finally a hard drive worth backup multiple TBs

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-lists-dual-actuator-hdd-exos-2x14

SAS connection for 550+ MB/sec read/write on most outer platter, im estimating ~300 to 350 MB/s inner disk, with average speed around say 450MB/s entire 14TB transfer will only take 10 hours! gonna be hella expensive though.

or you can do this https://www.pc-canada.com/item/901407.html

garbage QLC can't even saturate sata 6gbps speed, and cost you $4k+

 

I mean, if you're just going for data backup and archival, lto tape is an option too, you'll spend more on hardware for the computer to use it than the actual tape itself https://tapeandmedia.com/quantum-lto-8-tape-ultrium.asp

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

 

those 9-10 hours would only be the case with large files though...

 

when u do tiny files.. 5-10 MB/seconds. thats why for those backup gotta zip everything, even if no compression and take up the same size on disk.

how much of the hardware are we talking about? 300 MB/s isn't bad at all, and at 12TB.

edit: ok just realized the access time is a real issue, hence you mentioned "only for archives". hopping in and out of the drive whenever I want is a major convenience and even if harddrive feels slow, it is bearable. 30seonds for LTFS seems impossible except only for pure backup.

I could get it to replace external drives though.

 

I've been keeping an eye on these Mach.2 drives everyone is posting "news" about that have been in use for ~3 years on the enterprise side.

DA's virtual 14TB (2x7TB spindles logical)

It seems like a Raid0 single disk 3.5" format. Taking the theory of Raid into account vs price potentially when these may get released outside of DC use it might be cheaper to just run a Raid10 w/ instant access whenever you want. I'm running 4 x 8TB WD Reds in this format and clock the data transfer at ~400MB/s which makes sense since each drive can push 200MB/s. Total speed in R0 would be 800MB/s w/o redundancy (protection) 10 splits the bandwidth due to replication to the other disk within the set.

If I could get a pair of these at 14TB / 500MB/s in R1 configuration it would be tempting. Doing 4 of them in R10 though would start competing with the system drive ~1GB/s. Then the bottleneck becomes the network if you're running less than 10GE. It would be a snappy system for a fraction of the enterprise SAN solutions for sure but, still a considerable expense unless you need a "fast" backup system or hosting IO intensive network data. For most having these speeds is just a luxury not a need.

***There's always a one off use case though where the bandwidth is needed for live access or quick syncs.

 

Unless you're exclusively moving large/huge files, these drives won't be that fast @Tech Junky.

For any sort of backup of actual (unzipped) data, these will be as dog slow as any other spinning rust.

And with the Seagate label, with the worst reliability too.

 

@ tilleroftheearth

I wouldn't buy a seagate after having a couple of them in the past but, as a bigger picture on how to get the desired speed / capacity it's worth mentioning the other options.

It all comes down to how much you want to spend up front and after purchase to power these things. You could spend $5K on 4x NVME drives and a x16 PCI card to mount them inside a tower or go w/ 4 drives in a R10 for ~$800 and have some redundancy in place.

You can skin the storage kitty in serval different matters of approach depending on your budget and needs / desires.

 

thats why gotta zip them small files, even without compression. easy winrar access and uses large block sequential read/write for best performance. heck even the best of SSDs are defeated by small file blocksize sequential read/writes.

 

Of course. But can't do that to a live system that is in constant use, and you want backups of.

 

Depends on how you setup the system and run data.

I have an OS disk for my "server" and then the 4 disk raid on top of that. I could backup the Raid either live with another system with the capacity or take the array offline to make a backup as well. Since it's not running the OS there isn't any "locked" files in use if a backup were needed. Any vital files on the OS drive typically aren't locked either as they just get loaded into RAM and then released after the processes start up.

With Windows this would be a tad bit more cumbersome but, there are ways to do it with the right approach. In the enterprise environment everything these days is a virtual cluster not confined to a disk but rather a group of them. When you get more into the virtualized environment these tasks on a single "PC" become easier to manage.

So, I guess the new HDD mentioned could be of use for a single machine backup @ SSD speed if you want to minimize the downtime for a true backup provided your system disk speed matches or exceeds the speed of the mechanical drive. Still the process isn't going to be lightning fast to do a disk:disk copy w/o compression. The better option may be to get 2 of them in a Raid1 configuration so you have a live shadow copy available if one drive dies. You could setup something like that as the OS + Data partitions if it's available in the BIOS as an option. Then have another drive available to swap in if the array has a failure. When dealing with these types of setup you should try to source drives from different batches so they have a lower probability of failing within a short period of time.

Even when I setup my 4 disk option one of the drives I ordered failed at install.

 

Zipping is asking for trouble when doing large drives zip if the zip fails everything fails. I've used 8TB seagate archive v2 drives and so far for backup/archive they worked just fine the access slower but then again they aren't running 24/7 so that saves on drive LifeSpan and since they are for archive only. I never use RAID that is for DOD, NSA, CIA, KGB you will never need to do that kinda backup. You data is import just use a separate HDD or SSD of large capacity over 8tb to store that data and retrieve only when you need it. So only the main drive will be used but backup only runs when accessed. You can have multiple 8tb or 14tb without RAID and still store more then anyone can store. And I formatted each drive as single drive so I get the max space storage and not loose any to partitions. But that is how I do my backup/archive and so far haven't lost any files beside myself deleting by accident-but then I also have recovery/undelete program install on the main so I can recover the backup/archive drive data without over writing something important that I want to restore.

 

thats why you gotta make backup of it man. also store without any compression with winrar will not have this issue, you should give it a try.