News - Seagate takes swipe at Western Digital: announces 'proper' 2TB drive

[HEXUS]

Enterprise-class hard-drive to be the fastest around?

Read more.

[Funkstar]

hey why don't they just issue a press release saying they have a 42TB drive spinning at a million RPM..... available in 2087.

This won't be out until at least last summer, as you say the WD is available (roughly) now. By late summer I would expect a 2TB Blue and a Black from WD as well. So that will be 3x 2TB drives in WDs lineup, with the bugs and manufacturing issues worked out as they will have been around for 6 months.

Press releases are all well and good, but come on, show us the drives!

[kalniel]

They say it as if variable RPM is a bad thing. WD did a good thing with that IMHO.

[TAKTAK]

Am i the only one that prefers to have data spread out across lower capacity drives? (providing there is room for more drives )

Well.. i say lower capacity... 500GB + 500GB + 640GB...

[Funkstar]

But then you need three of four times the physical space and your storage will be using three or four times the power.

I could sell one of my N5200s, 5x1TB drives and 5x500gb drives if I bought 5x2TB drives. Hmmmm that could be an idea.....

[shaithis]

Am i the only one that prefers to have data spread out across lower capacity drives? (providing there is room for more drives )

Well.. i say lower capacity... 500GB + 500GB + 640GB...

4 x 1TB in RAID 5

Plus stand-alones:
1 x 1TB
1 x 500GB
3 x 320GB
2 x External 200GB

And I keep running out of space....it all depends on your needs.

Give bigger drives!!!

[alchemist118]

Am i the only one that prefers to have data spread out across lower capacity drives? (providing there is room for more drives )

I'm with you on this... I don't think I could lose 2TB of data!! I backup the important stuff but losing 2TB that is insane if the drive goes bad!!

[arthurleung]

Am i the only one that prefers to have data spread out across lower capacity drives? (providing there is room for more drives )

Well.. i say lower capacity... 500GB + 500GB + 640GB...

500, 640GB drives, in comparison, is not as bad as losing a 2TB drive.
I wouldn't dare running any drives > 1TB in anything other than RAID5 (Which means minimum of 3TB to kick off).

My stuff are backed up mostly off-site but ISP won't be happy if I try to restore my data across the internet

[scaryjim]

I don't think I could lose 2TB of data!!

I guess that *for now* these drives are really aimed more at the commercial end of the market - no, I wouldn't want to store all my data on a 2TB drive (I don't think the 6 - 7 computers I have at home have 2TB of storage between them, and none of them are anywhere near full), but I work for a research group that receives 1.2million data records *each month* and has to store and work with that data securely. So lining up 4 of these drives in Raid10 could make implicit sense in a small workgroup server where you might not have the resources to extend the storage matrix offered on your motherboard. Although I think I'd have a job justifying £800 just on storage media...

[Steve]

People thinking of maintaining huge RAID arrays need to stop and think about it:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

Hard drive's are reaching such a capacity that at their current Unrecoverable Read Error rates, a rebuild of an array will have a significant chance of suffering another error on another disk before the build completes... boom.

I'm guessing ZFS solves this problem somehow, seeing as it solves about every filesystem problem ever.

[manwithnoname]

People thinking of maintaining huge RAID arrays need to stop and think about it:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

Hard drive's are reaching such a capacity that at their current Unrecoverable Read Error rates, a rebuild of an array will have a significant chance of suffering another error on another disk before the build completes... boom.

I'm guessing ZFS solves this problem somehow, seeing as it solves about every filesystem problem ever.

I smell a fish

Reads fail
SATA drives are commonly specified with an unrecoverable read error rate (URE) of 10^14. Which means that once every 100,000,000,000,000 bits, the disk will very politely tell you that, so sorry, but I really, truly can’t read that sector back to you.

One hundred trillion bits is about 12 terabytes. Sound like a lot? Not in 2009.

Disk capacities double
Disk drive capacities double every 18-24 months. We have 1 TB drives now, and in 2009 we’ll have 2 TB drives.

With a 7 drive RAID 5 disk failure, you’ll have 6 remaining 2 TB drives. As the RAID controller is busily reading through those 6 disks to reconstruct the data from the failed drive, it is almost certain it will see an URE

So let's forget raid, say I have 6 x 2TB disks pluged into my pc full of data (It's all music honest) and I read all the data at once the article implies (almost certain) that I will get a URE error. And let's say I only have one 2TB disk and I read all the data 6 time in a row - almost certain to get URE error? If I back up my 1TB disk every day am I almost certain to have a URE by the end of 2 weeks?

It's bad maths to take a probabily measure like URE and make those assumptions. But, yes, the bigger the disk the more likely an error but not almost certain. Another thing to consider URE figures are likely to incease as the disk sizes do.

[arthurleung]

I smell a fish



So let's forget raid, say I have 6 x 2TB disks pluged into my pc full of data (It's all music honest) and I read all the data at once the article implies (almost certain) that I will get a URE error. And let's say I only have one 2TB disk and I read all the data 6 time in a row - almost certain to get URE error? If I back up my 1TB disk every day am I almost certain to have a URE by the end of 2 weeks?

It's bad maths to take a probabily measure like URE and make those assumptions. But, yes, the bigger the disk the more likely an error but not almost certain. Another thing to consider URE figures are likely to incease as the disk sizes do.

That is where stuff like PAR2, ECC, WinRAR Recovery Records comes into play. Who would archive something in an unprotected format?

URE certainly makes quite large impact. My fileserver regularly give out file error every few weeks which a backup had to be restored or winrar recovery record is used to repair it. The error is usually small, damaging just a block or two (4-8kb).

[watercooled]

In the article, it says the problem is with disks specd at 1 URE per 10^14bits, but modern drives by WD and Samsung are Specd at 1 URE per 10^15bits - the writer claims enterprise disks with this reliability 'And your spec’d URE rate of 10^15 also helps.' are much safer, it's true - 10 times safer!

[Singh400]

Any idea when Samsung will bring out 2TB drives? As for drive failure my Windows Home Server and file duplication takes care of that.

[l33t-krew]

2tb drives?


I still think 500gb is big.

I remember my first pc with its 8gb hdd :|

[Singh400]

2tb drives?


I still think 500gb is big.

I remember my first pc with its 8gb hdd :|

Then you are one of few who think that. The rest of us need MOAR