You know, at that price, i'll be sticking with my 4TB's for a little while longer, would cost me 5.5k to replace them...Eh..no.
I'm not sure if I would trust my data to a helium filled drive, as the helium dissipates over time would it not cause mechanical problems inside the drive ? also that price is a bit on the wild side !
Link in the OP doesnt work for me: This does though http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/11/12/hgst-8tb-priced/1
So, minor rant... The comparison is entirely irrelevant. I appreciate this is a consumer oriented site, but the drive is not a consumer oriented drive, so drawing comparisons to a WD Green is just silly. Compare equivalent 6TB disks from the same site... http://www.span.com/product/Hitachi...6060ALA641-0F20572-SATA-6Gb-6TB-7200rpm~41942 http://www.span.com/product/Seagate...D-V-4-ST6000NM0024-SATA-6Gb-6TB-7200rpm~42411 ... and there's barely a premium on the 8TB variant. In all likelihood, the cost per TB at-scale for storage systems featuring this drive will be fairly (if not precisely) linear with the 6TB and 4TB disks. The increased cost per spindle is offset by the decrease in infrastructure to host the same capacity. Taking TCO into account, fewer spinning disks for the same capacity means less cost powering, cooling and housing the capacity, so the 8TB drives are cheaper still over their lifetime. Rebuild times for traditional RAID are clearly terrifying though. Small businesses wanting a few large drives in a server will feel it, but that's not really the target market for these either - more like the middle ground of WD Reds and the like.
You said it yourself: this is a consumer-oriented site, and thus the comparison is from a consumer's perspective. There are no consumer-oriented 8TB drives on the market; a consumer wanting 8TB in a single drive has no choice but to buy the new HGSTs regardless of the company's target market. Thus, I feel, it was an entirely valid comparison. I even specifically stated that the comparison was to the 'cheapest 6TB drive' rather than one of equivalent specification, and clarify the comparison's focus in the very next sentence: 'For home users, then, the drives may as well be still unavailable.' I don't know where you work, but a higher-than-24% price premium per terabyte over the same-specification (hell, same manufacturer, control logic and helium filling) 6TB model is a little more than 'barely' in my books - I'd be sacked for trying to sneak that through the budget without justification! And if this were an enterprise-oriented site, I would have likely done a full TCO calculation for the article. But, like you said, it's not: this article was merely a follow-up to the previous "hey, Hitachi's releasing 8TB drives and they're going to be expensive" piece to say "sure enough, Hitachi's released 8TB drives and they're expensive."
My maths put it at closer to a 20% increase in the cost per GB based on the drives I looked at on the site, but close counts. A quick and dirty Google shows 6TB WD Greens at a not-insignificant premium over 4TB WD Greens - 16%. The sweet spot for cost-per-GB is typically squarely in the middle of the available capacity spread - that doesn't mean that the premium for higher density is simply money down the drain, the value is in the higher density itself - i.e. the justification you would need to attach to that premium in order to not be sacked. I get the comparison as giving readers something to relate to, but I would have felt better about an acknowledgement that they're just not the same league of kit, so we're not talking apples to apples. A 25%+ premium on bleeding-edge capacity points is nothing unusual in either consumer or enterprise drives (or bleeding edge CPUs and GPUs and anything else for that matter). As this isn't an enterprise focussed site I'm in no way critical of the posting for not going in to great depths analysing environmental footprint at various capacity points, largely because nobody reading would care. I do think that if a news item gets posted on an enterprise product, the reader might be offered some insight in to the enterprise space it fills - hence the second part of my post. The message the post seems to offer is "Look at this cool tech, but it's mega, mega expensive", when I think it could be more along the lines of "Look at this cool tech, too bad, not for you" and go on to some like detail about why it's important... "but actually it's density that's key to the target market, and the premium over equivalent 6TB drives isn't quite at the same level", and so on. The subsequent posts in this very thread suggests a few readers just haven't "got" it. Just trying to offer a bit of constructive feedback, and I did acknowledge the minor rant prior to issuing it!
I just re-did it based on the prices this morning, which judging from the numbers I've got saved in my scratchpad have either changed or I misread last night, and got just shy of 23% - I still say that's more than 'barely a premium.' Oh, absolutely, and I accept the feedback in the manner in which it was intended; I was just attempting to explain why I disagree with your opinion that the comparison between the cost of the two drives was, to quote, 'silly.' In fact, it could be argued that I made a full apples-to-apples comparison: the cheapest 6TB drive to the cheapest 8TB drive. It just so happens that the cheapest 8TB drive is also the most expensive 8TB drive...
I feel they're very good value... when compared to my first hard drive which was quite expensive on the '£ per MB' scale. Using the same metric this drive should cost £35,000,000. The best part of 700 smackers doesn't sound so bad now does it? It's worth remembering how far we've come and that 8TB is an awful lot of ones and zeroes if you stack them up in a line. If you really need to store your ones and zeroes in 8TB chunks rather than 4TB or 6TB chunks then £700 what you gotta pay.
