in a data center somewhere just in case you'll need the data one day. In this use case it's PERFECT for the use. Who cares if this drive dies, anyone buying these is buying N+3 of them just in case and leaving them on the shelf waiting for the day when they fail.

The servers or RAID chassis will NEVER be powered off and be running 24/7/365 till the next set of archival disks comes in. Think BACKBLAZE

If you use this for your home make this your secondary backup drive if you have a big SAN/NAS already. Make this your Time Machine drive for you Apple FanBoys(I am one). Ideal use.
 
Not in stock though.

We currently have no inventory of this hard drive, but it is likely we have it on order from the manufacturer. Specifically, hard drives are ordered in bulk then split up into single units to fill orders.
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So basically..... these would work wonders in an UnRaid server used for weekly backups?

I mean, that seems to be the easiest use of cold storage-ish at home, right?
HD's being spun down when not in use. Hell, You could use an AMD E-350 or Atom with a few of these drives, and use it as a backup to your primary system.
 
I had been hoping that these new larger density drives would drive down the cost of the 4TB Reds I use in my storage box.

Thus far, no dice.
 
After you return it for warranty 5 times and lose previous time restoring backups it doesn't become affordable anymore.
 
iamwhoiamtoday said:
So basically..... these would work wonders in an UnRaid server used for weekly backups?

.
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That's why i have a 2nd UnRAID key is for this reason. At night the rsync job kicks in and copies files over to the backup server and up into backblaze via a USB attached system.
 
Chas said:
It's really getting to the point where I look at it and go "Okay, when it fails, how much data have I lost?"

I had a 320GB NAS fail on me a couple years back.
Yeah, it was only 320GB, but it had some irreplaceable stuff on it.
With my current connection, moving to an online backup just isn't feasible (my upstream bandwidth is still measured in Kbits/sec) and I don't have any options for moving to anything faster.

My landlord booted Comcast in favor of kickbacks from some crappy satellite/DSL reseller.

And AT&T won't upgrade to the area PRECISELY because of what my landlord did. So all line installs in this area are no faster than 3M/384K (usually closer to 2M/128K). And I'm lucky to be grandfathered in at 6M/512K because I had the line before the policy went into place.

Backing up to DVD? On a regular basis? Uh. NO. Too expensive. Too time-consuming.
Tape? What century are you from?

Yet Another External Disk? That's what I had the NAS for in the first place. And this way I didn't have to go searching manually through a bunch of disks with no good way to label for content.

Now I see an 8TB disk?

Yeah. I'll pass for a while.
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You could go with Crashplan and do their seeded backup option. I just seeded 940GB to my Crashplan account and it all went great. Not a huge help if you are constantly adding lots of new data to your backup, but solves the issue of the initial backup.

http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Seeded_Backup
 
I'd like to second Crashplan. While I've never used their online service, I've used it across a local network, and it's done wonders, especially cross platform.
 
evilsofa said:
5900RPM. Quoting from somewhere, "Average read speeds are rated at 150MB/s with a maximum sustained rate of 190MB/s."

GlowingGhoul, HGST has 8TB drives too, but they are $1000 each, or almost four times the cost.
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Too slow, no go.
 
maverikv said:
Are these fast enough for HD video?
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Probably, but it seems to me these drives are not intended for live use due to their technology being less robust than a typical desktop or server drive.

These are specifically targeted at "cold storage" type applications where data is written, stored and infrequently accessed, which allows then to make them cheaper.

Probably nothing you'd want as a non business shopper, unless you are looking to make an infrequently used backup array.
 
Zarathustra[H];1041288424 said:
Probably, but it seems to me these drives are not intended for live use due to their technology being less robust than a typical desktop or server drive.

These are specifically targeted at "cold storage" type applications where data is written, stored and infrequently accessed, which allows then to make them cheaper.

Probably nothing you'd want as a non business shopper, unless you are looking to make an infrequently used backup array.
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Well, it does say: "Engineered for 24×7 workloads of 180TB per year" right on the datasheet though.
 
maverikv said:
Are these fast enough for HD video?
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Dumping videos to them or reading the videos off them?

I've been reading more and more on these drives, which come out in January and only available in 20 packs, and they don't sounds that uber fantastic even for RAID arrays that are very...instense. Something about the SMR tech that updates one part of the platter then causing the rest of the area around the platter to be reread or something. I am probably way off and misreading something (glazed over it on engadget), but I am more inclined to putting these drives farther and farther away from mainline day to day usage as possible. Backup drives? Absolutely. Cold Storage (Write Once, read sparingly)? Hell yes. Day to day NAS/SAN? Probably not so much.

Link to more info:

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/12/seagate-ships-8tb-shingled-hard-drive/

This video explained a bit more about what SMR is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UFUfv9n420
 
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8Tb is rather risky on a Seagate drive.

Storage tech seems to have been stuck in time since Hitachi released the first 4Tb drive years ago.
 
8Tb is rather risky on a Seagate drive.
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This is designed to be a backup drive (and used for no other purpose). Maybe you should always have at least 2 full backups at all times..
 
Panmaster said:
8Tb is rather risky on a Seagate drive.

Storage tech seems to have been stuck in time since Hitachi released the first 4Tb drive years ago.
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Spinning disk storage, that is. There's a new thing out lately that doesn't use spinning disks. :D
 
Panmaster said:
8Tb is rather risky on a Seagate drive.

Storage tech seems to have been stuck in time since Hitachi released the first 4Tb drive years ago.
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Did you even read what SMR is? That's brand new tech right there.
 
Sounds like these would be good for my blu-ray server where I just store movies and play maybe 3 or 4 movies a week. My server is on 24x7. Have 8tb in it now and it's all full but like 250gig. In bad need of more drives.
 
8TB? I wouldn't store 8MB of data on a Seagate. People can try to spin this around on WD all they want. I've bought somewhere around 150-ish hard drives over the years, specifically only WD and Hitachi the last 5 years or so. I've had I think 12 failures, all Seagates with one exception.... an Intel SSD that failed and was quickly RMA'd.
 
Flapjack said:
8TB? I wouldn't store 8MB of data on a Seagate. People can try to spin this around on WD all they want. I've bought somewhere around 150-ish hard drives over the years, specifically only WD and Hitachi the last 5 years or so. I've had I think 12 failures, all Seagates with one exception.... an Intel SSD that failed and was quickly RMA'd.
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I bought 3 of their external 3TB drives and they all failed. Not sure I trust them either.
 
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