Seagate Ships World’s First 8TB Hard Drives

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Seagate, a world leader in storage solutions, today announced it is shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive. An important step forward in storage, the 8TB hard disk drive provides scale-out data infrastructures with supersized-capacity, energy-efficiency and the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the industry for cloud content, object storage and back-up disaster recovery storage. A cornerstone for growing capacities in multiple applications, the 8TB hard drive delivers bulk data storage solutions for online content storage providing customers with the highest capacity density needed to address an ever increasing amount of unstructured data in an industry-standard 3.5-inch HDD. Providing up to 8TB in a single drive slot, the drive delivers maximum rack density, within an existing footprint, for the most efficient data center floor space usage possible.
 
It would be nice to Seagate focus more on making their drives reliable and less on making them larger.
 
Great, now I can lose twice as much data when the drive fails.

No way would I buy one of these.

I've had several drives fail on my servers the past couple months, and every one was a Seagate, even though I have more drives for other vendors. Only reasons I have any Seagate drives is because that is what the servers shipped with.
 
I just bought my first 1TB hard drive a couple weeks ago when my 320 finally started throwing errors. :eek:
'

I might be slightly behind..
 
I would just like to see the Hitachi 6TB helium filled drives cheaper, they are up next to replace the Hitachi 3TB drives in my arrays.

Seagate 8TB, lol, I need reliability and capacity not just capacity.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
I just bought my first 1TB hard drive a couple weeks ago when my 320 finally started throwing errors. :eek:
'

I might be slightly behind..
Click to expand...
Sadly, I still have boxes of 4 and 8 MB drives. Talk about an old geezer. My first hard drive at home was a 10MB Warp 9 external drive for an old MAC, only $999. It lasted a couple of years before it flew apart one day and I listened in horror to the noise and watched the enclosure jump around. :D
 
When 3TB drives came out I remember reading that the drive size was getting close to the random bit error rate. Either the technology has improved significantly in the past few years or people these days just accept that their RAID array will always have errors.
 
Nearly every single Seagate drive I've bought has eventually failed. I think I have a little 250GB that still works... but every 500, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0TB drive has failed. Ever since they bought Maxtor and mixed their product lines, they've been shit. If you mix clean and dirty, you'll always get dirty.

Today, I mostly buy WD drives.
 
Every single WD drive will eventually fail as well.

These are all physically spinning disks... They can't spin like that forever, they will all die eventually.

I've had just as many RMAs with my WD Reds as my Seagate NAS drives.
 
When I still used Seagate, my failure rate for drives was extremely high...

... which lead me to stop using them ... cause backup or not... it's annoying... and a waste of money and time.

Since then I've been using WD all colours depending on their use. Everything was peaceful again.

Has Seagate changed anything in the last few years which may have helped improve their situation?
 
Viper87227 said:
It would be nice to Seagate focus more on making their drives reliable and less on making them larger.
Click to expand...

Since their last fiasco with the 7200.9 /10 series they fail as often as any other maker from anything i have read in the Enterprise level...

Unless i am missing some recent news?
 
Enterprise Seagate has a decent tract record, ES3 and the new V4 but their desktop consumer models have gone straight downhill.
I still have a 320GB running with 63K hours on it.

I moved to WD ages ago and recently picked up some HGST for the first time in 10+ years.

Question is, with 8TB if they are running 6 platters that would be roughly 1.33.
5 platters is the norm for form factor unless you get creative like the HE drives with thinner platters.

I'll bet it's damn fast, they usually are.
 
SirMaster said:
Every single WD drive will eventually fail as well.

These are all physically spinning disks... They can't spin like that forever, they will all die eventually.

I've had just as many RMAs with my WD Reds as my Seagate NAS drives.
Click to expand...
Of course, every drive will eventually fail. Every computer part will eventually fail. That's why they are given a rating (MTTF). Seagates simply do not stick to their MTTF as often as WDs. Sorry.

I used to be a die-hard Seagate fan. That was literally all I bought, unless there was some screaming deal on something else. Between my systems, and systems I built for others, I've probably purchased about 50 Seagate drives. For the past 7-8+ years, I've been dealing with the fallout. Friends, customers, myself.... all have suffered major hard drive failures at the hands of Seagate. I have not had one single WD drive... nor any other drive... for that matter (Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi) fail. That is not something you can explain away with your blanket "Every single WD drive will eventually fail as well" comment. Sure, they'll fail, but I'm mostly confident it will be around or after it's rated MTTF.

The only good thing that has come out of this whole Seagate fiasco is that many of the people I've worked with have finally started taking my advice on adopting solid backup routines. I've found over the years that you can write the best procedures for folks, and automate it as much as possible, but eventually, some human-in-the-loop will mess it all up.
 
50 drives is not really a meaningful sample size out of the millions upon millions of drives they sell.

Seagate is still the most popular and sells the most hard disks to both consumers and enterprises.

I have many Seagate disks in my array and they have all been working fine for years. My sample size is meaningless too.

Was I lucky? Were you unlucky? We don't really know.
 
SirMaster said:
Every single WD drive will eventually fail as well.

These are all physically spinning disks... They can't spin like that forever, they will all die eventually.

I've had just as many RMAs with my WD Reds as my Seagate NAS drives.
Click to expand...

SirMaster said:
50 drives is not really a meaningful sample size out of the millions upon millions of drives they sell.

Seagate is still the most popular and sells the most hard disks to both consumers and enterprises.

I have many Seagate disks in my array and they have all been working fine for years. My sample size is meaningless too.

Was I lucky? Were you unlucky? We don't really know.
Click to expand...
Ok, I was just unlucky. Between that any my overly active imagination, I had an unusual number of Seagates fail. /sarcasm

In all seriousness.... you're starting to come across as either a:

a) Seagate fanboy, or
b) Seagate employee

These MASSIVE Seagate failures, post-Maxtor acquisition are well-known. These things have been dropping like flies for years. I'm not sure where you've been....
 
Wonder what their cost would be. Wishful thinking that they would cost just a bit above their 6GB drives?

Flapjack said:
Ok, I was just unlucky. Between that any my overly active imagination, I had an unusual number of Seagates fail. /sarcasm

In all seriousness.... you're starting to come across as either a:

a) Seagate fanboy, or
b) Seagate employee

These MASSIVE Seagate failures, post-Maxtor acquisition are well-known. These things have been dropping like flies for years. I'm not sure where you've been....
Click to expand...


In all seriousness... Ha! That "you're a fan boy or employee" stunt gets old real quick. Reality of it is, informal polls or not just, just like your accusations you really can't back any of this up no matter of much hyperbole you throw at it.

Anyone can claim bad or good experiences and there is nothing wrong with that.

I've had 1 OEM Hitachi 320 GB 5200 rpm fail on me and my WD and Seagate drives are still going. My problem is what to do with them after I replace them with bigger/faster drives. I'm with SirMaster on this one. That make me a Seagate fan/Employee too?
 
I've got 18 Seagate 3TB drives up and running right now. One of them "failed" me over the past few years. The fan behind it died, and it overheated. Didn't lose data or anything, it just dropped from the array and came back. I think I also had an early death (<30 minutes powered on) way back when I first built my array. I took the drive back to the store and got a replacement, which is still running today. Failures happen to every manufacturer. I've lost more WD RE drives than I have Seagate "consumer" drives. I'd still buy either brand. They're both reliable enough for me.

My next array will probably be WD Reds. Not because of my 2 drive failures, but because of the RPM. Lower RPM = lower heat = lower fan speed = less noise = happy wife.
 
Flapjack said:
Ok, I was just unlucky. Between that any my overly active imagination, I had an unusual number of Seagates fail. /sarcasm

In all seriousness.... you're starting to come across as either a:

a) Seagate fanboy, or
b) Seagate employee

These MASSIVE Seagate failures, post-Maxtor acquisition are well-known. These things have been dropping like flies for years. I'm not sure where you've been....
Click to expand...

The biggest sample size test that I've seen is from Backblaze and their conclusion was that they liked the 4TB Seagate drives and plan to buy many more.

If they were as bad as you are making them out to be then I do not believe they would have reached this conclusion.
 
I won't buy another seagate drive again. Seen too many of them that are built with poor quality.
 
Just picked up a 6tb seagate drive last week.

215MB/sec real world transfer speed, way higher than the 130-150MB/sec real world transfer speeds I get from my older WD blue/black 500gb-3gb drives. The 128mb buffer and high density platters doing some serious work. Hope it's as reliable as it is fast.
 
Tak Ne said:
When 3TB drives came out I remember reading that the drive size was getting close to the random bit error rate. Either the technology has improved significantly in the past few years or people these days just accept that their RAID array will always have errors.
Click to expand...

Seagate is just stacking platters, not really doing anything different.
 
I'm honestly left wondering if you guys were really around for this. It literally affected a huge amount of drives. It was a big freaking deal. I'm not saying Seagte drives are unreliable now.... just that I will never buy them again. I have had so many Seagates fail me, it would be stupid to go back at this point.

Prior to the 500GB/1TB/1.5TB failures, I can recall two hard drive failures. One was a 2.1GB 10k Seagate SCSI drive. The other was a 320GB Maxtor, IIRC...

Here is a page that summarizes the problems they had pretty well. Though the firmware update never really seemed to help prevent any drives from failing on me...

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/seagate_hd_failures.html
 
after the fiasco of the 500GB 7200.11's (12 out of 12 dead within 6 months) I have never touched seagate... even though I know WD has just as many problems it's hard to tell myself that when it's time to buy a new drive.
 
techrat said:
Seagate is just stacking platters, not really doing anything different.
Click to expand...

Not true. They are using SMR for these beasts
Higher density = faster, BUT, are they reliable, and for that, nobody knows until they actually ship them and people have used them for a year or so.
 
nutzo said:
Great, now I can lose twice as much data when the drive fails.

No way would I buy one of these.

I've had several drives fail on my servers the past couple months, and every one was a Seagate, even though I have more drives for other vendors. Only reasons I have any Seagate drives is because that is what the servers shipped with.
Click to expand...

These days when I buy a new HDD (today it would be usually a 4TB from price per GB point of view) I automaticly also buy another 4TB USB drive for backup. xD Because the size of these HDDs are getting so big and there's potential for so much dataloss and I didn't fancy the idea of running expensive RAID setup nor a NAS.

Seagate USB drive I bought (Backup Plus model) came with a pretty hand backup software which lets you specify which folders it should backup and then it compares if there's been any additions to them and backs up the newly added stuff at a click of a button. So I just once in a while start the USB drive up, click the "backup" button and wait for it to finish and turn off the drive and that's it, not that much hazzle.
 
RealBeast said:
Sadly, I still have boxes of 4 and 8 MB drives. Talk about an old geezer. My first hard drive at home was a 10MB Warp 9 external drive for an old MAC, only $999. It lasted a couple of years before it flew apart one day and I listened in horror to the noise and watched the enclosure jump around. :D
Click to expand...

Wow that is old. I think my smallest drive was 10 MB (maybe 20MB). I think I have functional 240 MB SCSI drive around here some place (just in case I want to go back to DOS (or is it Windows 95?) I look forward to these large drives for backup, but I really look forward to huge SSDs. I I've got at least a TB of pictures in Raw Format. Those jump dramatically as soon as you go to a TIFF or PSD file.
 
for the most efficient data center floor space usage possible.
Click to expand...

Really? You don't say? You're telling me that every single time a larger capacity drive comes out that it's more space efficient? I call bulls***

If it does turn out to be true that will be revolutionary.
 
MysticRyuujin said:
Really? You don't say? You're telling me that every single time a larger capacity drive comes out that it's more space efficient? I call bulls***

If it does turn out to be true that will be revolutionary.
Click to expand...

If the drive fails and loses data, it's not that efficient :p
 
I have a stack of like 20 or 30 dead 1Tb seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives... all my new drives are hitachi
 
MysticRyuujin said:
Really? You don't say? You're telling me that every single time a larger capacity drive comes out that it's more space efficient? I call bulls***

If it does turn out to be true that will be revolutionary.
Click to expand...

Why does this sound revolutionary to you? Fewer disks = less floor space required.

Floor space is part of the $/TB equation in any data center. Some applications only care about capacity. When you're buying HDD's a few racks at a time, putting your storage pools behind storage virtualization appliances with high performance flash caches, have to cool the drives etc. - you want those larger drives and the performance and durability start to have less impact overall.
 
I build and fix computers for a living. I work on usually 100-125 computers a month. That doesn't count dealing with returns of just parts that were purchased at our store. I used to see a lot more Seagate drives come back when the bulk of their drives were made in China. The last year or so I have seen most of their drives stamped with made in Thailand and I have seen the failure rate decrease. For fun when I get to work today I am going to see how many defective Seagate drives I have sent back in the last year compared to other brands. I'll try to look up sales figures to put it in context.
 
techrat said:
Seagate is just stacking platters, not really doing anything different.
Click to expand...

After checking, the bit error rate is about 1 for every 900tb written. Not as bad as I thought but still a RAID array of 12 of these has a 10% chance of an error.
 
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