Finally, a hard drive which can store more than a dozen modern AAA games
Can’t wait to see this bad boy on serverpartdeals in a couple years if I’m still alive
if I’m still alive
That goes without saying, unless you anticipate something.
Well, largest this week. And
Yeah, $800 isn’t a small chunk of change, but for a hard drive of this capacity, it’s monumentally cheap.
Nah, a 24TB is $300 and some 20TB’s are even lower $ per TB.
Depends on your use case. The linked drive according to seagate’s spec sheet is only rated for about ~6.5 power-on hours per day(2400 per year). So if just in your desktop for storage then sure. In an always (or mostly) on NAS then I’d find a different drive. It’ll work fine but expect higher failure rates for that use.
I paid $600+ for a 24 TB drive, tax free. I feel robbed. Although I’m glad not to shop at Newegg.
Yes, fuck Newegg (and amazon too). I’ve been using B&H for disks and I have no complaints about them. They have the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB at $479 currently, but last week it was on sale for $419. (I only look at 5yr warranty disks.)
I was not in a position to take advantage as I’ve already made my disk purchase this go around, so I’ll wait for the next deep discount to hit if it is timely.
Christ, remember when NewEgg was an actual store? Now they’re just a listing service for the scum-level of retailer and drop shippers. What a shame.
I hate amazon but haven’t been following stuff about newegg and have been buying from them now and then. No probs so far but yeah, B&H is also good. Also centralcomputer.com if you are in the SF bay area. Actual stores.
Newegg was the nerd’s paradise 10+ years ago. I would spend thousands each year on my homelab back then. They had great customer service and bent over backwards for them. Then they got bought out and squeezed and passed that squeeze right down to the customers. Accusing customers of damaging parts, etc. Lots of slimeball stuff. They also wanted to be like amazon, so they started selling beads, blenders and other assorted garbage alongside tech gear.
After a couple of minor incidents with them I saw the writing on the wall and went to amazon who were somewhat okay then. Once amazon started getting bad, I turned to B&H and fleaBay. I don’t buy as much electronic stuff as I used to, but when I do these two are working…so far.
What is B&H?
I’ve recently bought a series of 24TB drives from both Amazon and Newegg. Each one I got was either DOA or shortly thereafter. I just gave up but I would love to have a better source.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1809439-REG/seagate_st24000nt002_ironwolf_pro_22tb_3_5.html
They are a retailer in NYC. Their specialties (historically) lie in photography and all the tech surrounding that.
Omg I really have been out of the loop. I originally filled my 8 bay NAS with 6tb drives starting back in 2018. Once they would fill, i added another. 3 years ago, I finally ran out of space and started swapping out the 6tb for 10tb. Due to how it works, I needed to do 2 before I saw any additional space. I think i have 3 or 4 now, and the last one was 2 years ago. They did cost around $250 at the time, and I think i got 1 for just over $200. The fact that I can more than double that for only $300 is crazy news to me. Guess I am going to stop buying 10tb now. The only part that sucks is having to get 2 up front…
I got some 16TB drives recently for around $200 each, though they were refurbished. Usually a refurbished drive will save you 20-40%. Shipping can be a fortune though.
Refurbished drives sound scary. Any data to point towards that not being a problem?
As mentioned by another user, all drives fail, it’s a matter of when, not if. Which is why you should always use RAID arrangement with at least one redundant drive and/or have full backups.
Ultimately, it’s a money game. If you save 30% on a recertified drive and it has 20% less total life than a new one, you’re winning.
Here’s where I got some.
https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives
I looked around a bit, and either search engines suck nowadays (possibly true regardless) or there are no independent studies comparing certified and new drives.
All you get mostly opinion pieces or promises by resellers that actually, their products are good. Clearly no conflict of interest there. /s
The best I could find was this, but that’s not amazing either.
What I do is look at backblaze’s drive stats for their new drives, find a model that has a good amount of data and low failure rate, then get a recertified one and hope their recertification process is good and I don’t get a lemon.
I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.
If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.
If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.
Yep staggering manufacturing dates is a good suggestion. I do it but it does make purchasing during sales periods to get good prices harder. Better than losing multiple drives at once, but RAID needs a backup anyway and nobody should skip that step.
I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you’ve got considerable cash.
Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that’s a good candidate for more white label drives.
Thanks! It seems too risky for something like a hard drive.
I bought 8TB for something like $300. 36TB seems quite attractive.
So how much data would I lose when it dies?
about 36TB?
Nooooooooo not all my pr0ns!!
Assuming you aren’t striping, up to 36 TB. If you follow even halfway decent practices with basically any kind of RAID other than 0, hopefully 0 Bytes.
The main worry with stuff like this is that it potentially takes a while to recover from a failed drive even if you catch it in time (alert systems are your friend). And 36 TB is a LOT of data to work through and recover which means a LOT of stress on the remaining drives for a few days.
aren’t striping
I think you mean “are striping”.
But even with striping you have backups right? Local redundancy is for availability, not durability.
Words hard
And I would go so far as to say that nobody who is buying 36 TB spinners is doing offsite backups of that data. For any org doing offsites of that much data you are almost guaranteed using a tape drive of some form because… they pay for themselves pretty fast and are much better for actual cold storage backups.
Seagate et al keep pushing for these truly massive spinners and I really do wonder who the market is for them. They are overly expensive for cold storage and basically any setup with that volume of data is going to be better off slowly rotating out smaller drives. Partially because of recovery times and partially because nobody but a sponsored youtuber is throwing out their 24 TB drives because 36 TB hit the market.
I assume these are a byproduct of some actually useful tech that is sold to help offset the costs while maybe REALLY REALLY REALLY want 72 TBs in their four bay Synology.
Been a long time since I set foot in a data center; are tape drives not still king for cold storage of data?
It depends on the size/“disruptiveness” of the company but yeah. You either have your own tape back up system or you contract out to someone who does and try not to think about what it means to be doing a glorified rsync of all your data offsite every week.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say anyone doing genuine offsite backups using a spinning disc is wrong but…
The caveat I’ll carve out is the hobbyist space where a lot of us will back up truly essential data to a cloud bucket or even a friend/family member’s NAS. I… still think that is more wrong than not but (assuming you trust them and they have proper practices) it is probably the best way for a hobbyist to keep a backup without worrying about that USB drive degrading since it gets plugged in once a year.
I wouldn’t buy a Synology but either way I’d want a 5 or 6 bay for raid-6 with two parity drives. Going from 4 bay (raid 6 or 10) to 5 bay (raid 6) is 50% more user data for 25% more drives. I wouldn’t do raid 5 with drives of this size.
It would probably take days to rebuild the array.
It’s important to also note that RAID (or alternatives such as unRAID) are not backup systems and should not be relied on as such. If you have a severe brownout that fries more than two or three drives at once, for example, you will lose data if you’re not backing up.
Are people still mining chia ?
I think if I needed to store 36TB of data, I would rather get several smaller disks.
But if you hate your data there’s no quicker way to lose it than a single 36TB Seagate drive.
That’s why Seagate is the last word in the title.
I don’t think the target audience of this drive is buying one. They are trying to optimize for density and are probably buying in bulk rather than paying the $800 price tag.
But if you need a Petabyte of data you’ll appreciate this existing
That’s roughly what I have now, and I only have about 200gb left, so I kind of wish I could get a little more right now. This is across 7 drives. I really hope storing data becomes faster and cheaper in the future because as it keeps growing over the past few decades, it gets longer and longer to replace and move this much data…
Well, it does cost less and less every year. I bought two 8TB drives for $300 each or so, and today a 24TB drive is about that much.
SSDs are getting crazy cheap.
If you need 10tb of storage, you could get 2x used 10tb hdds in raid 1 for $200, but 6x used 2tb nvme in raid 5 is only $600 and 100x faster. Both take up the same amount of space.
Multiple drives in a RAID.
for POrn, but who downloads porn nowadays. unless its the illegal kind.
Get your meds, man
Defragmenting…
Man, I used to LOVE defragmenting drives. I felt like I was actually doing something productive, and I just got to sit back and watch the magic happen.
Now I know better.
I’ve never had to defragment the ext4 drives in my server. Ext4 is fairly resistant to fragmentation.
It’s not really Ext4 doing that, it’s a bunch of tricks in the OS layer and the way apps write files to storage that limits it.
You’ll see it if you use something like a BT client without pre-allocation, those files can get heavily fragmented depending on the download speed.
One of the worst things that the newer Windows versions did is get rid of that little view of defragmenting. It was much more interesting than watching a number slowly tick up.
Makes me shudder. I have to replace a drive in my array, because it is degraded. It’s a 4TB. Imagine having to replace one of these. I’d much rather have a bunch of cheaper drives, even if they are a bit more expensive per TB, because the replacement cost will eventually make the total cost of ownership lower.
Also, repeat with me: “Please give me a Toshiba or Hitachi, please”
Until you run out of ports or cage space 😂
So if you have been around long enough you might remember the Hitachi (IBM) deathstars https://wizardprang.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-last-deathstar/
I see Hitachi and think no fucking way, where as Seagate I used to see as an always yes. Now I just stick the disks in a zfs array and call it done
What I’m really waiting for is large capacity ssds with sata.
Pretty sure I had a bigger hard drive than that for my Amiga. You could have broken a toe if you’d dropped it.
Do you need it? Probably not. Do you want it? Oh, yeah.
I feel seen
Hello
with this I can store at least 3 modern “AAA” games
Oh definitely, game sizes are getting extreme and I prefer smaller indie games now 🥲
More like zero, cause modern AAA games require an NVME (or at least an SSD) and this is a good old fashioned 7200 RPM drive.
Surely no games actually require a SSD?
A lot of modern AAA games require an SSD, actually.
On top of my head: Cyberpunk, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Space remake, Starfield, Baulder’s Gate 3, Palworld, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Both Cyberpunk and BG3 work flawlessly on the external USB hard drive that I use. The loading times suffer a bit, but not to an unplayable degree, not even close
It’s not a hard requirement.
They stream data from it while you play, so if you don’t have an SSD you’ll get pauses in game play.
Sure, you might.
But Baulder’s Gate 3 for example, which claims to require an SSD in it’s system requirements runs just fine on a HDD.
It’s just the developer making sure you get optimal performance.
But it is a hard drive requirement.
I can personally guarantee that it is a hard requirement for Spider-Man and Ratchet
That’s not how computers work, but sure bro.
Okay well try telling that to my computer when the games wouldn’t run without constantly freezing to load assets every few seconds.
Indeed, as others have said this isn’t a hard requirement. Anyone with a handheld (e.g. Steam Deck) playing off a uSD card uses a device that’s an order of magnitude slower for sequential I/O
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 don’t say they require an SSD I think, but when I had it on my hard drive any cars that did over 250kph caused significant world loading issues, as in I’d fall out of the world because it didn’t load the map.
Forza Horizon 4 actually does include an SSD in its requirements. Thank you for reminding me about that.
It does technically work without it, just don’tgo over A class, don’t do sprints and there was 1 normal circuit that’s a tad big in a forest bit
Cyberpunk literally has an HDD mode, I play it of an HDD every day.
With sufficient ram to load everything in you’ll just have longer load times, no hdd hitchiness
It will take about 36 hours to fill this drive at 270mb/s
That’s a long time to backup your giraffe porn collection.
How did you know about my giraffe porn?
What kind of degenerate do you think I am? That’s 36 hours to back up my walrus porn collection.
…or at least call a rubber walrus protector salesman!
Woah I haven’t thought about that since high school. I vaguely remember an inside joke between some dope smoking buddies and i where we would say call the police in that nervous voice
How you 'bout to call me out like that ?
Do people actually use such massive hard drives? I still have my 1 TB HDD in my PC (and a 512 GB SSD), lol.
I have 50t of data total : archival, old project, backups, backups of my physical medias, etc
This is an enterprise drive, so it’s useful for any usecase where a business needs to store a lot of lightly used data, like historical records that might be accessed infrequently for reporting and therefore shouldn’t get be transfered to cold storage.
For a real world example, the business I’m currently contracting at is legally required to retain safety documentation for every machine in every plant they work in. Since the company does contract work in other people’s plants that’s hundreds of PDFs (many of which are 50+ page scans of paper forms) per plant and hundreds of plants. It all adds up very quickly. We also have a daily log processes where our field workers will log with photographs all of their work every single workday for the customer. Some of these logs contain hundreds of photographs depending on the customer’s requirements. These logs are generated every day at every plant so again it adds up to a lot of data being created each month
I have just shy of 8TB of data on my home file server.
That’s not including my NVR (for security cameras) which has a single 6TB SATA drive sitting around 40% capacity.
Data hoarders could be happy, but otherwise it’s mostly enterprise use.
Still, I personally hold about 4 TB of files, and I know people holding over 30 TB.
As soon as your storage needs exceed 1-2 games and a bunch of old photos, demand for space raises quickly.
