You thought 50TB was it? LOL! Hold on to your butts because 53.713TB SSDs are coming! These will cost you all your vital organs at 35years of age. Brains included.
If EA or Ubisoft don’t get their shit together this won’t be enough.
I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the “deathstars” (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I’d personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.
There are loads of people who think a company is bad because of one product, one service etc. A friend of mine hates Seagate, but he bought 10 drives of the same model. Pretty sure he even bought some after the first one failed … or people (like me) put desktop drives in a NAS or service with other drives. While mine are still good I expect them to fail any time since well they are not desinged for the use case I am using them for.
Many people can’t accept that one drive model isn’t going to kill a company or make everything from them bad.
The exception being the palladium drive. Although its not directly attributed to the fall of JTS, who at the time owned Atari. Its was clear from the frontline techs these things were absolute shit. The irony is that 1 out of say 10,000 was perfect. So much so I still have one of the 1.2 gig’s that still spins up and reads and writes fine. Its nearly a unicorn though.
I had one of these, it worked perfectly for years. I might even still have it. I remember it being a significant leap in size and cost per MB.
We had failure rates over 90% on them. We sold around 8000 computers on contract to the local schools that year and took a hit to our rep. We started going from school to school replacing them before they could fail.
The drive in the picture is dated mar 16 97. I’m pretty sure it was one of thousands of warranty replacements we received. Like I said its still good but really hasn’t been in service in over 30 years. I keep it because its a reminder of how bad, bad can be.
JT storage went out of business in 98. When we heard they had no one was surprised.
That is an absolutely wild fail rate.
i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.
Seagate have never once secretly changed the underlying disk technology on a NAS grade drive to one utterly unsuited for use in a NAS drive and then sold it as a NAS grade drive at a premium price because it’s a NAS grade drive. So there’s that.
I have killed every single type of magnetic platter drive from every brand they are all bad
Not “bad”, consumable.
Maybe consider looking at what all those had in common… Ie you
The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it’s all anecdotal, and I’ve had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I’ve owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven’t had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can’t recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the “bad” gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM’s derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi’s HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.
It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.
I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.
It’s all anecdotal for the most part. I’ve had two DOA WD drives in a row before, but no dead seagates.
As a side note, I hope you have those two WDs backed up, they’re overdue for a death.
Trust me, I’ve been waiting for those ancient WDs to die. I’m actually using them in a raid 1 config, so if one dies the other remains. I’ve also got anything really important backed up to cloud storage. I’ve worked in software (games) for 20+ years. I’m very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Anyway, much of my opinion on seagates comes from people I know who work in render farms and IT guys who manage entire studios. So its not really that anecdotal.
I’m very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Backs up anything “really important” to cloud storage
Yes, I do believe you are very well accustomed to data loss.
Almost every bit of data i have is redundant. The stuff I back up to cloud storage is the stuff I would care about if my house were to burn down. But that stuff is all double, and triple backed up, locally as well.
Can’t wait to see how these 40 TB hard drives, a wonderment of technology, will be used to further shove AI down my throat.
Wow great. From seagate. The company that produces drives with the by far lowest life expectancy compared to the competiton
And IIRC moved their headquarters to some Caribbean island to avoid paying US corporate taxes.
Pretty sure they are fiscally located in Ireland like a lot of big companies for tax reason and for EU VAT reasons.
They’re called Seagate, not Landgate.
Is this true? I remember them being very reliable in the past.
I think people say this because there was one specific 6TB model that does really poorly in BackBlaze reports, combined with a generally poor understanding of statistics (“I bought a Seagate and it failed but I’ve never had a WD fail”).
I will also point out that BackBlaze themselves consistently say that Seagate and WD are pretty much the same (apart from the one model), in those exact same reports
Heh. In my case, one WD SSD failed miserably on me.
Thanks for the explanation.
I’ve had at least 6 seagate drives over the past 20 years. none of them survived more than 2 or 3 years. Meanwhile, i have two almost 15 year old WDs sitting on my desk still going strong.
I can’t wait to upgrade my NAS to a 200Tb Setup
Hey! You! Get offa the Cloud (and grab yourself one of those drives). You can keep your thoughts to yourself, now you can keep your data to yourself, like in the recent old times.
Best to get at least 2 so you have a backup
Your own lil cloud
Imagine how long it’ll take to rebuild your raid array after one fails lol
underrated comment. i’d much rather clone a 16 tb drive than 50 tb one. Also better speeds considering the use of more drives. That said, if I can save on electricity, noise, enclosure space, and very importantly, money, it could be pretty cool. Just need to wait and see how reliable these things are and if they are going to carry a price point that makes them make sense.
I mean personally, for long term data hoarding, I dislike running anything below raidz2, and imo anything less than 5 disks in that setup is just silly and inefficient in terms of cost/benefit. So I currently have 5x16TB in raidz2. The 60% capacity efficiency kinda blows, but also I didn’t want to spend any more on rust than I did at the time, and the array is still working great, so whatever. For me, that was a reasonable balance between power draw, disk count, cost, and capacity.
honestly though. I kinda dislike that a 40 or 50tb mechanical drive is even a thing. What we really need is larger, more affordable solid state drives. Mechanical drives have had their place, but their limits are fairly clear at this point. And your point about rebuilding an array makes that obvious. They are just too slow. This move by seagate to make ridiculously large mechanical drives, should not be the beginning, as this article suggests. It should really be the end.
They’re slow, but they’re WAY more robust than most SSDs - and in terms of $/TB, it’s not even close. Especially if you’re comparing to SLC enterprise-grade.
I’ve definitely seen more hdd failures than ssd failures in my life, that said, enterprise storage is indeed very robust. My WD red pros have all been workhorses. And right now the price per dollar is definitely in favor of HDDs. That really needs to change though. The raw materials alone make HDDs more expensive to produce, the problem is only that there are less manufacturers with the means to actually produce the chips necessary for SSDs because HDDs have been around for a million years. Once that changes, I think HDDs will and should go the way of every obsolete storage medium thats existed prior.
Great, can’t wait for it to be affordable in 2050.
If you aren’t running a home server with tons of storage, this product is not for you. If the price is right, 40TB to 50TB is a great upgrade path for massive storage capacity without having to either buy a whole new backplane to support more drives or build an entirely new server. I see a lot of comments comparing 4TB SSDS to 40TB HDD’s so had to chime in. Yes, they make massive SSD storage arrays too, but a lot of us don’t have those really deep pockets.
Thank you! I lol’d at the guy with one in his main PC lol. Like why?
I’m still waiting for prices to fall below 10 € per TB. Lost a 4 TB drive prematurely in the 2010s. I thought I could just wait a bit until 8 TB drives cost the same. You know, the same kind of price drops HDDs have always had about every 2 years or so. Then a flood or an earthquake or both happened and destroyed some factories and prices shot up and never recovered.
I expect many are not upgrading every small incremental improvement too. It’s the 20TB HDDs that are ready to replace.
I’d buy two and only turn the other on for a once a month backup. For one lone pirate just running two drives, it would be endgame basically. You’re good.
I wish. I’ve got 6000 movies, 200 series, 300k songs, games, etc. pushing 30tb usage. I need to redo my setup, right now it’s raid 10. I know it’s not the most efficient with space, but I feel much better about redundancy.
We all prioritize the data we want. I don’t carry ps3 games because I have zero interest in them, and several shows I’d never have interest in, and I don’t bsckup FLAC, I downsample to 320kbps so I doubt I’ll break 25TB any time in the next five years.
Imagine losing a 50tb drive because you choose to use Seagate.
Seagate Exos is usually ok. Their generic stuff, is sometimes crap, but that’s true of all manufacturers, really.
That being said, I’d be nervous with a single huge drive, no matter where it’s from. And even as part of a redundant structure, the rebuild times would be through the roof.
exos are fine if you don’t mind them being loud as hell.
They’re not really meant for desktop use, so not really an issue. Also don’t keep your servers under your bed, the ventilation is quite bad.
Yup, if you can put em in a closet or something, you’re golden.
I can’t wait to lose even more data when this thing bricks
Having been burned many times in the past, I won’t even trust 40 GB to a Seagate drive let alone 40 TB.
Even in enterprise arrays where they’re basically disposable when they fail, I’m still wary of them.
Still, it’s a good thing if it means energy savings at data centers.
For home and SMB use there’s already a notable absence of backup and archival technologies to match available storage capacities. Developing one without the other seems short sighted.
I still wonder, what’s stopping vendors from producing “chonk store” devices. Slow, but reliable bulk storage SSDs.
Just in terms of physical space, you could easily fit 200 micro SD cards in a 2.5" drive, have everything replicated five times and end up with a reasonably reliable device (extremely simplified, I know).
I just want something for luke-warm storage that didn’t require a datacenter and/or 500W continuous power draw.
Cost. The speed of flash storage is an inherent quality and not something manufacturers are selecting for typically. I assure you if they knew how to make some sort of Super MLC they absolutely would.
It’s not inherent in terms of “more store=more fast”.
You could absolutely take older, more established production nodes to produce higher quality, longer lasting flash storage. The limitation hardly ever is space, but heat. So putting that kind of flash storage, with intentionally slowed down controllers, into regular 2.5 or even 3.5" form factors should be possible.
Cost could be an issue because the market isn’t seen as very large.
they make bulk storage ssds with QLC for enterprise use.
The reason why they’re not used for consumer use cases yet is because raw nand chips are still more expensive than hard drives. People dont want to pay $3k for a 50tb SSD if they can buy a $500 50tb hdd and they don’t need the speed.
For what it’s worth, 8tb TLC pcie3 U.2 SSDs are only $400 used on ebay these days which is a pretty good option if you’re trying to move away from noisy slow hdds. 4 of those in raid 5 plus a diy nas would get you 24tb of formatted super fast nextcloud/immich storage for ~$2k.
I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.
The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.
EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.
Flash drives are much worse than hard drives for cold storage. The charge in flash will leak.
If you want cheap storage, back it up to another drive and unplug it.
Eh hard drives are archival storage these days. They are DOG SLOW and loud. Any real time system like Nextcloud should probably be using ssds these days.
Hard drives are also relatively cheap and fast enough for many purposes. My PCs use SSDs for system drives but HDDs for some data drives, and my NAS will use hard drives until SSDs become more affordable.
yeah i still use hard drives for storing movies, logs, and backups on my Nas cluster, but using it for nextcloud or remote game storage is too slow. I also live in an apartment and the scrubs are too loud. There’s only a 5:1 price premium, so it’s worth just going all flash unless you have like 30tb storage needs.
My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.
Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.
I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.
It’s always worth paying more for Western Digital.
Same here. Been burned by SSD’s too though - a Samsung Evo Pro drive crapped out on me just months after buying it. Was under warranty and replaced at no cost, but I still lost all my data and config/settings.
Any disk can and will fail at some point in time. Backup is your best friend. Some sort of disk redundancy is your second best friend.
I feel the exact same about WD drives and I’m quite happy since I switched to Seagate.
Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then. WD is pretty much all good, Seagate has some good models that are comparable to WD, but they have some absolutely unforgivable ones as well.
Not every Seagate drive is bad, but nearly every chronically unreliable drive in their reports is a Seagate.
Personally, I’ve managed hundreds of drives in the last couple of decades. I won’t touch Seagate anymore due to their inconsistent reliability from model to model (and when it’s bad, it’s bad).
Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then
I have.
But after personally having suffered 4 complete disk failures of WD drives in less then 3 years, it’s really more like a “fool me once” situation.
It used to be pertinent to check the color of WD drives. I can’t remember all of them but of the top of my head I remember Blue dying the most. They used to have black, red and maybe a green model, now they have purple and gold as well. Each was designated for certain purposes / reliability.
Source: Used to be a certified Apple/Dell/HP repair tech, so I was replacing hard drives daily.
Gold is the enterprise ones. Black is enthusiast, blue is desktop, red is NAS, purple is NVR, green is external. Green you almost certainly don’t want (they do their own power management), red is likely to be SMR. But otherwise they’re not too different. If you saw a lot of blues failing, it’s probably because the systems you supported used blue almost exclusively.
I thought green was “eco.” At least the higher-end external ones tend to be red drives, which is famously why people shuck them to use internally because they’re often cheaper than just buying a red bare drive directly, for some reason.
Correct about the greens. They used to be (might still be) the ones that ran at a lower RPM
You might be right. Although I think it’s been pretty hit or miss with which drives they use in those enclosures.
Same. Between work and home, I’ve had ~30 Seagate drives fail after less than a year. I stopped buying them for personal use many years ago, but work still insists, because they’re cheaper. I have 1TB WD Black drives that are over ten years old and still running. My newest WD Black drive is a 6TB, and I’ve had it for seven years. I dunno if WD Black is still good, but that’s the first one I’ll try if I need a new drive.
That’s pretty impressive a couple of those and you could probably download the next Call Of Duty.
So all the other hard drives will be cheaper now, right? Right?
A 2tb SSD can now be bought for 100$ at least.
This is good to know. I might need to upgrade the storage for my Monero node.
Just wondering, why do you run a monero node?
That’s the default setting when setting up a local wallet. It is also more private due to not being dependent on someone else’s node.
How else are you going to bring up Monero in unrelated discussions about computer hardware?
For my wallets
You should ideally run your own node when using Monero
why? dont know much about monero just wondering.
When running a local node, the most other people could possibly see is that “x IP is running a Monero node”
When connecting to a remote node, the node can see:
- Your IP address
- When you submit a transaction (which could link your IP to your transactions)
- The last block your wallet synced (which could be used to determine when you usually use/spent monero last)
It’s also possible for a remote node to feed your wallet a manipulated list of decoys, which can reduce the anonymity of the transaction you submit by allowing the remote node to simply remove the fake decoys to find which isn’t the decoy (you.)
Because with someone else’s node, they can potentially track and log the transactions you make
This is how I know I’m getting old, my first thought was “spinning rust for always on long term storage” and then I remembered it’s 2025 and SSD’s are about equal now.
Get off my lawn, your interrupting Matlock!
Still cheaper though. 4TB you are looking at around 3x the price for it in SSD storage. Although I wonder how the power use compares, might be worth factoring in but probably isn’t too massive over it’s realistic lifespan
Oh yeah, I run spinning rust in my nas. All data storage for me is on HDDs, only OS date is on the SSD. That’s for the nas and my computer.
My main data usage is game installs and pretty unimportant temporary stuff so it doesn’t need backup fortunately. Game saves do of course but a simple bash script and the file size for that is tiny in comparison.
SSD performance would be nice to have, but costs extra.
SSDs are getting reasonable, you might want to look into it again if that’s your use case.
