Comment on Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate
SuperUserDO@sh.itjust.works 2 days agoThere is an enterprise storage shelf (aka a bunch of drives that hooks up to a server) made by Dell which is 1.2 PB (yes petabytes). So there is a use, but it’s not for consumers.
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s a use-case for a fuckton of total capacity, but not necessarily a fuckton of per-drive capacity. I think what the grandparent comment is really trying to say is that the capacity has so vastly outstripped mechanical-disk data transfer speed that it’s hard to actually make use of it all.
For example, let’s say you have these running in a RAID 5 array, and one of the drives fails and you have to swap it out. At 190MB/s max sustained transfer rate (figure for a 28TB Seagate Exos; I assume this new one is similar), you’re talking about over two days just to copy over the parity information and get the array out of degraded mode! At some point these big drives stop being suitable for that use-case just because the vulnerability window is so large that the risk of a second drive failure causing data loss is too great.
needanke@feddit.org 2 days ago
Thats exactly what I wanted to say, yes :D.
SuperUserDO@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I get it. But the moment we invoke RAID, or ZFS, we are outside what standard consumers will ever interact with, and therefore into business use cases. Remember, even simple homelab use cases involving docker are well past what the bulk of the world understands.
needanke@feddit.org 1 day ago
I would think most standard consumers are not using HDDs at all.