On Seagate’s 3 TB

So, Seagate confirmed a 3 TB disk. It would be able to store a lot of stuff.

Or few video.

Well, IMO, the only benefit of this is that the price of lower capacity disks would go downfall. I probably won’t get any of it anytime soon. No. None.

Why? It’s really simple: dangerous thing to do. You see, having 3 TB of data in one freaking disk, without backup, is not good for one’s health. Yes really, you don’t want to do that. Just imagine when it becomes inaccessible because of reaching MTBF or bad luck (it will). If you store all of your data in there, I can see you crying.

Now if you put it in a RAID 1 (mirror), it’d take as soon as 9 hours to complete resilvering on restore. Assuming no disk access and full 80 MiB/s, that is. Good thing USB 3 is getting common (no, it isn’t yet here – in fact I’ve never seen one).

Got them covered? Now imagine the one time one of your file silently corrupted. Especially on case accidental power down. Or just bad sector. How would you find the bad file? Scan each one of them? All 3 TB? Ha.

The only possible case can think of is for personal NAS. The one with (Open)Solaris, Nexenta, or FreeBSD (or NetBSD once it’s ready). Oh and probably Linux with its Btrfs which probably going to be ready just before Hurd becomes usable. Even then I wouldn’t use it unless it’s got RAID-6 like mode. Nevermind, I probably wouldn’t trust anything other than ZFS anytime soon. Which filesystem are you going to use for it on Windows? NTFS? Lol.

In fact, I hoped resources used for either:

  • improvement on disk access time, especially on random and parallel read/write operation,
  • smaller physical disk size, or
  • Cheaper and bigger SSD,

not on some “hey look we’ve created the biggest disk ever!”

At the bright side, though – lower capacity disks will be cheaper thanks to the new higher capacity disk.

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One thought on “On Seagate’s 3 TB

  1. I have to agree with this. Unless you have way too much money and it is important to reduce the number of drives for whatever reason, it’s better to use smaller (and better price/size ratio) drives.

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