Where are the 4TB drives?

[gramboh]

Personally, I would prefer 4 separate 1TB drives in a modern case as opposed to a single 4TB. In the event of a drive failure, the impact would be far less catastrophic. Today I prefer several 500GB drives as opposed to 1 or 2 TB drives. Same rationale. I have never liked putting all my eggs in one basket.

Problem is you need a lot of 3.5" bays/connectors to do that, especially if you want redundancy. I'd rather buy a bunch of 3/4TB drives and just mirror for back-up, that is what I do now and it works great (2 drives in my PC, 2 drives in external enclosure I only power on for back-ups).

 

[KentState]

Personally, I would prefer 4 separate 1TB drives in a modern case as opposed to a single 4TB. In the event of a drive failure, the impact would be far less catastrophic. Today I prefer several 500GB drives as opposed to 1 or 2 TB drives. Same rationale. I have never liked putting all my eggs in one basket.

It also takes much longer to rebuild a failed array with a 4TB HD compared to a 500GB model.

 

[exdeath]

It also takes much longer to rebuild a failed array with a 4TB HD compared to a 500GB model.

That's because the 500 GB drives are the same speed as the 4 TB drives... so using 500 GB drives = 8 times the performance for the same capacity.

Can't really move heads any faster to keep performance linear with capacity. That's the problem with ever increasing capacity. Storage just get slower and slower relative to capacity as time goes on. Number of heads is far more important than total capacity in a mechanical array.

I'd probably have sworn off computers if SSDs didn't mature when they did to breath new life into them. I've had it with access time and app hang delays for every simple mouse click. I'm ready to throw the computer into the trash if control panel doesn't come up before I have already moved the mouse to the location of the item I'm going to click next.

And it's not that I'm even impatient or anything, it's just a real drag how slow our computers are because of storage IO. It's not a stretch to ask that a 10 billion operation per second machine be able to keep up with a human operator in a way that puts productivity in the hands of the operator and not at the mercy of the storage device. It's not so much being impatient as knowing that a minute here and there waiting on a flashing disk light all day adds up to dozens of hours of unproductive time beyond my control.

 

[pauldun170]

With windows 8 introducing storage spaces, I'm not worried about how long it takes them to introduce 4tb drives with current pricing.

I can have a logical 8tb drive that will expand as needed. Run low on space...add another physical drive.

 

[boed]

I just added another 2TB of media to my drives. I broke down and bought some more 3TB drives to hold me over but I wish I could have bought some 5TB drives. I'd have bought my controller and set up a 15TB Array until larger drives are available down the road. It will take me a long time to rip all my movies to disk anyways but it kills me to buy these 3TB drives knowing I won't use them for long. And before someone says it, I don't have the space for an external array nor do I have the space for 6 3TB drives in my current system.

 

[Red Squirrel]

With the availability of multi drive cards and multi drive chassis I don't see a huge need for 4TB drives yet. I rather have 5 1TB drives in raid 5 than 1 4TB drive or 2 of them in raid 1.

My server has 6 1TB drives and a hot spare, with room for 3 more drives. I can just keep adding 1TB drives to add space and grow the logical single volume. When that gets full then I can swap them out with 2 or 3TB drives. Plenty of space to go around in a single system these days. Especially with some of the 20-24 bay cases. I want to get me one of those eventually and build a SAN. In fact I have an old SAN (can't trust it for important stuff) with 400GB drives. I could fill a 24 bay chassis with those and do a raid 6 and it would give me around 8TB of redundant space. Good speed too.

 

[rana_kirti]

are 2tb HDDs more reliable than 3tb hdds...?

 

[Maximilian]

We got 1 in the kingdom of the united :awe:

http://www.ebuyer.com/320118-deskstar-idk-4tb-sata-7200-rpm-3-5in-h3ik40003272sw-0s03363

 

[Magic Carpet]

We got 1 in the kingdom of the united :awe:

http://www.ebuyer.com/320118-deskstar-idk-4tb-sata-7200-rpm-3-5in-h3ik40003272sw-0s03363

Access Time: 8 ms Unsually... low. Hmm.

 

[boed]

With the availability of multi drive cards and multi drive chassis I don't see a huge need for 4TB drives yet. I rather have 5 1TB drives in raid 5 than 1 4TB drive or 2 of them in raid 1.

When you are ready to rip a few thousand DVDs to your 5TB of space, let me know - then perhaps you'll see the need for 5TB drives as I couldn't even fit all my TV shows on your 5TB array. I've estimated between my BR's and DVDs I need about 35TB of disk space so 8 physical drives (as I don't need much speed and with all the striping, speed will be fine). With 1TB drives I would need at least 41 drives, a ton of physical space and a signifcant amount of electricity not to mention multiple controllers and the extreme costs. With the 1TB solution it would be nearly 5 times as expensive for the initial built the rediculous amount of noise it would make and the monthly electric bill to power the monstrosity.

 

[Anteaus]

If you're ripping a few thousand DVDs, you sound like the type of person that needs a pro level rack system. At $10 average conservative, thats over $30,000 in dvds, not to mention what you've spent in blu-ray.

Just don't forget that you'll need double that capacity for backup. Raid is great, but it will take a very very very long time to rip those movies and one catastrophic system failure it could all be gone. Raid redundancy is relied on way to much, especially if your not using raid certified drives.

Good luck with your system though. i think it's great you're trying to future proof.

 

[boed]

Thanks - I'm going to probably take a few years to rip them all. My backup system is actually going to be an identical array although in my 20 years of working with arrays - probably a few hundred arrays, I've never had a complete failure (knock on wood).

I'll be building my own array with an LSI 9265 controller and the 5TB drives when available.

 

[tommo123]

i didnt just rip my dvds, i encoded them. same quality at about a 5th of the space. some i had to as they were bastardised! mainly US dvds and anime in general. PAL dvds were progressive so were far quicker to do

anyhoo, i backed up all my hd-dvds to MKVs due to backwards compatibility problems. done the same to about 40 blu rays too.

 

[Anteaus]

I did the same. I ripped and converted them all with handbrake. If you use constant quality betweem 15-13, they average around 2-2.5GB for a 2 hour movie and its virtually flawless. I always pixel peep scaled up to 1920X1200 and its amazing. The current version of Handbrake is great. When the average DVD movie VOB is 5-7GB thats huge space savings.

For reference, I have a 2600k with 8GB ram and it takes me about 7 minutes to convert the average 2 hour movie to h.264. Sadly it takes 3 times that to actually rip the disc it comes on. Slow a** bluray drive

 

[Red Squirrel]

When you are ready to rip a few thousand DVDs to your 5TB of space, let me know - then perhaps you'll see the need for 5TB drives as I couldn't even fit all my TV shows on your 5TB array. I've estimated between my BR's and DVDs I need about 35TB of disk space so 8 physical drives (as I don't need much speed and with all the striping, speed will be fine). With 1TB drives I would need at least 41 drives, a ton of physical space and a signifcant amount of electricity not to mention multiple controllers and the extreme costs. With the 1TB solution it would be nearly 5 times as expensive for the initial built the rediculous amount of noise it would make and the monthly electric bill to power the monstrosity.

Well I don't pirate as much so I have a few TB worth of movies at very most. Thousands of DVDs? That's just insane. Where do you even find the time for that? Most of my space usage is VMs as I like to preallocate all the VDIs. That way I know exactly how much space I'm using.

With a chassis such as this you can have a 50TB or so of usable space with 3TB drives depending how you setup your LUNs. That's a lot of space. You can then have multiple chassis for even more space. You could probably set up a bunch of equal sized iSCSI luns then use a machine to raid them all together in one giant volume if you wanted to. The performance would be awesome. They also have chassis that have bays on the back. You can easily fit 1PB of storage on a 42U rack if you really have that many movies.

Sure, 3TB and 4TB are great and all, but imo not worth the cost just yet, and if you want proper redundancy you need to buy multiple drives anyway.

 

[boed]

Well I don't pirate as much so I have a few TB worth of movies at very most. Thousands of DVDs? That's just insane. Where do you even find the time for that? Most of my space usage is VMs as I like to preallocate all the VDIs. That way I know exactly how much space I'm using.

With a chassis such as this you can have a 50TB or so of usable space with 3TB drives depending how you setup your LUNs. That's a lot of space. You can then have multiple chassis for even more space. You could probably set up a bunch of equal sized iSCSI luns then use a machine to raid them all together in one giant volume if you wanted to. The performance would be awesome. They also have chassis that have bays on the back. You can easily fit 1PB of storage on a 42U rack if you really have that many movies.

Yes, and I'd have to rent the apartment next door just to drown out the noise and get a second job for the initial cost and electricity bills. Thanks but I'll wait until 5TB drives are available later this year.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

I have 2 2 tb plus 2 1 tb plus 1 ssd plus 1 DVD rw plus 1 external USB 2tb for back up and a total of 6 sata ports all used. That is why we need at least 8-10 sata ports as will get with my new z77 but having 6 2 tb drives will be pretty much required 2-3 years down

 

[boed]

Still hoping Seagate will announce some 5TB or larger drives for release in the near future - not announce in the near future but release schedule in the near future.

 

[rsutoratosu]

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD

HAMR is the new recording methods.. it was like PMR to HMR..

They seem to be having problems with it since 2002. Seagate thought we all be on it by 2008, that got push out to 2010 and we still dont have it. But they're getting closer..