News Seagate ships first 8TB hard drives

That is a hell of a lot of storage from the least reliable manufacturer of the lot. I don't think I'll be trusting them any time soon.

 

Well, this is where it starts. First generations are always buggy and expensive. Pretty soon R&D costs are recouped, cost goes down, and wrinkles are ironed out.

I don't mind just JBOD'ing two 4TB together. My big thing is I really need a 4TB portable hard drive. Can't wait for that.

 

Sorry dstarr3 but I found it funny that you NEED a 4TB portable drive, although I know I have know idea what you do. I just found it funny.
If you need that amount of data though is it really that much of a problem to use a standard HDD with an enclosure?

 

While HDDs are a bit old tech-y these days, and bleeding edge storage capacities have never made much sense,
I still can't help but be impressed that double figures TBs on a single 3.5" disk are almost here.
I remember being impressed when they first hit double figures GBs

 

Not big enough. Think I'll hold off and wait for 15TB drives to become mainstream. I want a 120TB RAID 6 array. Should be able to fit my torrent download collection on that

</wit>

Seriously though, I am waiting for 8 or 10TB drives to go mainstream. RAID 5 sounds tempting when drives are big enough to not fill in a year!

 

The only significant issue I can see with disks of such a large capacity without great read/write numbers is that if a disk fails in your raid, it'll take two days(!) to repopulate the replacement.

 

Don't read/write speeds increase as the data density increases? I know it's nothing like SSD speeds, but the "data rate" should increase for the same spindle rotation speed?

 

yes, sequential data rates can increase with areal density. seek time could be improved with a finer track pitch also. Worst case seek times won't change obviously- still 7200 rpm.

I run a few big raid 6's- >100TB. Some are over 150TB too. The IOPS density I need even from NL-SAS is only barely there at 2TB per disk.

Anyone seen if there have been any major changes in the mean time between uncorrectable bit error figures? I haven't looked into that in a while. At 8TB I'd be concerned about even getting a RAID 6 recovered with more than a handful of spindles in a RAID set.

 

As a professional photographer, my 2TB portable is full and I need the ability to move all my photos around wherever I need them. Because I don't want to have to think about what photos I need to have on me any given day. If I can just have all of them on me all the time, my life is simpler. And unfortunately, a 2TB portable isn't enough anymore. So a 4TB portable would be a welcome device.