Western Digital launch a 14TB drive

[Linus_torvalds]

12 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Sustained transfer rates are usually bottlenecked by the connection interface, not disk rpm

Sata is really dated. They should put SAS3 on this drive instead.

Not true for HDDs. The same interface sustains about 450-500 MB/s on SSD but not more them 250 MB/s for HDDs (I personaly have not seen faster speed on 1 HDD)

[Jito463]

37 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Need and want is different

Nope.  

[PianoPlayer88Key]

On 10/4/2017 at 8:31 AM, huilun02 said:

Not priced for average joe because average joe doesn't need to have 14TB in the space of 1 drive.

 

On 10/4/2017 at 4:52 PM, Jito463 said:

Says you.  This would replace all four of my HDD's with a few extra TB to spare.  Gimme, gimme.  I'll take 2 in RAID 1, thanks.

And me with my 5TB, 3TB, 2TB and 1TB (plus my 240GB SSD).  I believe it's high time I phase out that 1TB, now that I think of it.

 

Really?

(The 160GB Seagate & 500GB WD 2.5" HDDs are my dad's, they were just in the pic.  It was also taken before he got his 500GB 850 Evo, which replaced the WD.)

 

I was going to phase out all my 2TB and smaller drives, then a few months I ran into an issue that I haven't yet figured out how to solve.  I could clone a Windows install from an MBR-formatted 250 to 750 GB drive to a GPT-formatted 8 TB drive, but I couldn't boot from it.   I cloned, using CloneZilla, disk-to-disk, btw.  I'd use disk-to-image, except I haven't figured out how I'd boot straight off of the image.  I'd have to clone BACK to a < 2 TB drive (something formatted MBR), THEN boot from that, to boot installs of Windows for which, for example, the original drive died, or I'm testing a backup -- and even THEN I'm not sure if it'd work.

I recently bought the 8TB drives, specifically for the purpose of backing things up from the others.  Some of the 4TB and 5TB drives have multiple copies of things that were on the 2TB and smaller drives, and I think consolidation is in order.  I believe most all of my actual data (at least now) would fit on the three 8TB HGST drives.  Also there might be a couple older OS install backups - I know I saw Windows 2000 on at least one partition and there may even be a small chance of Windows 98 or even 95 lurking somewhere, although that's doubtful.

 

Also, it'd be nice to consolidate to fewer drives too, because the trend is for cases (at least in my typical price range) to have fewer drive bays.  How am I going to put all that capacity in one of these, if I was to buy one someday?

         

 

And please don't tell me to put my ? in the ☁, because

Oh, and

 

I don't have a picture of the bill, but I believe we're paying $75/month.

 

On 10/4/2017 at 8:33 AM, samcool55 said:

Well you are split so i dunno, doesn't sound too healthy...

 

Anyway, it's nice that we see capacity increasing but i'm wondering how they are going to solve transfer speeds. The issue with drives like these is if one dies in a raid config or whatever it takes like a day to rebuild... (over 25 hours from 0 to 100% full if it can write at a constant 150MB/s)

 

On 10/4/2017 at 8:55 AM, Sauron said:

We're rapidly reaching the edge of practicality. If anything happens or you are using these as backups, reading 14 TB off of a hard disk will take days and may straight up break the drive.

Still not really enough, and you'd be lowering its reliability.

The only real solution would be not using a hard disk, or at least spreading the load among multiple drives. Eventually they'll have to give up and just move to SSDs. Price isn't really a good selling point for these things anymore, given the size markup the price per GB for ssd storage is less than 10 times as much and when you factor in maintenance and practicality the difference is probably much lower in the long run.

 

Yeah.  It'd be nice to see them increase transfer speeds (sequential AND random) to

 

 

Quote

And if you really need massive storage on the cheap, you can buy tape storage, which is not faster but at least can be trusted to not break after a full read cycle.

I'd love to get tape, but have you seen the prices of tape drives?  The ones I've seen recently go for a few - not hundred, but THOUSAND dollars each!!  And from what I see, the couple hundred dollar tape drives can't take the tapes that would house 1 or 2 of my largest hard drives on a single tape.

 

I'd prefer my tape drive and tape media cost, vs. hard drives, be more like:

 

Also it'd be nice to see HDDs and SSDs these days have that much higher capacity per dollar in that amount of time.

 

 

Also, I'm sure 14 TB hard drives will be pretty expensive per TB right now.  Even the 12 TB drives aren't cheap.  I'd much rather get something like

I don't desperately need another one right at the moment, and right now I'm saving my $ for other things.  But, if I did need one, I'd definitely get one, or two or four.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

And please don't tell me to put my ? in the ☁, because

But the cloud solves all problems and is the answer to the meaning of life and all things in the universe, oh wait sorry that's 42 never mind.

[Jito463]

4 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I was going to phase out all my 2TB and smaller drives, then a few months I ran into an issue that I haven't yet figured out how to solve.  I could clone a Windows install from an MBR-formatted 250 to 750 GB drive to a GPT-formatted 8 TB drive, but I couldn't boot from it.   I cloned, using CloneZilla, disk-to-disk, btw.  I'd use disk-to-image, except I haven't figured out how I'd boot straight off of the image.  I'd have to clone BACK to a < 2 TB drive (something formatted MBR), THEN boot from that, to boot installs of Windows for which, for example, the original drive died, or I'm testing a backup -- and even THEN I'm not sure if it'd work.

The reason for that, is because the newer larger drives support what's called Advanced Format (if you look, they'll have a "AF" symbol on them).  There is a tool on the WD website from Acronis that fixes the formatting of the cloned drive so it understands the new AF sector positions.  We ran into this a while back when we cloned a customer's laptop drive to a new HDD, only to find that the cloned drive simply would not boot and/or would lock up.

[Jito463]

5 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I'm sure 14 TB hard drives will be pretty expensive per TB right now.  Even the 12 TB drives aren't cheap.  I'd much rather get something like

 

Spoiler

 

I was about to lament that I had just ordered one from Newegg that was $30 more (yep, I decided to act on my impulse to eliminate my 1TB drive), then I realized that this version is only 64MB cache.  The one from Newegg is 128MB cache, which is worth the extra expense in my opinion.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I was going to phase out all my 2TB and smaller drives, then a few months I ran into an issue that I haven't yet figured out how to solve.  I could clone a Windows install from an MBR-formatted 250 to 750 GB drive to a GPT-formatted 8 TB drive, but I couldn't boot from it.   I cloned, using CloneZilla, disk-to-disk, btw.  I'd use disk-to-image, except I haven't figured out how I'd boot straight off of the image.  I'd have to clone BACK to a < 2 TB drive (something formatted MBR), THEN boot from that, to boot installs of Windows for which, for example, the original drive died, or I'm testing a backup -- and even THEN I'm not sure if it'd work.

Windows can actually boot off of VHDX disk images so you could create disk images in that format. You might, I stress might, even be able to create a VHDX image of a 2TB HDD and mount that disk image and clone it to a 8TB HDD and be able to boot off it. 100% guessing here.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

34 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

I was about to lament that I had just ordered one from Newegg that was $30 more (yep, I decided to act on my impulse to eliminate my 1TB drive), then I realized that this version is only 64MB cache.  The one from Newegg is 128MB cache, which is worth the extra expense in my opinion.

 

Also look at the part number (0S04012).  I believe the 64MB in the title is a misprint.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

41 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

The reason for that, is because the newer larger drives support what's called Advanced Format (if you look, they'll have a "AF" symbol on them).  There is a tool on the WD website from Acronis that fixes the formatting of the cloned drive so it understands the new AF sector positions.  We ran into this a while back when we cloned a customer's laptop drive to a new HDD, only to find that the cloned drive simply would not boot and/or would lock up.

Yeah, I've seen that on my larger drives, and I was aware of that.  From what I understand, it has something to do with the 2 TiB limit of MBR, among other things.

 

9 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Windows can actually boot off of VHDX disk images so you could create disk images in that format. You might, I stress might, even be able to create a VHDX image of a 2TB HDD and mount that disk image and clone it to a 8TB HDD and be able to boot off it. 100% guessing here.

Maybe so, but I'm not aware that Clonezilla (or other FOSS tools) can create VHDX images.  VirtualBox can create VHDs, but not from existing first-level installs without a lot of trickery and even then it's quite risky from what I've heard, if it would work at all.

 

I'd like to be able to clone smaller MBR drives to images on larger GPT drives, and 1 - have the cloned OS be able to boot off said drive, and 2 - be able to clone from the image on the large drive to an actual filesystem on a smaller MBR drive for when the main drive that's in use dies or something.  Even better, I think, is being able to go from a < 2 TB drive to a 3+ TB drive (due to replacing a failed drive) without having to reinstall the OS.

 

 

For some reason, my parents are wary of OS reinstalls except when getting an entirely new OS / PC.  They've had XP Pro on their laptop since summer 2008, using the same install, now on their third drive.  First drive was a 160GB Seagate, then that started having issues so dad bought a 500GB WD Black (WD5000BPKT) around Spring 2012.  Then just a month or so ago, he bought a 500GB 850 Evo.  In both cases we cloned from one drive to the next, without reinstalling the OS.  Also several years ago, my mom's user account got compromised with something like a virus (although I don't think it was exactly that, but whatever it was wasn't good).  Rather than reinstall the OS, dad made a new user account for her and moved her files over.

 

Interestingly, even with the SSD, my mom thinks it's still just as slow as ever.  I'm thinking the Core 2 Duo T7250 and 2GB DDR2-667 RAM don't help that.  Yesterday my mom was complaining about it being SUPER unresponsive, and it doing things she didn't expect.  Later in the day my dad was telling me he noticed it was using > 2 GB of RAM / pagefile.  I would have thought an SSD would have greatly improved performance vs a HDD when running into pagefile?  Or does XP not play well with SSDs?

 

It's still faster than a sytem like this though

Spoiler

 

Look at the VM, not the host.  The CPU speed in the VM I think should be 5% of what it says, because that's the execution cap set in VirtualBox.  It was taking several minutes to do each of boot, open the login screen, open the desktop, open task manager, etc.   And that's even with the VDI hosted on an SSD  and I did cheat by giving it a fair bit more CPU & RAM during installation, THEN turning it down   I'm now almost wondering how low I could set it and still boot to desktop ... any chance that like 2-3% cap (80-120 MHz equivalent) and 128 or 192 MB RAM could boot?  How low might I have to go before the VM wouldn't even post...  

I thought Windows 10 required a 1 GHz CPU and 2 GB RAM for the 64-bit version which that is.  (I wasn't able to install the 32-bit version for some reason.) How is it that it's booting with the equivalent of a 200 MHz 1-core CPU and 256 MB RAM?

 

 

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Maybe so, but I'm not aware that Clonezilla (or other FOSS tools) can create VHDX images.  VirtualBox can create VHDs, but not from existing first-level installs without a lot of trickery and even then it's quite risky from what I've heard, if it would work at all.

Microsoft has a tool to do it, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

[Jito463]

33 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Also look at the part number (0S04012).  I believe the 64MB in the title is a misprint.

Hmm, interesting.  If that's true, I may have to send this drive back.  Thanks for pointing that out.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

1 minute ago, Jito463 said:

Hmm, interesting.  If that's true, I may have to send this drive back.  Thanks for pointing that out.

You're welcome Although hope you have a Fry's nearby, cause the page now says not available online for shipping.  (It's still available at my local Fry's in San Diego though.)

[Jito463]

15 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

You're welcome Although hope you have a Fry's nearby, cause the page now says not available online for shipping.  (It's still available at my local Fry's in San Diego though.)

Ah, nope.  No Fry's at all in Nebraska.  Closest one according to their website is about 2-3 states away.  ROAD TRIP!  

[dalekphalm]

On 04/10/2017 at 12:03 PM, huilun02 said:

Sustained transfer rates are usually bottlenecked by the connection interface, not disk rpm

Sata is really dated. They should put SAS3 on this drive instead.

Errm, you know that this drive does have SATA3, which is 6 Gbps (or around 600 MB/s) - which is juuuust a little shy of three times faster than the maximum sustained speed of this drive.

 

Now maybe you're talking about an Array, such as RAID10 or RAID 60, etc, where you can get exponential speed increases as the arrays grow - but that's not a problem with this drive specifically, but rather with any large array that uses SATA3 interface.

 

Also, FYI, this drive also comes in a SAS3 12 Gbps variant

[Beskamir]

On 10/4/2017 at 9:31 AM, paddy-stone said:

... And here's me with my 4TB drives

To make you feel better the chance that a raid rebuild fails increases with drive capacity. So basically lots of 1TB drives are much better than several very large drives. Of course this assumes you're using some kind of RAID array with adequate redundancy cause otherwise you'd just have a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

[mr moose]

On 10/5/2017 at 2:31 AM, huilun02 said:

Not priced for average joe because average joe doesn't need to have 14TB in the space of 1 drive.

So I am either not average because I can afford it but don't really need it, or I am not average because I only have two bays in my NAS case but 3x3TB drives. 2 of these mirrored would give me 14 redundant TB's instead of 9TB with no redundancy.   

[System Error Message]

Sata 3 which is common now is 6Gb/s, which if you convert is 750MB/s. So many SSDs can still use sata and HDDs are far from maxing it out. Each sata 3 in a chipset is its own channel so 6 sata 3 ports gives you a total of 36Gb/s. So 6 SSDs in raid 0 on sata 3 will give you 36Gb/s. (cant wait for people to say that im wrong but i tested this in benchmarking my SSDs before).

 

With the prices of everything up and not coming down it'd cause people to buy lower end stuff instead. For example when WD lost a factory the prices went up but never came down. Same with ram and flash as well.

 

Some company needs to disrupt the market as people tend to fall stagnant with ever increasing prices rather than improving tech and releasing for a lower price.

 

For instance DDR4 is supposed to be cheaper than DDR3 in both performance and price/GB but we arent seeing that. The exact same ram i bought years ago costs 2x more not because of demand but because of fame (Kingston ECC value rams overclock well).

 

G.skill which is supposed to be cheaper than corsair and a better overclocker just isnt cheaper anymore, and corsair's performance line stopped being a performance line since DDR3.

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, System Error Message said:

cant wait for people to say that im wrong but i tested this in benchmarking my SSDs before

Your wrong. Can I have a cookie? 

 

Not sure why people think HDDs are limited by it's interface though

[System Error Message]

28 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Your wrong. Can I have a cookie? 

 

Not sure why people think HDDs are limited by it's interface though

because people only see the mentioned speeds rather than theoretical and no nothing about the design. Its the same, only few actually learn how their car works when they buy it, everyone else just buys and drives assuming stuff.

[dalekphalm]

16 hours ago, System Error Message said:

because people only see the mentioned speeds rather than theoretical and no nothing about the design. Its the same, only few actually learn how their car works when they buy it, everyone else just buys and drives assuming stuff.

Yeah but even with the theoretical specs, the SATA 3 interface is like 3 times faster "in theory" compared to the rated speed of the drive.

 

Whereas in practice, you'll only ever hit that rated speed under very specific circumstances. So literally adding a faster interface for most situations is not needed.

 

The faster speed of SAS3 vs SATA 3 is just a byproduct, and will not impact this drive. You go with the SAS version because of the inherent benefits of SAS - or because of the platform you're using. Not because SAS3 is faster.

[System Error Message]

14 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Yeah but even with the theoretical specs, the SATA 3 interface is like 3 times faster "in theory" compared to the rated speed of the drive.

 

Whereas in practice, you'll only ever hit that rated speed under very specific circumstances. So literally adding a faster interface for most situations is not needed.

 

The faster speed of SAS3 vs SATA 3 is just a byproduct, and will not impact this drive. You go with the SAS version because of the inherent benefits of SAS - or because of the platform you're using. Not because SAS3 is faster.

i hit the interface speed pretty easily. Busses are very easy to overwhelm. In my case i used SSDs and hit the max pretty easily.

 

So no sata 3 is not the limiting factor for hard drives. This isnt wifi or ethernet, there are no overheads either.

[Guest]

On 05/10/2017 at 6:23 AM, leadeater said:

Also add 1GB power protected DRAM, 512GB of NAND cache, SAS 12GB dual port then send me 300 of them 

Actually not all that impressed - sure you could now put 1260TB inside 4U physically (90 x 14TB) however weight would be a huge issue. Sure a standard rack could probably support the weight however your floor might not.. 

[Guest]

Gamers don't need more than a 500GB SSD.  Video producers Pro/AM need a primary drive of 500GB and a storage drive of 1TB (SSD of HDD).

 

Anything more is strictly for commercial enterprises.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Windspeed36 said:

Actually not all that impressed - sure you could now put 1260TB inside 4U physically (90 x 14TB) however weight would be a huge issue. Sure a standard rack could probably support the weight however your floor might not.. 

Well our 4.5 racks of disks have yet to fall through the floor . Not using 60/90 bay chassis though only 24LFF (double depth) and 24SFF, does help we have reinforced steel floors.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Crusher Golfer said:

Gamers don't need more than a 500GB SSD.  Video producers Pro/AM need a primary drive of 500GB and a storage drive of 1TB (SSD of HDD).

 

Anything more is strictly for commercial enterprises.

My steam library is over 2TB though....