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  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    ah yes, when transferring hard drives in big server rooms its nice to have a safe way of doing that... look i understand what these products are supposed to do but its really uber dumb and not practical. transfering drives around should be kept to like maybe 1 or 2 times in a drives lifetime, because fail rates go out the roof when you move drives. this is just dumb man. i bet nobody will bite this and it will be dead fast.
  • Mr.Vegas - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    Unless you work in a field or TV, Movie production or lots of otehr jobs that need storage for field data, even Geologists need lots of storage now, Oil industry too and so on
  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    I understand that whole heartedly... but spinning drive storage? they need to be able to convince people this will actually hold up. And with seagate's track record that will be a no (there is zero denying that seagate drives have continually held the number 1 least reliable hard drive manufacturing mantle for the last ~10 years). cannot refute that statement. even in the server world.
  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    ^ I apologies and retract this statement here. I have been very very salty about 4 of my seagate drives dying on me in the last 3 years so I was venting a bit about reliability. but they still must be able to convince people this will actually hold up and not cause hard drive failure at a high rate.
  • khanikun - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    I find Seagate to be reliable, but have to keep them cool. WD and HGST seem to hold up to heat better. For my file server, I use WD, HGST, and Toshiba, since I cram a lot of drives in there and they have to deal with the heat. My regular desktops have HGST and Seagate, since they have room to breathe.
  • PeachNCream - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    Considering the number of hard drive manufacturers in the world these days, being number one may not be a big deal. Though I do agree that my personal experience with Seagate has not always been the most positive.
  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    yea i'm just being too harsh on seagate. I apologies. Maybe this could work but only time will tell, and billion dollar companies buying these things for science and entertainment. We probably won't ever know how these things perform.
  • eastcoast_pete - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    This! Seagate is clearly targeting those field applications with their "Lyve" system. For example, the CFExpress reader can live in the same rack as a couple of disks. So, you shoot your footage, immediately back that up to spinning rust (redundantly so), while you continue your shoot. In a scenario like that, the HDDs aren't the initial or primary data storage, they back up costly footage or data from SSD-type storage right in the field. Not sure I'd trust those data to HAMR drives without some more reliability data, though.
  • evernessince - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    What exactly are you basing this on? Hard Drives are not nearly as fragile as you make them seem.
  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    they are quite fragile actually. There have been numerous studies on the effects of forces on hard drives, from shaking hard drive cage damage to temperature and also just movement damages. each hard drive manufacturer has a on and off drive gforce shock number listed for their drives for a reason. And also seagate doesn't have a ton of experience in making external hard drives. they have some sure, but they only have like maybe 5 for sale right now. wd and toshiba have like hundreds of external drives made for that purpose. and they are talking about using just regular hamr drives in these chasses. idk, just spells disaster to me. i'm not meming btw.
  • Korguz - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    what kind of damage do you think a hdd could sustain when it is moved ?? how did notebook mechanical hdds last all these years ?? my notebook has 1 ssd and 1 mechanical hdd in it.. and guess what.. both have survived two trips ( soon to be 3 trips )back and forth to the phillipines just fine... 5 hdds for sale ?? ha.. my local computer store shows 28 seagate external hdds.
  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    the vast majority of laptop hard drives are single platter drives or even 2 platter drives. failure rate on those drives are historically very low :). because you have 1 platter moving only one can get hurt... seagate is talking about putting 9 PLATTER DRIVES in this thing. Do you have any idea how fragile those things are? i'm guessing extremely so :). also i have a 2 tb seagate in my laptop as well for 2 years and all is well. big differences here though.
  • rabidkevin - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    Dude, you can't just assume its more fragile because it has 9 platters. Where did you get your information? Do you even know what you are talking about?
  • austinsguitar - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    more platters means litterally 9 platters moving around when running and 9 sitting there doing nothing when they are off? lets say you have one hard drive a standard 4tb hard drive with like 4platters right and its a 3.5. there are 4 platters a certain distance from another platter with many many heads on the platters. double that and you have 8 in the same space. put 9 in there and bingo... 9 platters where there was once only 4 platters there. not just the platter but the equipment reading the platters is super close together. i have a degree in physics. if these platters are very close more damage can be done to the drive as a whole during movement and basically everything that can damage a drive can now damage 9 platters instead of just 4. You now have litterally twice the amount of hardware in the same space. its not rocket science. and yes laptop hard drives use only 1 or 2 platters for this reason. and you cant even fit that many platters into a 2.5 drive. its simple.
  • Korguz - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link

    still doesnt change much.. hdds also have a park mode.. when there is no power to the drive.. its pretty secure to move it around.. i even dropped an external 5 tb seagate drive the other day, as i was moving it from one comp to the other, was unplugged, power and usb, man my heart stopped, pluggit it in to the comp i was moving it to.. and it has been working fine since... unless you can provide a source.. i think you are making hdds... more fragile then you make them out to be..
  • austinsguitar - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    As a professional, we use something called fallback raid. why? because hard drives fail, and die, or stop working. It would be interesting to see raid on this thing actually. May already have it!. These mobile lyve systems are going to be used for programs that will be thousands of dollars to mutli-million dollar investments in science and movies. The maximum may make a ton of since for extremely large data gathering on mobile, but it will always be risky. I am not saying "hdd's are fragile as glass. don't use them or move them ever!" i'm saying that this is extremely risky as a product. Imagine a hard drive failing in one of these in a one million dollar project and they can't get the data back. That is going to be a humongous ouch. But this would be the only thing in the world that is capable of doing so, and I do applaud seagate. But as a business owner I would be really scared knowing what may happen to my data.
  • mr_tawan - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    @austinguitar as a professional, we also use something called "back up". In fact, if the data is really important, we'd have multiple copies of data located in different places of the world, and also in tape backups kept in multiple locations.

    Regarding the drive being fragile, it might be more fragile than what it used to be in the past (as you can tell by shorten waranty... 3 instead of 5 years like 10 years ago). I don't find them `too fragile to use` although I'm more careful of them now than before. Personlly I check S.M.A.R.T. every now and then to see the fail rates and stuffs, and will bring in a new drive if one start to act up strange. And if it's approaching it's expected lifetime (aka, guarantee period), I'll also bring in a new drive. The old one is still in use, but I'll use them only for not-so-important data like game installs and work which has a copy somewhere else.

    Right now I have 6 NAS drive, as 2 RAID-5 array (12 TB in total). 3 desktop drives, with one of them already in the failing stage. and 2 portable drives. A couple of them is approaching EoL, which I've already planned to replace them.
  • khanikun - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    I wouldn't say that's an assumption, but more like standard practice for calculating something's possible failure. More parts, more chance of failure.
  • Gigaplex - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    9 platters... that aren't spinning at all during transit. This is supposed to be used stationary, then moved when powered down.
  • Gigaplex - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    I've used Seagate hard drives in laptops (predating SSDs) and their reliability was acceptable.
  • evernessince - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    Drivers are rated for 300G when off. That is not fragile in any sense of the word.

    https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/d...

    I repeat, provide a source for your OPINION.
  • leexgx - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link

    He not wrong really, the issue is how they fail typically

    on a wd they do try there best to fail in a way that doesn't continue to the destroy the disk platter and in most cases are recoverable

    wd also better handle drops then seagate and the actuator arm will typically not allow the head to re-emergence onto platters on a drop (unless its an extreme large drop) , where as seagate a drop on the side of any force maybe enough to cause the heads to movo onto the patter and ripping the heads off the moment it spins up as they are in direct contact (basically if you drop a seagate hdd you should assume the heads are no longer parked and never power It up until you taken it to a data recovery to open it up to make sure heads are not on the platter)

    seagate on the other hand on top of them been sensitive to drops you have a very high chance that the data is lost because it has destroyed the start of the disk platter
  • khanikun - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    I could see the military. Ships go out to sea, generate data, need to offload the data quickly when back to shore. Spy planes do the same, although they already have their own antiquated systems, which is essentially doing the same thing. Pulling drives off the plane to transfer data.

    Do I see this as being dead fast? Maybe, maybe not. I can see the purpose of it. Hell, when I was in Stuttgart, Germany, I was watching Mercedes testing their cars. Not sure what they were testing, maybe traction control, gps, abs, or whatever. I don't know, but they were in a Merc wagon with a small server rack in the back with about 4 servers. I'm sure they'd love a solution to easily get that data off and onto their regular network.
  • A5 - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    I used to make data recorders for military use. Their requirements are so specialized that it’s still worth their time to have someone make a custom solution.
  • eastcoast_pete - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    @Ganesh: Thanks! Is the shipping case IP rated, and, if yes, what is that rating? Thanks!
  • ganeshts - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link

    I will check with Seagate, but am expecting a response only after the CES hangover is gone :)

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