Western Digital started shipping 20TB drives

[WereCatf]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

*tries to imagine a home use for a 20 tb dive.  Fails*

In the meanwhile, I would happily buy eight of those this instant, if I could afford it.

 

_{Alas, I can't even afford a 2TB drive and no one here seems to be selling cheap, used ones, either. Makes me a sad panda}

[Bombastinator]

49 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

In the meanwhile, I would happily buy eight of those this instant, if I could afford it.

 

_{Alas, I can't even afford a 2TB drive and no one here seems to be selling cheap, used ones, either. Makes me a sad panda}

You got a freegeek in your area?  Various charitable donation stores also get electronics occasionally.  They list stuff on their websites.  They wouldn’t be new.  Rather dramatically the reverse.  There’s some system someone built for linking various old drives of different sizes into one giant thing.  It’s not RAID, exactly.  There’s a different acronym.  My memory is that there is a “J” in it somewhere but I could be wrong about that.

[2FA]

8 hours ago, cj09beira said:

i dont envy those that have to use them in server workloads, rebuilding a drive that big must take ages, we have no reason not to go to 2 heads (separate not like the one by seagate)

I imagine the big enterprises commonly use striped mirrors to avoid rebuild.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Perhaps it’s because I don’t collect giant libraries of movies and digitize them.

But many of us do. Then there are people who work from home, professional and amateur photographers who work in raw files, etc.

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Just imagine how much pr0n you can save on 20TB drive. Even in 4K!

There is always someone who will make this kind of a comment. 

18 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

You got a freegeek in your area?  Various charitable donation stores also get electronics occasionally.  They list stuff on their websites.  They wouldn’t be new.  Rather dramatically the reverse.  There’s some system someone built for linking various old drives of different sizes into one giant thing.  It’s not RAID, exactly.  There’s a different acronym.  My memory is that there is a “J” in it somewhere but I could be wrong about that.

Mayhap you are thinking of UnRAID?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

5 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

True. I'm sure we'll get there. I mean there's a 3.5" 100TB SSD which is sick. And also a very large capacity in 2.5" form factor too. 

They also cost an arm, two legs, and your first born.

[RejZoR]

@Lady Fitzgerald

What else you'd possibly need 20TB for, other than pr0n? XD

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Just now, RejZoR said:

@Lady Fitzgerald

What else you'd possibly need 20TB for, other than pr0n? XD

Go back up about two or three posts.

[Kilrah]

Yup, RAW photos are space eaters, at 42MB a pop in my case since 2015. Easy to come from a 2hr performance shoot with 100GB of photos. Got 3TB worth of them (not including some jobs the client has a copy of that I keep on a 4TB external drive that I don't have a backup of since it's likely never going to be touched, no need for double backups) plus 4TB or so of video I've shot, which is why I upgraded my 2x6TB RAID0 set from 2016 that was full to 2x16. Rest is everything I've done and care about since I started using computers in the end of the 90s.

Currently more than one drive's worth is empty, but the 17.7TB free should hopefully last me another 6 years or so and that was the point of going big, no need to think about it again for many years. And RAID0's because I want the performance (got 450MB/s R/W with this set) and I want a single logical drive to hold everything, been through the pain of splitting stuff across multiple drives before and I'm not doing that again mostly for backup complexity reasons.

[Bombastinator]

17 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

But many of us do. Then there are people who work from home, professional and amateur photographers who work in raw files, etc.

There is always someone who will make this kind of a comment. 

Mayhap you are thinking of UnRAID?

No.  Maybe.  It was a four letter acronym my brain translated as “whatever spare junk you happen to have lying around duct taped together into one big drive.  Now with extra redundancy because any of it could die at any time”

 

I vaguely recall an LTT video about tech hoarding where Linus descended into someone’s basement full of ancient museum grade hardware and the guy was using it run a Minecraft server.

[The1Dickens]

46 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

No.  Maybe.  It was a four letter acronym my brain translated as “whatever spare junk you happen to have lying around duct taped together into one big drive.  Now with extra redundancy because any of it could die at any time”

 

I vaguely recall an LTT video about tech hoarding where Linus descended into someone’s basement full of ancient museum grade hardware and the guy was using it run a Minecraft server.

JBOD?

[Doobeedoo]

2 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

They also cost an arm, two legs, and your first born.

Yeah, those are definitely not consumer drives. It still take a while before we can easily buy multi TB SSDs though.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Yeah, those are definitely not consumer drives. It still take a while before we can easily buy multi TB SSDs though.

Good (MLC and TLC) 4TB consumer SSDs have been around for a while and the prices have come down quite a bit. The QLCs aren't quite ready for prime time just yet.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

4 hours ago, Kilrah said:

...I want a single logical drive to hold everything, been through the pain of splitting stuff across multiple drives before and I'm not doing that again mostly for backup complexity reasons.

Splitting stuff over multiple drives, even with 4TB drives, is a pain in quite a few parts of the body but it's still doable. However, backing the up can be quite simple; just use drives that are the same size as the drive being backed up. Works for me quite well.

[suicidalfranco]

if i hadn't planned to remove all moving parts from my PC i'd really love to get two of these, would last me a lifetime before i even reach half of it's capacity between Plex, game installs, Ubuntu and Windows backups and random courses i found on 4chan

[williamcll]

6 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Good (MLC and TLC) 4TB consumer SSDs have been around for a while and the prices have come down quite a bit. The QLCs aren't quite ready for prime time just yet.

QLC will be ready when PLC arrives.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

49 minutes ago, williamcll said:

QLC will be ready when PLC arrives.

Hopefully. The R&D folks really should concentrate on refining QLC before they even think about PLC, not to mention coming out with consumer SSDs larger than 4TB.

[porina]

18 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

*tries to imagine a home use for a 20 tb dive.  Fails*

Backups. Ok, you'll have to have a LOT of data to backup...

 

Currently I run a 6x3TB unraid (12TB usable) for general backups, and 2x8TB mirror only for game recordings. The 3TB drives seem so small now... when the time comes to upgrade that, it'll be bigger drives, not more smaller ones.

 

12 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Yup, RAW photos are space eaters, at 42MB a pop in my case since 2015.

Photos are nothing  In about 5+ years of photography as a hobby I produced about 2TB of data, and I'm too trigger happy when it comes to shooting. Now I produce about 1TB/year of game recordings and I'm only just starting...

[williamcll]

Very cool but when will 2.5in drives get more than 2 terabytes? Seems like the market for those have been completely smashed by SATA SSDs.

[Kilrah]

Long ago? I have 4 and 5TB ones...

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

Long ago? I have 4 and 5TB ones...

HDD greater than 2TB in 2.5" have been wildly expensive for ages, they came to market around 2016 but they were anything but cost effective. I brought a 32 2.5" bay server back around 2011 on the assumption that disks get larger over time and boy did I get screwed, for years. By the time larger 2.5" disks came to market that server was generationally irrelevant and I never really got to do what I wanted with it.

[Kilrah]

That might be why they now get offloaded as cheap externals, nobody wanted them in the server space becasue of either the price or thickness and laptop manufacturers don't want anything that thick either...

At least here the 4-5TB 2.5" externals are literally the same price per GB as 3.5" ones. 4TB for about $80, 5TB for $115.

 

I shucked 2 of the 5TB ones to put them in RAID0 in my SFF PC, bargain (buying the same drives as OEM was almost twice the price...)

[DildorTheDecent]

25 minutes ago, leadeater said:

HDD greater than 2TB in 2.5" have been wildly expensive for ages, they came to market around 2016 but they were anything but cost effective. I brought a 32 2.5" bay server back around 2011 on the assumption that disks get larger over time and boy did I get screwed, for years. By the time larger 2.5" disks came to market that server was generationally irrelevant and I never really got to do what I wanted with it.

>Imagine having a 32 bay, 2.5 inch server and not filling it with dirt cheap/Chinese garbage SSDs and configuring then into a giant RAID 0 array and seeing which one dies last and then sending that drive back to the manufacturer along with a note that says "this drive survived, use it for development purposes"

 

Madness.

[RejZoR]

16 hours ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Go back up about two or three posts.

Lighten up, it's a joke. People can hoard whatever they want.

[Doobeedoo]

On 12/27/2019 at 3:01 AM, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Good (MLC and TLC) 4TB consumer SSDs have been around for a while and the prices have come down quite a bit. The QLCs aren't quite ready for prime time just yet.

I'm mainly interested in MLC and it's prices are still very high though. When I see SSDs are getting cheaper saying I want to see it for MLC though. 

[leadeater]

13 hours ago, Kilrah said:

That might be why they now get offloaded as cheap externals, nobody wanted them in the server space becasue of either the price or thickness and laptop manufacturers don't want anything that thick either.

People did want them in the server space and the problem was the platter density wasn't really getting that much better. Over a 3.5" disk with multiple platters the size increases were worth it, wasn't the case for 2.5". Thickness is a non issue for servers as there is a standard size, much thicker than in laptops.

 

And I wasn't even wanting SATA 2.5" I was waiting for NL-SAS and SAS to go over 2TB, disks that have no relation to laptops and their constraints.

 

The stop gap during that time period was to use double dense 3.5" bays to double the disks per chassis and also benefit from the increases in disk size for 3.5".