Seriously. If I were going to buy a company (HGST) and they had a good reputation, I'd keep them around and just collect the revenue/profits of the ownership. WD doesn't have to be all narcissistic about it...besides, the WD Re line has a good reputation, why the hell are they phasing it out!?
What's next, Intel ditches the Core and Xeon names for something new and unfamiliar?
HGST has the lowest failure rate by far and this is very consistent across all their products. Read the Backblaze reports. WD and Seagate has much higher failure rates.
Hard drives still aren't getting more affordable in $/GB for a few years now. It's like these hard drive manufacturers want to die out compared to flash-based storage (particularly TLC-based).
There is no competition in this area. There is only 2 main players, and they have probably agreed not to give each other a hard time, this way they can milk consumers without significantly improving their offerings.
As mature of a technology as HDDs might be, there is still a lot to be done, especially now that micro-controllers have become much more powerful, it won't be that much of a stretch to make HDDs that rival and exceed the sequential performance of PCI-E SDDs at a fraction of the cost.
>it won't be that much of a stretch to make HDDs that rival and exceed the sequential performance of PCI-E SDDs at a fraction of the cost
Oh yeah, no big deal, HDs just increasing read performance by a full order of magnitude and necessitating PCIe capable controllers in hardly any time at all because it's no big stretch.
Yup, believable, it'll happen, HDs win again boys!
HDDs currently employ no form of parallelism whatsoever.
Notice how low capacity SSD are usually slower - that's because their low nand chip count and lower level of parallelism. Add more chips, run them in parallel and you get higher badnwidth.
This is not the case of HDDs, they don't get faster with the number of platters increasing, regardless of the number of platters and heads, only one single head will read from one platter surface at a time. Modern HDDs are approaching 200 MB/sec, and have up to 8 platters, that's 16 platter surfaces, and 16 heads. Add in some platter level parallelism, and you get 200 x 16 = 3.2 GB/sec, which is where the fastest PCIE SSD's are.
And that can be achieved without even altering the mechanical design, only by improving the firmware. But there is a lot more improvement that can be achieved by improving on the mechanical design as well.
Yesterday, I finished updating my DEC 2013 rig. Upgrades consisted of migrating the components to a new case (Corsair 780T), mounting three additional fans on the case for a total of six, as well as replacing my two WD Green 2TB drives for two brand-new WD Blue 6 TB in Raid 1.
I could find no drives for sale with higher than 6 TB capacity. I couldn't even find WD Green 6 TB drives either so I just went with WD Blue 6TB's.
My point is, if WD Blue or Green drives with a capacity of 8 TB were available, I'd buy those instead.
Blue and Green only have a 2 year warranty. I'd rather get the Black or Red Pro - 5 years warranty, 2.5 as much warranty period for 0.2 extra cost. It is a no-brained.
Hard drives really don't offer as much value they used to.
I used to recommend RAID 0 and/or Velociraptors for quicker large capacity storage, particularly for people who wanted to load Steam games quick but didn't want the fuss of migrating games back and forth between SSD boot and HDD storage. Not anymore when you can just get any single large capacity drive and a small sized (120GB~240GB) SSD and use the SSD as cache for the larger capacity drive via Intel RST.
I used to recommend RAID 0 WD Blacks for people that needed large scratch disks for recording or video work. I just recommend RAID 0 SSDs of the largest capacity they can muster.
I used to recommend people get quality series hard drives (Spinpoint F3, Black, Barracuda, etc) over dirt-cheap hard drives (Most Toshiba variants, most Hitachi variants), but nowadays I just recommend people install only SSDs into their systems and buy an external hard drive for mass storage. Not only are externals commonly cheaper than internal bare drives at the same capacities, but they're both just as likely die (i recommend using Dropbox or another cloud storage service to be setup as automatic backups) and at least the external is portable while the internal is not.
Hard drives are just... dead. Helium filled drives aren't a game changer if they can't provide larger capacities at lower prices. The "Gold" drives won't be a game changer either. SSDs are hot on HDD's heels on the only thing they have going for them still; they're still barely the most economical option for high volume storage. (Ironically in an age where almost everything is online in some form or another, and users really can go without mechanical hard drives in their machines and still be OK.)
If you're talking about what drives people are putting in "their machines," a story on data center storage is not relevant. Or phrased more correctly - your thoughts (and others) on the death of PC storage doesn't belong here.
SSDs are not replacing cloud storage any time in the foreseeable future.
Just FYI, I don't really care whether you believe my comment belongs or doesn't belong here. I posted it because they were my thoughts and I was going to share them, which is exactly what I did.
You saying it doesn't belong here isn't going to change the fact that I posted that comment or the fact that I will continue to post my thoughts wherever I see fit.
However, you can follow what you preach by going ahead and exercising your own self-imposed limitation on freedom of speech on relevant subject matter.
This one you will have to watchout. SSDs beat HDDs for density which happened too early than I expected. SSDs don't need to match the pricing of HDDs in the enterprise or cloud environment.
"SSDs are not replacing cloud storage any time in the foreseeable future."
It's a shame the most important metric isn't listed here - the BERR (Bit Error Recovery Rate). If they are migrating marketing-wise from RE to this then it would be good to have confirmed that this is at least as good as the RE drives. I can't find the information on their now very dumb website either - no formal datasheet apparently linked from the drive descriptions. :( I guess if you make no formal written promises of drive quality, you can't be sued...
As for SSD over spinning rust, I'd hate to be the client of one of these loudmouth SSD-only evangelists who is NOT reminded that data on SSDs dies after quite a short time without power applied, where magnetic hard disks retain data pretty much indefinitely. Use cases vary, and true cold storage, bulk or not, will remain useful for many - SSDs cannot cut it there.
Hard disks have fairly limited data retention times too. Recommended cold storage time is at most six months for SSD, around two years for hard disks, but decades for tape (usually around 50 years).
why would anyone, ever, now buy a mechanical HDD for enterprise applications over an SSD?
I don't care if they are cheaper, they consume 5-10x the amount of electricity which makes them more expensicve in the long run. They also fail a ton more, are a FUCKTON slower and now you can even get SSD's that are twice this size (16tb SSD's are here, just not quite in the shops yet, a bit like these gold drives) and bigger are coming.
WD, why the fuck didn't you jump on the SSD bandwagon? I used to love your HDD's they were fast and awesome.
Now you just look like Kodak claiming the didigtal camera is just a fad.
The days where we wanted to have super redundancy for availability (controller, Backplane, Cable, CPU) are over everything we are moving to is server wise redundancy as this turns out to be much more efficient. See windows server 2016 high availbility - uses common buses and inexpensive pools to present software defined storage. Check VMWare EVO:Rail - SAS + Proprietary tech etc and slow in adoption except for fanboys and people with huge Dell discounts. Nutanix are moving to SDS as well - just introduced a SDS solution based off StorPool - A bunch of HDDs + SSD (PCI-E if you like). So SDS is the solution here - there you don't need SAS at all :)
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dragosmp - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Looks like a rebadged HGST helium drive, good for themnathanddrews - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
The real question is whether or not to hold out for the platinum or diamond model. /marketingFlunk - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
WD, marketing overdrive since 2003.Samus - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Seriously. If I were going to buy a company (HGST) and they had a good reputation, I'd keep them around and just collect the revenue/profits of the ownership. WD doesn't have to be all narcissistic about it...besides, the WD Re line has a good reputation, why the hell are they phasing it out!?What's next, Intel ditches the Core and Xeon names for something new and unfamiliar?
Spede - Saturday, April 30, 2016 - link
Personally I've never wanted to buy any IBM-related disk after a bad experience, which includes HGST down the line.WD on the other hand, whilst of course not immune to failures, has a strong and steady brand. It'd be foolish not to make use of it.
crimsondoor - Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - link
HGST has the lowest failure rate by far and this is very consistent across all their products. Read the Backblaze reports. WD and Seagate has much higher failure rates.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Hard drives still aren't getting more affordable in $/GB for a few years now. It's like these hard drive manufacturers want to die out compared to flash-based storage (particularly TLC-based).ddriver - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
There is no competition in this area. There is only 2 main players, and they have probably agreed not to give each other a hard time, this way they can milk consumers without significantly improving their offerings.As mature of a technology as HDDs might be, there is still a lot to be done, especially now that micro-controllers have become much more powerful, it won't be that much of a stretch to make HDDs that rival and exceed the sequential performance of PCI-E SDDs at a fraction of the cost.
Space Jam - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
>it won't be that much of a stretch to make HDDs that rival and exceed the sequential performance of PCI-E SDDs at a fraction of the costOh yeah, no big deal, HDs just increasing read performance by a full order of magnitude and necessitating PCIe capable controllers in hardly any time at all because it's no big stretch.
Yup, believable, it'll happen, HDs win again boys!
ddriver - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Nobody cares what you believe. It is technically possible, the only reason it has not happened is a lousy and lazy industry.ajp_anton - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Please explain how. Not being sarcastic, I just don't see the low-hanging fruit that enables this with "not that much of a stretch".ddriver - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
HDDs currently employ no form of parallelism whatsoever.Notice how low capacity SSD are usually slower - that's because their low nand chip count and lower level of parallelism. Add more chips, run them in parallel and you get higher badnwidth.
This is not the case of HDDs, they don't get faster with the number of platters increasing, regardless of the number of platters and heads, only one single head will read from one platter surface at a time. Modern HDDs are approaching 200 MB/sec, and have up to 8 platters, that's 16 platter surfaces, and 16 heads. Add in some platter level parallelism, and you get 200 x 16 = 3.2 GB/sec, which is where the fastest PCIE SSD's are.
And that can be achieved without even altering the mechanical design, only by improving the firmware. But there is a lot more improvement that can be achieved by improving on the mechanical design as well.
Scipio Africanus - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
So are some new line or is this a rename of the Re series?Achaios - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Yesterday, I finished updating my DEC 2013 rig. Upgrades consisted of migrating the components to a new case (Corsair 780T), mounting three additional fans on the case for a total of six, as well as replacing my two WD Green 2TB drives for two brand-new WD Blue 6 TB in Raid 1.I could find no drives for sale with higher than 6 TB capacity. I couldn't even find WD Green 6 TB drives either so I just went with WD Blue 6TB's.
My point is, if WD Blue or Green drives with a capacity of 8 TB were available, I'd buy those instead.
ddriver - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Blue and Green only have a 2 year warranty. I'd rather get the Black or Red Pro - 5 years warranty, 2.5 as much warranty period for 0.2 extra cost. It is a no-brained.fancarolina - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Neither the Blue nor Green drives are designed to be used in RAID. Good luck with that you are playing with fire.nils_ - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Are they still running this sort of broken firmware where the heads are parked after 8 seconds?magreen - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Blue > 1TB is Green. They renamed the Green series.Squuiid - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
You should have been able to find 8TB Reds in quite a few places, Amazon included.jasonelmore - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
anyone else remember when a 5 year warranty on a Hard drive was common?Even seagates cheap barracuda's had 5 year
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Everyone here remembers.Hard drives really don't offer as much value they used to.
I used to recommend RAID 0 and/or Velociraptors for quicker large capacity storage, particularly for people who wanted to load Steam games quick but didn't want the fuss of migrating games back and forth between SSD boot and HDD storage. Not anymore when you can just get any single large capacity drive and a small sized (120GB~240GB) SSD and use the SSD as cache for the larger capacity drive via Intel RST.
I used to recommend RAID 0 WD Blacks for people that needed large scratch disks for recording or video work. I just recommend RAID 0 SSDs of the largest capacity they can muster.
I used to recommend people get quality series hard drives (Spinpoint F3, Black, Barracuda, etc) over dirt-cheap hard drives (Most Toshiba variants, most Hitachi variants), but nowadays I just recommend people install only SSDs into their systems and buy an external hard drive for mass storage. Not only are externals commonly cheaper than internal bare drives at the same capacities, but they're both just as likely die (i recommend using Dropbox or another cloud storage service to be setup as automatic backups) and at least the external is portable while the internal is not.
Hard drives are just... dead. Helium filled drives aren't a game changer if they can't provide larger capacities at lower prices. The "Gold" drives won't be a game changer either. SSDs are hot on HDD's heels on the only thing they have going for them still; they're still barely the most economical option for high volume storage. (Ironically in an age where almost everything is online in some form or another, and users really can go without mechanical hard drives in their machines and still be OK.)
bsd228 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
If you're talking about what drives people are putting in "their machines," a story on data center storage is not relevant. Or phrased more correctly - your thoughts (and others) on the death of PC storage doesn't belong here.SSDs are not replacing cloud storage any time in the foreseeable future.
JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Just FYI, I don't really care whether you believe my comment belongs or doesn't belong here. I posted it because they were my thoughts and I was going to share them, which is exactly what I did.You saying it doesn't belong here isn't going to change the fact that I posted that comment or the fact that I will continue to post my thoughts wherever I see fit.
However, you can follow what you preach by going ahead and exercising your own self-imposed limitation on freedom of speech on relevant subject matter.
zodiacfml - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
This one you will have to watchout. SSDs beat HDDs for density which happened too early than I expected. SSDs don't need to match the pricing of HDDs in the enterprise or cloud environment."SSDs are not replacing cloud storage any time in the foreseeable future."
asmian - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
It's a shame the most important metric isn't listed here - the BERR (Bit Error Recovery Rate). If they are migrating marketing-wise from RE to this then it would be good to have confirmed that this is at least as good as the RE drives. I can't find the information on their now very dumb website either - no formal datasheet apparently linked from the drive descriptions. :( I guess if you make no formal written promises of drive quality, you can't be sued...As for SSD over spinning rust, I'd hate to be the client of one of these loudmouth SSD-only evangelists who is NOT reminded that data on SSDs dies after quite a short time without power applied, where magnetic hard disks retain data pretty much indefinitely. Use cases vary, and true cold storage, bulk or not, will remain useful for many - SSDs cannot cut it there.
monsted - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Hard disks have fairly limited data retention times too. Recommended cold storage time is at most six months for SSD, around two years for hard disks, but decades for tape (usually around 50 years).MrPoletski - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Yawn.why would anyone, ever, now buy a mechanical HDD for enterprise applications over an SSD?
I don't care if they are cheaper, they consume 5-10x the amount of electricity which makes them more expensicve in the long run. They also fail a ton more, are a FUCKTON slower and now you can even get SSD's that are twice this size (16tb SSD's are here, just not quite in the shops yet, a bit like these gold drives) and bigger are coming.
WD, why the fuck didn't you jump on the SSD bandwagon? I used to love your HDD's they were fast and awesome.
Now you just look like Kodak claiming the didigtal camera is just a fad.
vladx - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
WD is already on the SSD bandwagon, they are buying Sandisk.SpetsnazAntiVIP - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Data center drives only offered with SATA? Not SAS? Am I missing something?sivaplus - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
The days where we wanted to have super redundancy for availability (controller, Backplane, Cable, CPU) are over everything we are moving to is server wise redundancy as this turns out to be much more efficient. See windows server 2016 high availbility - uses common buses and inexpensive pools to present software defined storage.Check VMWare EVO:Rail - SAS + Proprietary tech etc and slow in adoption except for fanboys and people with huge Dell discounts.
Nutanix are moving to SDS as well - just introduced a SDS solution based off StorPool - A bunch of HDDs + SSD (PCI-E if you like).
So SDS is the solution here - there you don't need SAS at all :)