Seagate launches 30/32TB capacity Exos M mechanical HDD (30/32TB capacity)

It never ceases to amaze me how far we can still take a piece of technology that was invented in the 50s.
That's like developing punch cards to the point where the holes are microscopic and can also store terabytes of data. It's almost Steampunk-y.
- Solid state is kinda like a microscopic punch card.
  
  So are optical discs
  
  More like microscopic fidget bubble poppers.
  When the computer wants a bit to be a 1, it pops it down. When it wants it to be a 0, it pops it up.
  If it were like a punch card, it couldn’t be rewritten as writing to it would permanently damage the disc. A CD-RW is basically a microscopic punch card though, because the laser actually burns away material to write the data to the CD.
- That's how most technology is:
  combustion engines - early 1900s, earlier if you count steam engines
  missiles - 13th century China, gunpowder was much earlier
  wind energy - windmills appeared in the 9th century, potentially as early as the 4th
  Almost everything we have today is due to incremental improvements from something much older.
- Talking about steam, steam-powered things are 2 thousand years old at least and we still use the technology when we crack atoms to make energy.
  
  What the Romans had wasn't comparable with an industrial steam engine. The working principle of steam pushing against a cylinder was similar, but they lacked the tools and metallurgy to build a steam cauldron that could be pressurized, so their steam engine could only do parlor tricks like opening a temple door once, and not perform real continuous work.
- This isn't unique to computing.
  Just about all of the products and technology we see are the results of generations of innovations and improvements.
  Look at the automobile, for example. It's really shaped my view of the significance of new industries; we could be stuck with them for the rest of human history.

I can't wait for datacenters to decommission these so I can actually afford an array of them on the second-hand market.
- Home Petabyte Project here I come (in like 3-5 years 😅)
  
  better start preparing with a 10G network!
- Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail
  
  Where is a good place to search for decommissioned ones?
  
  Nice, where do you get yours?

30/32 = 0.938
That’s less than a single terabyte. I have a microSD card bigger than that!
;)
- Can't even put it into simplest form.
- Now now, no self-shaming about the size of your card. It's how you use it!
  
  Some IOT perverts are into microSD

radarr goes brrrrrr
- sonarr goes brrrrrr…
- barrrr?
  
  ...dum tss!

My first HDD had a capacity of 42MB. Still a short way to go until factor 10⁶.
- My first HD was a 20mb mfm drive :). Be right back, need some “just for men” for my beard (kidding, I’m proud of it).
  
  So was mine, but the controller thought it was 10mb so had to load a device driver to access the full size.
  Was fine until a friend defragged it and the driver moved out of the first 10mb. Thereafter had to keep a 360kb 5¼" drive to boot from.
  That was in an XT.
- My first one was a Seagate ST-238R. 32 MB of pure storage, baby. For some reason I thought we still needed the two disk drives as well, but I don't remember why.
  "Oh what a mess we weave when we amiss interleave!"
  We'd set the interleave to, say, 4:1 (four revolutions to read all data in a track, IIRC), because the hard drive was too fast for the CPU to deal with the data... ha.

Great, can't wait to afford one in 2050.
- Fleebay? Yup, me too!
  
  $4.99 for the drive plus $399.00 s&h

Everybody taking shit about Seagate here. Meanwhile I've never had a hard drive die on me. Eventually the capacity just became too little to keep around and I got bigger ones.
Oldest I'm using right now is a decade old, Seagate. Actually, all the HDDs are Seagate. The SSDs are Samsung. Granted, my OS is on an SSD, as well as my most used things, so the HDDs don't actually get hit all that much.
- I've had a Samsung SSD die on me, I've had many WD drives die on me (also the last drive I've had die was a WD drive), I've had many Seagate drives die on me.
  Buy enough drives, have them for a long enough time, and they will die.
- Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.
  Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)
  So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh..check your backups I guess?
  
  Had good impressions and experiences with Toshiba drives. Chugged along quiet nicely.
  
  That decade old one is 3TB. 😅
- Yeah, same. I switched to seagate after 3 WD drives failed in less then 3 years. Never had problems since.
- I had 3 drives from seagate (including 1 enterprise) that died or got file-corruption issues when I gave up and switched to SSDs entirely...

This is for cold and archival storage right?
I couldn't imagine seek times on any disk that large. Or rebuild times....yikes.
- up your block size bro 💪 get them plates stacking 128KB+ a write and watch your throughput gains max out 🏋️ all the ladies will be like🙋‍♀️. Especially if you get those reps sequentially it's like hitting the juice 💉 for your transfer speeds.
  
  This is my favorite post ever.
- Definitely not for either of those. Can get way better density from magnetic tape.
  They say they got the increased capacity by increasing storage density, so the head shouldn't have to move much further to read data.
  You'll get further putting a cache drive in front of your HDD regardless, so it's vaguely moot.
- For a full 32GB at the max sustained speed(275MB/s), 32ish hours to transfer a full amount, 36 if you assume 250MB/s the whole run. Probably optimistic. CPU overhead could slow that down in a rebuild. That said in a RAID5 of 5 disks, that is a transfer speed of about 1GB/s if you assume not getting close to the max transfer rate. For a small business or home NAS that would be plenty unless you are running greater than 10GiBit ethernet.
- Random access times are probably similar to smaller drives but writing the whole drive is going to be slow

Seagate. The company that sold me an HDD which broke down two days after the warranty expired.
No thanks.
laughing in Western Digital HDD running for about 10 years now
- I had the opposite experience. My Seagates have been running for over a decade now. The one time I went with Western Digital, both drives crapped out in a few years.
  
  I have 10 year old WDs and 8 year old Seagates still kicking. Depends on the year. Some years one is better than others.
- Funny because I have a box of Seagate consumer drives recovered from systems going to recycling that just won't quit. And my experience with WD drives is the same as your experience with Seagate.
  Edit: now that I think about it, my WD experience is from many years ago. But the Seagate drives I have are not new either.
  
  Survivorship bias. Obviously the ones that survived their users long enough to go to recycling would last longer than those that crap out right away and need to be replaced before the end of the life of the whole system.
  I mean, obviously the whole thing is biased, if objective stats state that neither is particularly more prone to failure than the other, it's just people who used a different brand once and had it fail. Which happens sometimes.
- Had the same experience and opinion for years, they do fine on Backblaze's drive stats but don't know that I'll ever super trust them just 'cus.
  That said, the current home server has a mix of drives from different manufacturers including seagate to hopefully mitigate the chances that more than one fails at a time.
- Did you buy consumer Barracuda?
- I currently have an 8 year old Seagate external 4TB drive. Should I be concerned?
  
  Any 8 years old hard drive is a concern. Don't get sucked into thinking Seagate is a bad brand because of anecdotal evidence. He might've bought a Seagate hard drive with manufacturing defect, but actual data don't really show any particular brand with worse reliability, IIRC. What you should do is research whether the particular model of your drive is known to have reliability problems or not. That's a better indicator than the brand.
- Western digital so good

Avoid these like the plague. I made the mistake of buying 2 16 TB Exos drives a couple years ago and have had to RMA them 3 times already.
- I stopped buying seagates when I had 4 of their 2TB barracuda drives die within 6 months... constantly was RMAing them. Finally got pissed and sold them and bought WD reds, still got 2 of the reds in my Nas Playing hot backups with nearly 8 years of power time.
  
  I recently had to send back a Barracuda drive as well. I'm seeing if the Ironwolf drive fares any better.
  
  I have several WDs with almost 15 years of power on time, not a single failure. Whereas my work bought a bunch of Seagates and our cluster was basically halved after less than 2 years. I have no idea how Seagate can suck so much.
  
  They seem to be real hit or miss. I also have 2 6TB barracudas that have 70,000 power on hours (8 yrs) that are still going fine.
- Their 3tb and 16 TB are super trash. I'm running 20tb and 24tb and they've been solid... So far
- Had that issue with the 3tb drives. Bought 4, had to RMA all 4, and then RMA 2 of the replacement drives all within a few months.
  The last 2 are still operating 10 years later though. 2 out of 6.

Lmao the HDD in the first machine I built in the mid 90s was 1.2GB
- My dad had a 286 with a 40MB hard drive in it. When it spun up it sounded like a plane taking off. A few years later he had a 486 and got a 2gb Seagate hard drive. It was an unimaginable amount of space at the time.
  The computer industry in the 90s (and presumably the 80s, I just don't remember it) we're wild. Hardware would be completely obsolete every other year.
  
  My 286er had 2MB RAM and no hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives. One to boot the OS from, the other for storage and software.
  I upgrade it to 4 MB RAM and bought a 20 MB hard drive, moved EVERY piece of software I had onto it, and it was like 20% full. I sincerely thought that should last forever.
  Today I casually send my wife a 10 sec video from the supermarket to choose which yoghurt she wants and that takes up about 25 MB.
  
  It really was doubling in speed about every 18 months.
- Back then that was very impressive!
  
  Yup. My grandpa had 10 MB in his DOS machine back then.
- I had a 20mb hard drive
  I had a 1gb hard drive that weighed like 20 kgs, some 40 odd pounds
- Our first computer was a Macintosh Classic with a 40 MB SCSI hard disk. My first "own" computer had a 120 MB drive.
  I keep typoing TB as GB when talking about these huge drives, it's just so weird how these massive capacities are just normal!
- We had family computers first, I can't recall original specs but I think my mother added in a 384MB drive to the 486 desktop before buying a win98se prebuilt with a 2GB drive. I remember my uncle calling that Pentium II 350MHZ, 64MB SDRAM, Rage 2 Pro Turbo AGP tower "a NASA computer" haha.

Just one would be a great backup, but I’m not ready to run a server with 30TB drives.
- I'm here for it. The 8 disc server is normally a great form factor for size, data density and redundancy with raid6/raidz2.
  This would net around 180TB in that form factor. Thats would go a long way for a long while.
  
  I dunno if you would want to run raidz2 with disks this large. The resilver times would be absolutely bazonkers, I think. I have 24 TB drives in my server and run mirrored vdevs because the chances of one of those drives failing during a raidz2 resilver is just too high. I can't imagine what it'd be like with 30 TB disks.

I thought I read somewhere that larger drives had a higher chance of failure. Quick look around and that seems to be untrue relative to newer drives.
- One problem is that larger drives take longer to rebuild the RAID array when one drive needs replacing. You're sitting there for days hoping that no other drive fails while the process goes. Current SATA and SAS standards are as fast as spinning platters could possibly go; making them go even faster won't help anything.
  There was some debate among storage engineers if they even want drives bigger than 20TB. The potential risk of data loss during a rebuild is worth trading off density. That will probably be true until SSDs are closer to the price per TB of spinning platters (not necessarily the same; possibly more like double the price).
  
  If you're writing 100 MB/s, it'll still take 300,000 seconds to write 30TB. 300,000 seconds is 5,000 minutes, or 83.3 hours, or about 3.5 days. In some contexts, that can be considered a long time to be exposed to risk of some other hardware failure.
  
  Yep. It’s a little nerve wracking when I replace a RAID drie in our NAS, but I do it before there’s a problem with a drive. I can mount the old one back in, or try another new drive. I’ve only ever had one new DOA, here’s hoping those stay few and far between.
  
  What happened to using different kinds of drives in every mirrored pair? Not best practice any more? I've had Seagates fail one after another and the RAID was intact because I paired them with WD.

I mean, cool and all, but call me when sata or m2 ssds are 10TB for $250, then we'll talk.
- Not sure whether we'll arrive there the tech is definitely entering the taper-out phase of the sigmoid. Capacity might very well still become cheaper, also 3x cheaper, but don't, in any way, expect them to simultaneously keep up with write performance that ship has long since sailed. The more bits they're trying to squeeze into a single cell the slower it's going to get and the price per cell isn't going to change much, any more, as silicon has hit a price wall, it's been a while since the newest, smallest node was also the cheapest.
  OTOH how often do you write a terabyte in one go at full tilt.
  
  I don't think anyone has much issue with our current write speeds, even at dinky old SATA 6/GB levels. At least for bulk media storage. Your OS boot or game loading, whatever, maybe not. I'd be just fine with exactly what we have now, but just pack more chips in there.
  Even if you take apart one of the biggest, meanest, most expensive 8TB 2.5" SSD's the casing is mostly empty inside. There's no reason they couldn't just add more chips even at the current density levels other than artificial market segmentation, planned obsolescence, and pigheadedness. It seems the major consumer manufacturers refuse to allow their 2.5" SSD's to get out of parity with the capacities on offer in the M.2 form factor drives that everyone is hyperfixated on for some reason, and the pricing structure between 8TB and what few greater than 8 models actually are on offer is nowhere near linear even though the manufacturing cost roughly should be.
  If people are still willing to use a "full size" 3.5" form factor with ordinary hard drives for bulk storage, can you imagine how much solid state storage you could cram into a casing that size, even with current low-cost commodity chips? It'd be tons. But the only options available are "enterprise solutions" which are apparently priced with the expectation you'll have a Fortune 500 or government expense account.
  It's bullshit all the way down; there's nothing new under the sun in that regard.

How can someone without programming skills make a cloud server at home for cheap?
- Yes. You'll have to learn some new things regardless, but you don't need to know how to program.
  What are you hoping to make happen?
- Not programming skills, but sysadmin skills.
  Buy a used server on EBay (companies often sell their old servers for cheap when they upgrade). Buy a bunch of HDDs. Install Linux and set up the HDDs in a ZFS pool.
  
  Or install TruNAS and chill.
  I went with Linux and BTRFS because I just need a mirror. Lots of options and even more guides.
- The easiest way is NextCloud.
- Debian, virtualmin, podman with cockpit, install these on any cheap used pc you find, after initial setup all other is gui managed
- Raspberry Pi or an old office PC are the usual methods. It's not so much programming as Linux sysadmin skills.
  Beyond that, you might consider OwnCloud for an app-like experience, or just Samba if all you want is local network files.
- The $0 home server:
  https://youtu.be/IuRWqzfX1ik
- Cheapest is probably a Raspberry Pi with a USB external drive. Look up "Raspberry Pi NAS," there are a bunch of guides.
  Or you can repurpose an old PC, install some NAS distro, and then configure.
  There are a ton of options, very few of which require any programming.
- I run docker services and host virtual machines from Unraid OS

Heck yeah.
Always a fan of more storage. Speed isn't everything!
- HP servers have more fans!

How many platters?!
- 30 to 32 platters. You can write a file on the edge and watch it as it speeds back to the future!

The two models, [...] each offer a minimum of 3TB per disk
Huh? The hell is this supposed to mean? Are they talking about the internal platters?
- More than likely

Here i am still rocking 6TB.

These things are unreliable, I had 3 seagate HDDs in a row fail on me. Never had an issue with SSDs and never looked back.
- well until you need capacity why not use an SSD. It's basically mandatory for the operating system drive too
- Seagate in general are unreliable in my own anecdotal experience. Every Seagate I've owned has died in less than five years. I couldn't give you an estimate on the average failure age of my WD drives because it never happened before they were retired due to obsolescence. It was over a decade regularly though.

- Same but western digital, 13gb that failed and lost all my data 3 time and 3rd time was outside the warranty! I had paid 500$, the most expensive thing I had ever bought until tgat day.

"The two models, the 30TB ... and the 32TB ..., each offer a minimum of 3TB per disk". Well, yes, I would hope something advertised as being 30TB would offer at least 3TB. Am I misreading this sentence somehow?
- They probably mean the hard drive has 10 platters, each containing at least 3TB.

Haven’t bought Seagate in 15 years. They improve their longevity?
- Vastly. I'm running all seagate ironwolf pros. Best drives Ive ever used.
  Used to be WD all the way.
  
  I’m going to have to pass though. They cost too much. I buy refurb with 5 year warranty
- https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data
  Backblaze reports are cool
  
  Nice data but I stick with Toshiba old HGST and WD. For me they seem to last much longer than Seagate
- I have one Seagate drive. It's a 500 GB that came in my 2006 Dell Dimension E510 running XP Media Center. When that died in 2011, I put it in my custom build. It ran until probably 2014, when suddenly I was having issues booting and I got a fresh WD 1 TB. Put it in a box, and kept it for some reason. Fast forward to 2022, I got another Dell E510 with only an 80 GB. Dusted off the old 500 GB and popped it in. Back with XP Media Center. The cycle is complete. That drive is still noisy as fuck.
- Not worth the risk for me to find out lol. My granddaddy stored his data on WD drives and his daddy before him, and my daddy after him. Now I store my data on WD drives and my son will to one day. Such is life.
  
  And here I am with HGST drives hitting 50k hours
  Edit: no one ever discusses the Backblaze reliability statistics. Its interesting to see how they stack up against the anecdotes.
- My personal experience has been hit n miss.
  Was using one 4TB Seagate for 11 years then bought a newer model to replace it since I thought it was gonna die any day. That new one died within 6 months. The old one still works although I don't use it for for anything important now.
- I bought 16TB one as an urgent replacement for a failing raid.
  It arrived defective, so I can't speak on the longevity.

whoa
- Dude

- SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs
  Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it's being backed up (and if it's not backed up it's not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I'll happily give real backup advise if you need it)
  In my anecdotal experience across both my family's various computers and computers I've seen bite the dust at work, I've not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I've only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I've never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)
  Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don't need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don't even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB

Good. However, 2 x 16TB Seagate HDDs still cheaper, isn't it?
- These drives aren't for people who care how much they cost, they're for people who have a server with 16 drive bays and need to double the amount of storage they had in them.
  (Enterprise gear is neat: it doesn't matter what it costs, someone will pay whatever you ask because someone somewhere desperately needs to replace 16tb drives with 32tb ones.)
  
  In addition to needing to fit it into the gear you have on hand, you may also have limitations in rack space (the data center you're in may literally be full), or your power budget.

Just a reminder: These massive drives are really more a "budget" version of a proper tape backup system. The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren't a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.
So a decent choice for the big machine you backup all your VMs to in a corporate environment. Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
Not sure if the general advice has changed, but you are still looking for a sweet spot in the 8-12 TB range for a home NAS where you expect to regularly access and update a large number of small files rather than a few massive ones.
- HDD read rates are way faster than media playback rates, and seek times are just about irrelevant in that use case. Spinning rust is fine for media storage. It's boot drives, VM/container storage, etc, that you would want to have on an SSD instead of the big HDD.
  
  And oftentimes some or all of the metadata that helps the filesystem find the files on the drive is stored in memory (zfs is famous for its automatic memory caching) so seek times are further irrelevant in the context of media playback
- Not sure what you're going on about here. Even these discs have plenty of performance for read/wrote ops for rarely written data like media. They have the same ability to be used by error checking filesystems like zfs or btrfs, and can be used in raid arrays, which add redundancy for disc failure.
  The only negatives of large drives in home media arrays is the cost, slightly higher idle power usage, and the resilvering time on replacing a bad disc in an array.
  Your 8-12TB recommendation already has most of these negatives. Adding more space per disc is just scaling them linearly.
  
  Additionally, most media is read in a contiguous scan. Streaming media is very much not random access.
  Your typical access pattern is going to be seeking to a chunk, reading a few megabytes of data in a row for the streaming application to buffer, and then moving on. The ~10ms of access time at the start are next to irrelevant. Particularly when you consider that the OS has likely observed that you have unutilized RAM and loads the entire file into the memory cache to bypass the hard drive entirely.
- I’m real curious why you say that. I’ve been designing systems with high IOPS data center application requirements for decades so I know enterprise storage pretty well. These drives would cause zero issues for anyone storing and watching their media collection with them.
- The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren't a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.
  It's no ssd but is no slower than any other 12TB drive. It's not shingled but HAMR. The sectors are closer together so it has even better seeking speed than a regular 12TB drive.
  Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
  ????
  It's absolutely perfect for that. Even if it was shingled tech, that only slows write speeds. Unless you are editing your own video, write seek times are irrelevant. For media playback use only consistent read speed matters. Not even read seek matters except in extreme conditions like comparing tape seek to drive seek. You cannot measure 10 ms difference between clicking a video and it starting to play because of all the other delays caused by media streaming over a network.
  But that's not even relevant because these have faster read seeking than older drives because sectors are closer together.
- Oh hey, I did something right. That's kinda neat
  
  https://youtu.be/tKXO02VGrQ0
- honestly curious, why the hell was this downvoted? I work in this space and I thought this was still the generally accepted advice?
  
  Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.
  Mainly because of that. Spinning rust drives are perfect for large media libraries.
  There isn't a hard drive made in the last 15 years that couldn't handle watching media files. Even the SMR crap the manufacturers introduced a while back could do that without issue. For 4k video you're going to see average transfer speeds of 50MB/s and peak in the low 100MB/s range, and that's for high quality videos. Write speed is irrelevant for media consumption, and unless your hard drive is ridiculously fragmented, seek speed is also irrelevant. Even an old 5400 RPM SATA drive is going to be able to handle that load 99.99% of the time. And anything lower than 4K video is a slam dunk.
  Everything I just said goes right out the window for a multi-user system that's streaming multiple media files concurrently, but the vast majority of people never need to worry about that.
  
  Because everything he said was wrong?
  
  Because people are thinking through specific niche use cases coupled with "Well it works for me and I never do anything 'wrong'".
  I'll definitely admit that I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of fun when talking about something that triggers the dunning kruger effect. But people SHOULD be aware of how different use patterns impacts performance, how that performance impacts users, and generally how different use patterns impact wear and tear of the drive.
  
  Do you know about tape backup systems for consumers? From my (brief) search it looks like tape is more economical at the scale used by a data center, but it seems very expensive and more difficult for consumers.
- So I'm guessing you don't really know what you're talking about.