18 ms·
Western Digital to Ship 20TB OptiNAND HDDs in November
- kingcharles 5y agoRelevant and always lots of informed opinions on obscene storage options: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
- theandrewbailey 5y ago> Western Digital's 20TB HDDs with OptiNAND rely on the company's familiar nine-platter 7200RPM helium-filled platform that uses energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording technology (ePMR). I was surprised when (a few months ago) I bought a few 14TB WD external drives, shucked one, and found a helium-filled drive.
- Alupis 5y agoHaving shucked numerous WD external drives - I can say I'm unsurprised. They have a history of putting decent off the shelf drives in their externals - once I even found a Black drive in one!
- userbinator 5y agoI suspect they could be units that didn't pass the QC bar to be sold standalone; shucked drives are cheaper for good reason.
- magila 5y agoThat's pretty much what they are. Hard drives are binned based on the yield of each production run. Server drives get the best lots, then tier one OEMs, etc. External drives are the lowest bin before the trash bin.
- m0zg 5y agoI'm actually not sure that's true. I run a NAS with 12 8TB drives, and not a single one has failed over several years. Nothing in SMART log either. All "shucked" cheap WD My Books. Running raidz-2. Sure, an anecdote, but how do you even "bin" something like this? It's not like you can vary voltage or frequency or fuse out busted cores (which is how they bin the CPUs).
- arthurfm 5y ago> how do you even "bin" something like this? Number of bad sectors per drive? https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4ingu0/how_many_bad_sectors_is_too_many/d2zq91q/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4ingu0/how_man...
- tinus_hn 5y agoBackblaze used to do this on a large scale, they probably have reliability figures in their reports.
- walrus01 5y agopeople who are home building freenas/truenas type setups with like, 16 x 14TB drives have had generally really good results for shucking WD USB3 external drives for what's inside. You occasionally need to put kapton tape over the 3.3V pin, which is easy enough for a $5 roll of tape and a precision razor knife to cut it narrow enough. https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issue-in-White-Label-Disks-/ https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issue-i...
- tuananh 5y agohow do I know when I need to do that?
- semireg 5y agoWhen the drive doesn’t show up in the bios.
- MertsA 5y agoWhen you have a power supply that's not SATA 3.3 compliant and a drive that supports it. The SATA 3.3 revision revised one of the 3.3v pins to be a power disable pin. Almost no hard drives support it so it's not really something you'll run into but consumer external drives will often be ordinarily super expensive enterprise drives in a plastic shell. Google the SKU of whatever external drive you're thinking of shucking to find out if it needs a SATA 3.3 power connector and instructions on opening it without damaging it in case you ever need to warranty the drive.
- toast0 5y agoIf you're using the drives with normal sata power plugs (not in an enclosure), you can also just snip the orange wire. (And maybe electrical tape over the live end). IMHO, this is easier than precision cutting and applying tape... But it doesn't work if you've got an enclosure that supplies 3.3V.
- randombits0 5y agoHow did you peel it off the ceiling?
- randomhodler84 5y agoOh boy! Think how much chia that could mine! (J/k but sorta not)
- throw0101a 5y ago50 TB drives are on the roadmap for the 2025-30 time frame: * https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/09/01/wd-improves-disk-capacity-in-a-flash-mamr-delayed/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/09/01/wd-improves-disk-capac...
- ksec 5y agoI am going to assume this is with same number of platter so essentially a roadmap of 2.5x density improvement per platter. Which means we could finally see 10TB 2.5" HDD.
- awiesenhofer 5y agoWill be interesting to see what comes first: 2.5" HDDs in that size range or affordable 8TB+ QVO SSDs ...
- ksec 5y agoI would love to be wrong. But nothing I see in the current investor as well as technology roadmap suggest we are going to see significant cheaper NAND production cost. ( Note: Cost per bit aren't dropping much with more layers incase anyone is wondering.) I would be surprised if we could even push 4TB below $200 by 2025. Compared to a 4TB 2.5" external HDD which cost less than $100 today.
- watersb 5y agoFour years out... that gives me enough time to get this 20TB drive resilvered...
- ink_13 5y agoI can see the attraction for enterprise-level storage, where a single chassis might contain anywhere from 20-90 drives, but my thought on seeing news like this is that surely we're getting to the point where resilvering times will make small arrays infeasible from a reliability standpoint. My home NAS only has four drives in it: if one 20TB drive dies, how long will I have to run on three, even if I have a spare onhand? Will they all survive long enough to rebuild? Or am I going to have to run some RAID-6/RAID-Z2-like array just to ensure durability?
- Dylan16807 5y agoIf you have a spare onhand and a small array you should just put it into the array and make things massively more reliable. If you have to go get a new drive, then reliability won't change a huge amount based on rebuild time.
- kevingadd 5y agoit's still true that once you lose a drive you want to pop in a new one and resilver, it just reduces the risk to have 2 spares/parity drives instead of 1. my array is relatively small and it still takes like 24 hours to resilver one drive. pretty brutal. my current risk mitigation strategy is to have one spare in the array, and then have one 'warm spare' in the nas that is not part of the array and is instead a target of scheduled backups of the whole array every week. that way if i somehow lose another drive in the array while resilvering is in process i'm not totally screwed. (if my NAS could hold more drives I could do both, but more bays is way more price...) naturally I also backup to the cloud. but you gotta have a local solution too.
- fulafel 5y agoStandard reminder to home / small biz RAID users: it is an availability solution, not a replacement for backups. It lets you have fewer service outages connected to disk failures. There are many more ways to lose your data than physical media failures.
- Gigachad 5y ago
- cebert 5y agoIt’s going to be difficult for me to regain trust in WD following recent cases where they swapped out controllers on consumer SSD products with components offering degraded performance following their initial release.
- wmf 5y agoObligatory reminder that all three hard disk companies are evil and almost all SSD vendors as well. Boycotting just one company is cognitive bias.
- janto 5y agoIt might help to gradually fix their behaviour by signalling that you will go to a competitor instead...maybe....
- SturgeonsLaw 5y agoSamsung has been my goto for SSDs but even they're swapping chips on the same SKU. At least Intel hasn't engaged in this shitfuckery. Are there any other good guys in storage these days?
- ananonymoususer 5y agoI bought nine of them and they are still in service, although they have always been slow and I wondered why until I got the class action settlement letter. I'm not even going to bother redeeming the settlement. It's something like $5 per drive.
- ahofmann 5y agoThat's what WD is hoping for, of course, and that's why you should claim the money.
- doublepg23 5y agoI didn't know about this and thought you were going to reference them switching out NAS drives for SMR ones.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoHow much might one of these cost when they become available?
- wmf 5y ago$400 - $450
- sitkack 5y agoIt makes no mention of the physical layer, but spinning disks need to 1. increase their device bandwidth SAS only does what, 1200MB/s ? Networks are at 200-400G right now. And an individual SAS device can only do 12Gbits. 2. take predicates, even if the interface can handle 4-16GB/s your internal bandwidth and the ability to take a predicate means the drive can start understanding the data it stores 3. HDD physical media bandwidth needs to increase. Hard drives should move to 1-4U sizes, spin slower, have massively larger platters and multiple read heads. If we assume 200GB/cm^2, we come out to ballparkish numbers for modern drives if we assume 5 platters. Lets just say that is true. A single side of a 30cm platter is equivalent to 5 platters, two sides so 10 surfaces of a 9cm platter. Lets ignore the space taken up by the hub. So a 19inch rack sized storage device is going to have 10x the storage capacity. It might have 10x the HD heads? Is more a chicken all in a single egg and ... I think would have to do something more impressive to get economies of scale. The current 3.5" drive is going to pack a lot more than 10x to the 1u. So I think the current target I'd like to see drives go is a higher bandwidth access to the device, larger buffers, ability to send search predicates and a higher level protocol. We need HDD with NVMe. One should be able to do 4GB/s to an HDD for at least 10 seconds. All HDDs should be hybrid except for DVR drives as they only see there sustained write rate.
- wtallis 5y agoHard drives are still first and foremost optimized for low cost per TB. Almost everything you're asking for would work against that goal, even if you could get economies of scale on these specialized drives. You would end up with little or no cost savings relative to QLC NAND, sequential read performance and random IO performance that would still be worse than QLC, and potentially higher latency than current hard drives. Seagate has been pursuing dual-actuator drives because density increases have been causing a decline in performance per TB, making the performance characteristics of big hard drives relatively more tape-like. It's a first small step in the direction of your proposals, but it doesn't seem to be a big hit so far. That indicates taking those ideas to their logical extremes is probably very uneconomical.
- sitkack 5y ago
- jl6 5y agoI don’t get why storage isn’t sexier compared to CPUs. Vast amounts of cheap and fast storage is the enabler of our current computing paradigm, every bit as much as CPU tech. And it’s just as cutting edge! NAND is working right up against the limits of physics just like every semiconductor technology. There are hugely interesting problems being solved around optimizing cost and performance and capacity and scalability. But all the buzz seems to be about RISC-V and Apple’s chips, and Intel’s woes. All the hardware superstars are CPU people. Who’s the Jim Keller of storage?
- Gigachad 5y agoApple's chips include storage. They put super fast storage in the SoC. Raw capacity doesn't matter to most people. I collected up all of my personal files including all photos/vidoes/documents/etc, and it came out to about 35GB. The average person has absolutely no use for a 20TB drive so it isn't very interesting. For CCTV uses, 20TB drives sound awesome. Fast storage is all that matters to regular users and not capacity.
- Latty 5y agoPretty sure this isn't true? They have the memory in-package, but the storage is separate AFAIK. I believe they encrypt it with keys in the secure enclave in the SoC so it is tied to that chip, but not actually a part of it.
- Gigachad 5y agoI just looked this up to check and you are kinda right, It is a separate chip but it sits under the same heat spreader and on the same little pcb platform so I guess on some level they are separate but once they get joined they essentially form one part for most practical purposes. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgrades-possible/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgr...
- ksec 5y ago>But all the buzz seems to be about RISC-V and Apple’s chips, and Intel’s woes. All the hardware superstars are CPU people. Who’s the Jim Keller of storage? NAND and Storage technical improvement are relatively slow. And they also happens to be commodity, which means new technology improvement aren't as attractive if it doesn't bring down cost. A lot of the improvements happens in Operation and Scale.