And I'm just sitting here waiting for affordable 8TB non-shingled drives. Seriously, hard drive storage costs have not changed at all in the past 4 years. I bought a bunch of HGST 4TB drives in 2013 for around $150 a pop, and an 8TB in 2017 still costs ~$300...
You basically have to buy the new 8TB WD My Book externals and carefully take the drives out, they're without a doubt HGST Helium filled enterprise drives in a case sold at a huge loss (although running at slower spindle speed). Buying bare 8TB drives is terrible value in comparison.
Assuming the prices are really good, and adding significantly to the manufacturing output, those drive sales are lowering the cost to produce the drives, and so serve a real purpose.
Aren't most external drives outfitted with non-standard connectors that prevent people from doing that sort of thing? I haven't torn apart a My Book, but I've bumped into a number of other products that include SATA to USB bridge hardware on the drive's PCB.
most external drives have a separate board for the usb to sata bridge, this allows them to use the same case and bridge and then just change the drive for the different sizes, thats why if a external drive fails just take it apart and pull the drive out and hook it directly to the computer to see as it can sometimes just be the usb sata bridge that fails.
The exact model number is: WD80EZZX-11CSGA0 So it has WD written on it, since they own HGST, but it's physically very much an HGST He8. As I mentioned, though, it runs at 5400 RPM as opposed to 7200 RPM, but that's actually good for media storage.
Yeah, 8 and 12 GB PMR consumer drives are long overdue.
For storage expansion I've mostly been buying 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drives. Sure, it's "only" 4TB but they are small and USB bus powered. No use in a NAS of course but will do for now, and not really any more expensive than the 3.5" equivalent (especially on sale).
I don't really need a huge NAS but it's nice to have data in one place as well as some redundancy.
I imagine that for now, pricing will be closer to $1,000 than to $500. But in a couple of years, fierce the 16 and 20 TB drives are out, this should be under $500, as well as other less expensive 12 TB models from them, and others. It's the way of the world.
Quite a few years ago, my wife, who was an attorney with Citi Corp, and highly involved with computer operations, was sent down to their main data center in Texas. She described their set-up to me. There were high rows of disk packs that were taken out and replaced by robots. A huge operation. The entire storage for their customer databases was about 10 TB, a very large number at the time.
Several years later, she said that their operation there was a fraction of the size, and much larger in capacity. Now we can get that on one drive. It's really impressive.
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Ahnilated - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Man, I looked at those IOPS and laughed then I remembered they are spinning discs not memory chips.mapesdhs - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Hehe, yeah, try pricing up a 12TB Enterprise SSD. ;)dstarr3 - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
I misread the MTBF and Warranty parts of the table and thought that the warranty was 5 million years. I thought "Wow! Okay! I'll buy that!"Guspaz - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
And I'm just sitting here waiting for affordable 8TB non-shingled drives. Seriously, hard drive storage costs have not changed at all in the past 4 years. I bought a bunch of HGST 4TB drives in 2013 for around $150 a pop, and an 8TB in 2017 still costs ~$300...piroroadkill - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
You basically have to buy the new 8TB WD My Book externals and carefully take the drives out, they're without a doubt HGST Helium filled enterprise drives in a case sold at a huge loss (although running at slower spindle speed). Buying bare 8TB drives is terrible value in comparison.piroroadkill - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Well, sorry, I shouldn't say "huge loss", just that they're clearly being sold with wafer thin margins compared to the bare drives.melgross - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Assuming the prices are really good, and adding significantly to the manufacturing output, those drive sales are lowering the cost to produce the drives, and so serve a real purpose.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Aren't most external drives outfitted with non-standard connectors that prevent people from doing that sort of thing? I haven't torn apart a My Book, but I've bumped into a number of other products that include SATA to USB bridge hardware on the drive's PCB.jjjacer - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
most external drives have a separate board for the usb to sata bridge, this allows them to use the same case and bridge and then just change the drive for the different sizes, thats why if a external drive fails just take it apart and pull the drive out and hook it directly to the computer to see as it can sometimes just be the usb sata bridge that fails.https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tRpojG_g4ec/maxresdefault.j... is best picture i could find that shows this, you see the drive with a normal sata connector connecting to a small board that then connects to USB
piroroadkill - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
I've done this myself. I know for a fact it works.Ariknowsbest - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
That's 2.5" drives in real compact cased, the ones with a bridge is a little bit longer. In 3.5" it would not make sense to use the same approachtakeshi7 - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Amazon has the 8TB Seagate Ironwolf drive on sale for $270 right now. You're welcome.https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-3-5-Inch-I...
Guspaz - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
So, after nearly half a decade, that price means storage costs have dropped by a whopping 10%.piroroadkill - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-External-Drive...8TB for $209. It's an HGST built Helium filled drive inside. There's no contest.
bigboxes - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
So, if you shuck it you get an 8TB HGST He8 Enterprise drive?piroroadkill - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
The exact model number is: WD80EZZX-11CSGA0So it has WD written on it, since they own HGST, but it's physically very much an HGST He8. As I mentioned, though, it runs at 5400 RPM as opposed to 7200 RPM, but that's actually good for media storage.
darkfalz - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
Yeah, 8 and 12 GB PMR consumer drives are long overdue.For storage expansion I've mostly been buying 4TB Seagate Backup Plus drives. Sure, it's "only" 4TB but they are small and USB bus powered. No use in a NAS of course but will do for now, and not really any more expensive than the 3.5" equivalent (especially on sale).
I don't really need a huge NAS but it's nice to have data in one place as well as some redundancy.
melgross - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
I imagine that for now, pricing will be closer to $1,000 than to $500. But in a couple of years, fierce the 16 and 20 TB drives are out, this should be under $500, as well as other less expensive 12 TB models from them, and others. It's the way of the world.Quite a few years ago, my wife, who was an attorney with Citi Corp, and highly involved with computer operations, was sent down to their main data center in Texas. She described their set-up to me. There were high rows of disk packs that were taken out and replaced by robots. A huge operation. The entire storage for their customer databases was about 10 TB, a very large number at the time.
Several years later, she said that their operation there was a fraction of the size, and much larger in capacity. Now we can get that on one drive. It's really impressive.
bigboxes - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
I took a tour of their SOC and NOC. It's like the bs in the movies, except for real. One of my buddies from class got a job as a VP. He's doing well.HomeworldFound - Thursday, March 16, 2017 - link
Wow that's amazing, think how many pictures of my dick it can hold!Lolimaster - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
2017 still no HAMR drives...