Technology

Solid state is kinda like a microscopic punch card.

That's how most technology is:

• combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
• missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
• wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th

Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.

Home Petabyte Project here I come (in like 3-5 years 😅)

Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail

sonarr goes brrrrrr…

barrrr?

My first HD was a 20mb mfm drive :). Be right back, need some “just for men” for my beard (kidding, I’m proud of it).

I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.

Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?

I had the opposite experience. My Seagates have been running for over a decade now. The one time I went with Western Digital, both drives crapped out in a few years.

up your block size bro 💪 get them plates stacking 128KB+ a write and watch your throughput gains max out 🏋️ all the ladies will be like🙋‍♀️. Especially if you get those reps sequentially it's like hitting the juice 💉 for your transfer speeds.

Definitely not for either of those. Can get way better density from magnetic tape.

They say they got the increased capacity by increasing storage density, so the head shouldn't have to move much further to read data.

You'll get further putting a cache drive in front of your HDD regardless, so it's vaguely moot.

My dad had a 286 with a 40MB hard drive in it. When it spun up it sounded like a plane taking off. A few years later he had a 486 and got a 2gb Seagate hard drive. It was an unimaginable amount of space at the time.

The computer industry in the 90s (and presumably the 80s, I just don't remember it) we're wild. Hardware would be completely obsolete every other year.

I'm here for it. The 8 disc server is normally a great form factor for size, data density and redundancy with raid6/raidz2.

This would net around 180TB in that form factor. Thats would go a long way for a long while.

HDD read rates are way faster than media playback rates, and seek times are just about irrelevant in that use case. Spinning rust is fine for media storage. It's boot drives, VM/container storage, etc, that you would want to have on an SSD instead of the big HDD.

Not sure what you're going on about here. Even these discs have plenty of performance for read/wrote ops for rarely written data like media. They have the same ability to be used by error checking filesystems like zfs or btrfs, and can be used in raid arrays, which add redundancy for disc failure.

The only negatives of large drives in home media arrays is the cost, slightly higher idle power usage, and the resilvering time on replacing a bad disc in an array.

Your 8-12TB recommendation already has most of these negatives. Adding more space per disc is just scaling them linearly.

The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren't a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.

It's no ssd but is no slower than any other 12TB drive. It's not shingled but HAMR. The sectors are closer together so it has even better seeking speed than a regular 12TB drive.

Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.

????

It's absolutely perfect for that. Even if it was shingled tech, that only slows write speeds. Unless you are editing your own video, write seek times are irrelevant. For media playback use only consistent read speed matters. Not even read seek matters except in extreme conditions like comparing tape seek to drive seek. You cannot measure 10 ms difference between clicking a video and it starting to play because of all the other delays caused by media streaming over a network.

But that's not even relevant because these have faster read seeking than older drives because sectors are closer together.

I’m real curious why you say that. I’ve been designing systems with high IOPS data center application requirements for decades so I know enterprise storage pretty well. These drives would cause zero issues for anyone storing and watching their media collection with them.

One problem is that larger drives take longer to rebuild the RAID array when one drive needs replacing. You're sitting there for days hoping that no other drive fails while the process goes. Current SATA and SAS standards are as fast as spinning platters could possibly go; making them go even faster won't help anything.

There was some debate among storage engineers if they even want drives bigger than 20TB. The potential risk of data loss during a rebuild is worth trading off density. That will probably be true until SSDs are closer to the price per TB of spinning platters (not necessarily the same; possibly more like double the price).

Not sure whether we'll arrive there the tech is definitely entering the taper-out phase of the sigmoid. Capacity might very well still become cheaper, also 3x cheaper, but don't, in any way, expect them to simultaneously keep up with write performance that ship has long since sailed. The more bits they're trying to squeeze into a single cell the slower it's going to get and the price per cell isn't going to change much, any more, as silicon has hit a price wall, it's been a while since the newest, smallest node was also the cheapest.

OTOH how often do you write a terabyte in one go at full tilt.