Seagate Ships World’s First 8TB Hard Drives

RPGWiZaRD said:
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. .
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This is what i've done for a few years now. Seems pricey. But at the end of the day its cheaper to buy 2 drives then to recover one (recovery is expensive!). Though mine are just internal drives that i run backups of manually.
 
The length of the warranty will tell you how reliable these 8TB drives are.
If it's a shitty 1 year, there is NO way I would ever buy one.
 
I've had to replace about 8 Seagate drives out of a 5 drive raid 5 array (3 data, 1 parity, 1 hotspare) of ES2 250GB drives over the years. Once the hotspare and one of the active drives failed at the same time. I'll admit that those were probably a bad series/model, but I'm a bit leery at this time.
 
Flapjack said:
Yeah, that theory worked great for tge 7200.11 drives...
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At work some of these had to go back the 3rd or 4th time before the warranty was up. Although we did not have 1000 drives so nothing statistically significant. With that said I have returned to buying a few Seagate drives this year to give them yet another chance.


The length of the warranty will tell you how reliable these 8TB drives are.
If it's a shitty 1 year, there is NO way I would ever buy one.
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I would not purchase a drive of this size with a 1 year warranty unless the drive was $125 or similar.

I've had to replace about 8 Seagate drives out of a 5 drive raid 5 array (3 data, 1 parity, 1 hotspare) of ES2 250GB drives over the years.
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We had a lot of failures with Dell branded 1TB ES.2 drives in Dell workstations however again its not like we have 1000 drives.
 
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Larger hard drives like this dont make me think of a smaller storage footprint. They make me think of massive scalable storage... 8x8x8 arrays of these in a storage matrix Redundant Matrix of Inexpensive Drives but with variable numbers of copies & parity blocks depending on need. Something inbetween RAID and Google's storage. :):D:)
 
Tak Ne said:
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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That's why they don't recommend using Raid 5 with such large drives. The chance of running into an error during a rebuild (after a failed drive) is too high. I've switched to using Raid 6 or Raid 10 when using more than 4 drives.
 
Still running my Samsung SpinPoint 2TB drives - never a single issue and still running great. Bring them back!!
 
Artex said:
Still running my Samsung SpinPoint 2TB drives - never a single issue and still running great. Bring them back!!
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Since Seagate purchased the hard drive unit from Samsung and terminated any development these will be dead forever.
 
MrGuvernment said:
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?
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The last fiasco was the 7200.11 that shipped with a faulty firmware, at some point in their life they decided to not be accessible anymore. I own plenty of those (with correct firmware applied) and they work fine, some reallocated sectors after 50000 hours but that's expected.
 
Well I checked at work and we sell well over 100 WD and 100 Seagate drives a month and in the past year I have had 17 Seagate drives returned and 20 WD drives. Assuming just 1200 drives sold a year (it's more than that) that's a failure rate of 1.4% and 1.7%. Not exact math by any means since it doesn't factor in drives that fail outside of our warranty period but it gives you an idea.
 
Flapjack said:
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
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I remember that.

The reasons I decided to pick up the 6tb seagate drive is it's a new design and it's noticeably faster than other 6tb models available.

Also, it's been several years since that failure streak happened. Companies don't stay in business if their products keep failing. Also, 3tb seagate drives had roughly the same failure rate as WD and others. The problem seemed limited to a few smaller sized SKUs. The larger drives have different configurations and might not even have the same components that caused massive failure rates in the smaller drives. Sure seems so from the data.

Sometimes a company will just make a dog product. It happens. Unfortunately for Seagate it was their mainstream drives that were affected. To blacklist a company over one failed product seems a bit too knee-jerk for my liking, especially when data to support higher-capacity Seagate drives failing simply isn't there.
 
LordCalin said:
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.
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I still have two 7200.11 500G drives working flawlessly, the last Seagates I bought.
Maybe it's due to sticking with the AD14 firmware and not screwing with it?
 
Seagate, focus on reliability more. I mean it's great you pushing for more storage, but what good is it if such a large drive fails and the consumer looses all that data on it b/c of lousy reliability of your drives.
 
Viper87227 said:
It would be nice to Seagate focus more on making their drives reliable and less on making them larger.
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Agree. Not sure I'd even want one of these things for free, as I'd be tempted to use it. Still, I look forward to some reliable company coming out with 8 & 10TB drives. Be great for backing up the Unraid box.
 
Flapjack said:
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
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The 7200.11 problem was bad, however the drives didn't fail really, they were just not accessible anymore. With some playing around with a tty connection it was possible to get them back, with the data. Flashing them with the firmware Seagate provided solved the problem and they're still working now.
 
SirMaster said:
These 8TB are enterprise drives, they likely have a 5 year warranty.
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Enterprise drives for consumer use FTW. I don't tolerate or accept less than Enterprise/Datacenter-grade. After having the experience of such a harddrive, I will never buy a consumer-grade harddrive again.
 
Aesma said:
The 7200.11 problem was bad, however the drives didn't fail really, they were just not accessible anymore. With some playing around with a tty connection it was possible to get them back, with the data. Flashing them with the firmware Seagate provided solved the problem and they're still working now.
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Although I sent back dozens of 7200.10 and 7200.11 drives at work not a single one was sent back because of bricking. They all developed hundreds to thousands of reallocated sectors usually taking the drive offline when the drive tried to recover the UREs. A power cycle brought the drives back online every time. However a the point that the drive can not read dozens of sectors per full drive write and frequently offlines itself it becomes unusable even in raidz3.
 
Seeing as enterprise drives are typically twice the price of consumer drives though it's better to just get 2 consumer drives and have a backup. 2 consumer drives is going to be more reliable than 1 enterprise drive.

Also enterprise drives aren't really overall any more reliable than consumer drives.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

The main difference is they have longr warranties and different "better" firmware mainly for hardware RAID cards, and may have a lower URE rate. And most models can perform above what a consumer drive can.
 
I had feared that the amalgomation of the smaller hard drive manufacturers into the larger companies would slow progression of hard drive size. I'm very happy to see that this isn't the case and hope the rapid progress in storage continues. I'm hoping there is a SAS version of this drive available when these reach mass distribution and hope there are no unforseen delays in the arrival of these drives in the channel.

I remember my old 5.25" 4MB hard drive back in the day...8TB was unimaginable then...;)
 
drescherjm said:
Although I sent back dozens of 7200.10 and 7200.11 drives at work not a single one was sent back because of bricking. They all developed hundreds to thousands of reallocated sectors usually taking the drive offline when the drive tried to recover the UREs. A power cycle brought the drives back online every time. However a the point that the drive can not read dozens of sectors per full drive write and frequently offlines itself it becomes unusable even in raidz3.
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I had Constellation 1TB drives at the time and experienced no such issues. I had considered getting the consumer drives, but went for the Constellations instead...and I'm very glad I did...;)
 
Currently running 2x 3tb and 4x 4tb seagates in my NAS. No problems whatsoever.

Got 4x 6tb WD Greens on order only because there is no Seagate 6tb (non-enterprise) availability in the UK.
 
mw8t said:
Currently running 2x 3tb and 4x 4tb seagates in my NAS. No problems whatsoever.
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Having such a small sample size you can get lucky. At work we have had failures from every single hard drive manufacturer we have ever used. Somewhere between 2 and 10% annually is about what we expect.
 
I don't currently have any need for 5TB, 6TB, 8TB drives, but I'm still excited about them! Afterall, if 3TB/4TB are no longer the largest available capacities then those prices should come down.
 
mw8t said:
Currently running 2x 3tb and 4x 4tb seagates in my NAS. No problems whatsoever.

Got 4x 6tb WD Greens on order only because there is no Seagate 6tb (non-enterprise) availability in the UK.
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I bought 15 3TB seagates in the last year and a half, 5 have failed so far. I guess that is why they were $100 instead of $130 like the other brands.
 
Concentric said:
I don't currently have any need for 5TB, 6TB, 8TB drives, but I'm still excited about them! Afterall, if 3TB/4TB are no longer the largest available capacities then those prices should come down.
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I'm looking at buying 38 drives and was going back and forth between 3TB and 4TB now that they're at a similar price/GB, but I just noticed the other day that 6TB drives are getting close too ! Now I'm rethinking everything, and might leverage those gains in space and efficiency by getting only 19 drives after all.
 
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