I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the “deathstars” (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I’d personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.
There are loads of people who think a company is bad because of one product, one service etc. A friend of mine hates Seagate, but he bought 10 drives of the same model. Pretty sure he even bought some after the first one failed … or people (like me) put desktop drives in a NAS or service with other drives. While mine are still good I expect them to fail any time since well they are not desinged for the use case I am using them for.
Many people can’t accept that one drive model isn’t going to kill a company or make everything from them bad.
The exception being the palladium drive. Although its not directly attributed to the fall of JTS, who at the time owned Atari. Its was clear from the frontline techs these things were absolute shit. The irony is that 1 out of say 10,000 was perfect. So much so I still have one of the 1.2 gig’s that still spins up and reads and writes fine. Its nearly a unicorn though.
I had one of these, it worked perfectly for years. I might even still have it. I remember it being a significant leap in size and cost per MB.
We had failure rates over 90% on them. We sold around 8000 computers on contract to the local schools that year and took a hit to our rep. We started going from school to school replacing them before they could fail.
The drive in the picture is dated mar 16 97. I’m pretty sure it was one of thousands of warranty replacements we received. Like I said its still good but really hasn’t been in service in over 30 years. I keep it because its a reminder of how bad, bad can be.
JT storage went out of business in 98. When we heard they had no one was surprised.
That is an absolutely wild fail rate.
i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.
Seagate have never once secretly changed the underlying disk technology on a NAS grade drive to one utterly unsuited for use in a NAS drive and then sold it as a NAS grade drive at a premium price because it’s a NAS grade drive. So there’s that.
I have killed every single type of magnetic platter drive from every brand they are all bad
Not “bad”, consumable.
Maybe consider looking at what all those had in common… Ie you
The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it’s all anecdotal, and I’ve had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I’ve owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven’t had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can’t recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the “bad” gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM’s derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi’s HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.
It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.
I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.
It’s all anecdotal for the most part. I’ve had two DOA WD drives in a row before, but no dead seagates.
As a side note, I hope you have those two WDs backed up, they’re overdue for a death.
Trust me, I’ve been waiting for those ancient WDs to die. I’m actually using them in a raid 1 config, so if one dies the other remains. I’ve also got anything really important backed up to cloud storage. I’ve worked in software (games) for 20+ years. I’m very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Anyway, much of my opinion on seagates comes from people I know who work in render farms and IT guys who manage entire studios. So its not really that anecdotal.
I’m very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Backs up anything “really important” to cloud storage
Yes, I do believe you are very well accustomed to data loss.
Almost every bit of data i have is redundant. The stuff I back up to cloud storage is the stuff I would care about if my house were to burn down. But that stuff is all double, and triple backed up, locally as well.
You thought 50TB was it? LOL! Hold on to your butts because 53.713TB SSDs are coming! These will cost you all your vital organs at 35years of age. Brains included.
If EA or Ubisoft don’t get their shit together this won’t be enough.
Wow great. From seagate. The company that produces drives with the by far lowest life expectancy compared to the competiton
And IIRC moved their headquarters to some Caribbean island to avoid paying US corporate taxes.
They’re called Seagate, not Landgate.
Pretty sure they are fiscally located in Ireland like a lot of big companies for tax reason and for EU VAT reasons.
Is this true? I remember them being very reliable in the past.
I think people say this because there was one specific 6TB model that does really poorly in BackBlaze reports, combined with a generally poor understanding of statistics (“I bought a Seagate and it failed but I’ve never had a WD fail”).
I will also point out that BackBlaze themselves consistently say that Seagate and WD are pretty much the same (apart from the one model), in those exact same reports
Heh. In my case, one WD SSD failed miserably on me.
Thanks for the explanation.
I’ve had at least 6 seagate drives over the past 20 years. none of them survived more than 2 or 3 years. Meanwhile, i have two almost 15 year old WDs sitting on my desk still going strong.
Can’t wait to see how these 40 TB hard drives, a wonderment of technology, will be used to further shove AI down my throat.
I can’t wait to upgrade my NAS to a 200Tb Setup
Hey! You! Get offa the Cloud (and grab yourself one of those drives). You can keep your thoughts to yourself, now you can keep your data to yourself, like in the recent old times.
Best to get at least 2 so you have a backup
Your own lil cloud
That’s pretty impressive a couple of those and you could probably download the next Call Of Duty.
So all the other hard drives will be cheaper now, right? Right?
A 2tb SSD can now be bought for 100$ at least.
This is good to know. I might need to upgrade the storage for my Monero node.
Just wondering, why do you run a monero node?
That’s the default setting when setting up a local wallet. It is also more private due to not being dependent on someone else’s node.
How else are you going to bring up Monero in unrelated discussions about computer hardware?
For my wallets
You should ideally run your own node when using Monero
why? dont know much about monero just wondering.
When running a local node, the most other people could possibly see is that “x IP is running a Monero node”
When connecting to a remote node, the node can see:
- Your IP address
- When you submit a transaction (which could link your IP to your transactions)
- The last block your wallet synced (which could be used to determine when you usually use/spent monero last)
It’s also possible for a remote node to feed your wallet a manipulated list of decoys, which can reduce the anonymity of the transaction you submit by allowing the remote node to simply remove the fake decoys to find which isn’t the decoy (you.)
Because with someone else’s node, they can potentially track and log the transactions you make
This is how I know I’m getting old, my first thought was “spinning rust for always on long term storage” and then I remembered it’s 2025 and SSD’s are about equal now.
Get off my lawn, your interrupting Matlock!
Still cheaper though. 4TB you are looking at around 3x the price for it in SSD storage. Although I wonder how the power use compares, might be worth factoring in but probably isn’t too massive over it’s realistic lifespan
Oh yeah, I run spinning rust in my nas. All data storage for me is on HDDs, only OS date is on the SSD. That’s for the nas and my computer.
My main data usage is game installs and pretty unimportant temporary stuff so it doesn’t need backup fortunately. Game saves do of course but a simple bash script and the file size for that is tiny in comparison.
SSD performance would be nice to have, but costs extra.
SSDs are getting reasonable, you might want to look into it again if that’s your use case.
If you aren’t running a home server with tons of storage, this product is not for you. If the price is right, 40TB to 50TB is a great upgrade path for massive storage capacity without having to either buy a whole new backplane to support more drives or build an entirely new server. I see a lot of comments comparing 4TB SSDS to 40TB HDD’s so had to chime in. Yes, they make massive SSD storage arrays too, but a lot of us don’t have those really deep pockets.
Thank you! I lol’d at the guy with one in his main PC lol. Like why?
I’m still waiting for prices to fall below 10 € per TB. Lost a 4 TB drive prematurely in the 2010s. I thought I could just wait a bit until 8 TB drives cost the same. You know, the same kind of price drops HDDs have always had about every 2 years or so. Then a flood or an earthquake or both happened and destroyed some factories and prices shot up and never recovered.
I expect many are not upgrading every small incremental improvement too. It’s the 20TB HDDs that are ready to replace.
I’d buy two and only turn the other on for a once a month backup. For one lone pirate just running two drives, it would be endgame basically. You’re good.
I wish. I’ve got 6000 movies, 200 series, 300k songs, games, etc. pushing 30tb usage. I need to redo my setup, right now it’s raid 10. I know it’s not the most efficient with space, but I feel much better about redundancy.
We all prioritize the data we want. I don’t carry ps3 games because I have zero interest in them, and several shows I’d never have interest in, and I don’t bsckup FLAC, I downsample to 320kbps so I doubt I’ll break 25TB any time in the next five years.
Imagine how long it’ll take to rebuild your raid array after one fails lol
underrated comment. i’d much rather clone a 16 tb drive than 50 tb one. Also better speeds considering the use of more drives. That said, if I can save on electricity, noise, enclosure space, and very importantly, money, it could be pretty cool. Just need to wait and see how reliable these things are and if they are going to carry a price point that makes them make sense.
I mean personally, for long term data hoarding, I dislike running anything below raidz2, and imo anything less than 5 disks in that setup is just silly and inefficient in terms of cost/benefit. So I currently have 5x16TB in raidz2. The 60% capacity efficiency kinda blows, but also I didn’t want to spend any more on rust than I did at the time, and the array is still working great, so whatever. For me, that was a reasonable balance between power draw, disk count, cost, and capacity.
honestly though. I kinda dislike that a 40 or 50tb mechanical drive is even a thing. What we really need is larger, more affordable solid state drives. Mechanical drives have had their place, but their limits are fairly clear at this point. And your point about rebuilding an array makes that obvious. They are just too slow. This move by seagate to make ridiculously large mechanical drives, should not be the beginning, as this article suggests. It should really be the end.
They’re slow, but they’re WAY more robust than most SSDs - and in terms of $/TB, it’s not even close. Especially if you’re comparing to SLC enterprise-grade.
I’ve definitely seen more hdd failures than ssd failures in my life, that said, enterprise storage is indeed very robust. My WD red pros have all been workhorses. And right now the price per dollar is definitely in favor of HDDs. That really needs to change though. The raw materials alone make HDDs more expensive to produce, the problem is only that there are less manufacturers with the means to actually produce the chips necessary for SSDs because HDDs have been around for a million years. Once that changes, I think HDDs will and should go the way of every obsolete storage medium thats existed prior.
Imagine losing a 50tb drive because you choose to use Seagate.
Seagate Exos is usually ok. Their generic stuff, is sometimes crap, but that’s true of all manufacturers, really.
That being said, I’d be nervous with a single huge drive, no matter where it’s from. And even as part of a redundant structure, the rebuild times would be through the roof.
exos are fine if you don’t mind them being loud as hell.
They’re not really meant for desktop use, so not really an issue. Also don’t keep your servers under your bed, the ventilation is quite bad.
Yup, if you can put em in a closet or something, you’re golden.
Great, can’t wait for it to be affordable in 2050.
Incoming 1Tb videogames. Compression? Who the fuck needs compression.
Black ops 6 just demanded another 45 GB for an update on my PS5, when the game is already 200 GB. AAA devs are making me look more into small indie games that don’t eat the whole hard drive to spend my money on, great job folks.
E) meant to say instead of buying a bigger hard drive I’ll support a small dev instead.
That is absolutely egregious. 200GB game with a 45GB update? You’d be lucky to see me installing a game that’s around 20-30GB max anymore because I consider that to be the most acceptable amount of bloat for a game anymore.
Agreed, it’s getting out of control. The most annoying thing is I’m not interested in PvP, just zombies, so probably 80% of that is all just bloat on my hard drive.
Ok, I’m sorry, but… HOW??? How is it possibly two hundred fucking gigabytes??? What the fuck is taking up so much space???
It’s mostly textures, video, and audio.
The game code is probably less than 10gb
Change languages in your game, I am willing to bet it doesn’t download a language pack for whatever language you choose.
You need multiple textures for different screens, resolutions, etc. to provide the best looking results. Multiply by the number of unique environments…
Additionally, it’s not like they can only use “high” or “low” assets, as they progressively load different level of detail assets depending on the scene or distance.
Same with all of the video cutscenes in games, they play pre-rendered videos for cutscenes.
More than triple the next largest game. All I want is the zombies mode and space to install other games, I could probably cull 80% of the COD suite and be just fine, but I have to carry the whole bag to reach in 🤷♂️
The game is 50GB, the other 200GB is just “fuck you” space.
Do you have time to talk about our Lord and Savior FACTORIO? Here; just have a quick taste.
I haven’t played much since my curved monitor got broken but between Stellaris and Rimworld I don’t know if there’s enough time in a day for another build queue. I’ll check it out at some point and fall into the rabbit hole I’m sure.
I arrived at that point a few years ago. You’re in for a world of discovery. As an fps fan myself I highly recommend Ultrakill. There’s a demo so you don’t have to commit.
Thanks I’ll check it out. The gf and I like to shoot zombies but were it not part of PS Plus I surely wouldn’t give them $70. I’ve been playing a lot of Balatro recently, poker roguelike from a sole developer with simple graphics but very fun special powers
Did it use 45 GB extra or were there just 45 GB worth of changes?
Requires an additional 45 clear to accommodate the update file and is currently sitting at 196.5. Deleting Hitman and queuing it up after the update is simple enough technically for someone like me with a wired high speed connection and no data cap, but still a pain in the ass and way too big for a single game.
Clean up assets, are you kidding? Gamers have enough disk and time is money! /s
Oh, they’ll do compression alright, they’ll ship every asset in a dozen resolutions with different lossy compression algos so they don’t need to spend dev time actually handling model and texture downscaling properly. And games will still run like crap because reasons.
Games can’t really compress their assets much.
Stuff like textures generally use a lossless bitmap format. The compression artefacts you get with lossy formats, while unnoticable to the human eye, can cause much more visible rendering artefacts once the game engine goes to calculate how light should interact with the material.
That’s not to say devs couldn’t be more efficient, but it does explain why games don’t really compress that well.
When I say “compress” I mean downscale. I’m suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions (number of polygons, pixels for textures, etc), instead of handling that in the code. I’m not exactly sure how they currently do low vs medium vs high settings, just suggesting that they could solve that using a ton more data if they essentially had no limitations in terms of customer storage space.
Uuh. That is exactly how games work.
And that’s completely normal. Every modern game has multiple versions of the same asset at various detail levels, all of which are used. And when you choose between “low, medium, high” that doesn’t mean there’s a giant pile of assets that go un-used. The game will use them all, rendering a different version of an asset depending on how close to something you are. The settings often just change how far away the game will render at the highest quality, before it starts to drop down to the lower LODs (level of detail).
That’s why the games aren’t much smaller on console, for exanple. They’re not including all the unnecessary assets for different graphics settings from PC. They are all part of how modern game work.
“Handling that in the code” would still involve storing it all somewhere after “generation”, same way shaders are better generated in advance, lest you get a stuttery mess.
And it isn’t how most game do things even today. Such code does not exist. Not yet at least. Human artists produce better results, and hence games ship with every version of every asset.
Finally automating this is what Unreals nanite system has only recently promised to do, but it has run into snags.
When I say “compress” I mean downscale. I’m suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions.
Yeah, that’s generally the best way to do it for optimal performance. Games sometimes have an adjustable option to control this in game, LoD (level of detail).
I don’t know about that. These are spinning disks so they aren’t exactly going to be fast when compared to solid state drives. Then again, I wouldn’t exactly put it past some of the AAA game devs out there.
Yeah, I’d expect the bloat to hit when there is a boost in SSD sizes. Right now I think the biggest consumer-grade SSDs are 8TB and are still rather expensive.
10 of these in a raid6?that’s 4x speed and 400tb.
Of it’s raid6 it’s 320tb or so.
Optimizations are relics of the past!
And they’d only be like $5k each. HDD prices have gone ridiculous. I’d just like 20TB drives to be reasonably priced. 10TB drives are twice the price they were 5 years ago.
