News Seagate begins 8TB hard drive sales

I got bored of waiting, caved in and got 4 x 4TB drives a few months back. These 8TB drives look like they'll be out of reach of joe public for a while yet so dont feel too bad about these. Kind of wished I'd held off a little bit to get the 6TB Western Digital drives around the £200 mark though but I'd been waiting for years and years for something larger than 4TB.

 

Must say I'm looking forward to getting one. Not paying more than £250 though, so as long as that takes.

 

I just hope that these larger hard drives eventually force down the 4TB drives below the £100 mark. That would be the new sweet spot.

 

But if you add video to the music, then having more space is quickly needed.

 

Most of my data is just my steam library anyway as I can't be bothered to wait for a download and install.

Also ripping all your cds / dvds / blu rays in a loss less format due to being too lazy to look for discs every time eats storage space for breakfast.

Plus a lot of the increased storage needs is also just due to files getting bigger, current nvidia gpu driver is 213MB, remember when they used to fit on a 1.44MB floppy?

 

I rip my DVDs and Blu-Rays for archiving and fast access, because I hate physical media. My current media PC is rocking about 8TB mirrored storage space all told, but it's all in 1 and 2TB drives and it makes a hell of a noise.

As soon as there's an 8TB WD Red drive, my life will be a lot easier (and quieter).

 

My wedding DVD takes up 4.7gb alone, am I not normal?


Although I would also be concerned about putting all my eggs in 1 basket, I've lost data on a HDD and spent over a week recovering it slowly with about 10% loss.

Looking forward to other drives coming down though

 

We get it jrs77, you don't need this storage. You have your way of doing things and that's fine. Me, I have the means and the will to fill a 8TB with things I want (mostly emulation) very easily. I already run a 2x4TB NAS so a single 8TB drive I could dump all that stuff onto inside my HTPC would be very welcome.

I own hundreds of CD's and they just sit in a box in the attic. I have zero interest in storing a 500+ boxes of cd's, DVD's, BR's in my living space whenever I can store it all on a single 3.5inch drive. Each to their own.

 

CD-R/DVD-R discs only have an expected shelf life of 5-10 years before they're recorded, and I can't imagine the recording process will lengthen the life expectancy of a DVD-R (source https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/cached/preserving/8_1a_cdcare.htm). Similar poor longevity has also been seen in recordable blu-ray media (see here http://goughlui.com/?p=4914).

Recordable optical media is not a reliable long-term storage or backup strategy for data that you really don't want to lose, such as goldstar0011's wedding video. Not unless you want the huge effort of re-recording your discs every few years (and even if you did this you'd still need the hard drive space to back up the data on those discs before you recorded it to new discs). The most reliable and cost effective way of storing data like that is magnetic hard drives and a robust backup solution (I emphasize robust because if you really want a backup to be reliable then it should preferably be a an off-site backup). Unless of course you want to go down the magnetic tape cold-storage road, but that tends to get expensive for private individuals and while the data density & cost per GB/TB may be higher than hard drives the chances are that you'll spend a lot of money on specialised equipment that has only one purpose. Hard drives are versatile, a tape reader/writer isn't.

Just because you can live on 4GB jrs77 - and I strongly challenge the assertion that 4GB is indeed enough - it doesn't mean that everyone can. We can now fit 128GB of solid-state storage in a device that's no bigger than my thumbnail - why shouldn't I take advantage of that? Also, you say the same thing every time a hard-drive/storage news article is posted; give up, we're not listening any more.

 

No one is normal. My mommie always told me i was special, although I'm not sure she meant it in a nice way

 

Sorry JRS but I don't have 20 or so dvds, I have over 500 and trying to store/ look through is a pain. I may only watch ocassionally but its much nicer to look through my media library through plex and select genre etc.

 

Look, we're please you've achieved a zen-like tranquillity in your approach to data management, but there are plenty of valid reasons to need lots of storage at home, whether it's all put to good use or mindless hoarding, what's it to you?

At any rate, the story here isn't really about the disk capacity, it's more along the lines of "5PB in a rack", as I don't think these drives will be hitting consumer channels for quite some time (in spite of the odd choice of a SATA interface)

 

....That's 625 8TB hard drives in a rack. THINK OF THE NOISE!

 

You're doing well at being offensive today! I for one am very happy with my collection of 500+ DVDs. I like movies. I don't much care for piracy, and streaming, IMHO, has poor audio in general.

You do things your way, and don't pontificate your views on others, and we'll all happily co-exist? Deal?

 

I happily pay the premium for enterprise harddisks.

On a list of smells you never forget a harddisk going up in smoke comes second only to a decaying corpse.

Not even to mention the mental anguish when you see smoke coming out of a pc case and thats before we even get to the more common smoke free failures that are far too common in consumer drives.

 

Lol jrs you making friends here

I understand what you're saying and in principle there's nothing wrong with it, as long as that's your own stance that you apply to yourself (and not to others). I'm in a similar position to you - I have 320GB boot drive and 2TB storage, and that's all I've needed for the past 3-4 years.

CDs? DVDs? What are they? Pretty much any film my wife and I watch is on the laptop via HDMI, downloaded content or something streamed through our Virgin box. People (like myself) who are movie buffs are going to have a movie collection, and if it's 10GB or so for a blu-ray movie, then 1TB isn't going to get you very far... there are many more than 100 good films out there!