Three hundred thousand drives. That figure seems insane. Google and AWS must have truly staggering amounts.
I wonder if backblaze's business has seen any changes given that their assets are platter drives
Design your training strategy carefully and you can do streaming rather than random reads from the drives and get enough performance.
It looks like I picked a good vintage which is good because the same drives are approaching 2x the price today.
I never thought I would own commodity hardware that would increase in value over time. When this AI bubble pops like dotcom 1.0, the definancialization is going to be painful.
I was wondering why we dont have something like that.
Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes.
Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/
I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically.
Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage. By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with. This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.
Why is that?
5 years doesn't seem that long for a drive that cost hundreds of dollars! Persistence is the point.
Just wondering why Seagate seems like the bottom of the barrel in the longevity department. Western Digital drives seem to fail a lot less frequently on average in this dataset and in my life experience.
To Seagate's credit, I do have 8x24TB drives that have been working fine for the past 4 years. Hopefully can last a few more until the compute hardware shortages pass.
Last year I have bought a 22 TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external HDD, because it was cheaper than the other 22 or 24 TB HDDs available at that time.
I had read carefully its datasheet before buying and there was nothing suspicious there, so I assumed that it must be cheaper just because it is a slow HDD. I did not care about the speed, it was for storing data archives infrequently accessed.
Only after receiving it I discovered what was not said in the datasheet, that this Seagate HDD does not support S.M.A.R.T., so there is no way to test it to see if it works OK and there is no way to discover when errors have happened, e.g. to see when the HDD becomes too old, so you need to migrate your data.
I have never imagined that in 2025 it is possible to buy a HDD that does not support S.M.A.R.T., especially in HDDs with a capacity over 20 TB, and moreover without giving a prominent notice about such a misfeature in the datasheet.
Before this, in 2024 I had bought a 24 TB Seagate SkyHawk, which had S.M.A.R.T., as expected. Since then, after the Seagate Expansion fiasco, I have bought a 22 TB external WD HDD, at the same price with the Seagate, and which has S.M.A.R.T., as it is normal.
I cannot see how removing S.M.A.R.T. support can reduce costs, as it is just a firmware feature. I any case a manufacturer that removes testing and error reporting features from its products clearly does not give a s*t about data corruption and HDD failure rates.
If Seagate has chosen in 2025 to use some archaic bridge that does not pass the SMART commands, it is on them. That would be even more stupid than not implementing SMART in the HDD firmware.
As I have said, the previous external Seagate that I had bought in 2024 had SMART that worked fine over USB. I have a large number of external HDDs, most from WD. Some have been packaged by the HDD vendor as USB drives, others I have assembled myself into enclosures with SATA-to-USB bridges.
On all of them SMART works perfectly, except in this Seagate Expansion Desktop, where the drive replies that SMART is not supported.
Whenever I buy a HDD, I first run the long SMART self-test, to determine whether it can be used safely or I should return it immediately, even if the long self-test takes a couple of days on modern over 20 TB HDDs.
I started to use this procedure after I had some problems with a batch of WD drives, 2 decades ago, where all the drives had very frequent errors since the first few days of use. After running the SMART self-tests, which all failed, the seller could not deny an immediate replacement.
My latest 'fun' experience with them, also, came in the form of an Ironwolf drive which is 'detected' on usb-to-sata interface when plugged in, around %15 of the time. While it starts up consistently on a plain SATA interface. This makes it unusable for what I need. Again, no other drive or MFG ever fails on this usbSata, just the new ironwolf, which it appears is actually for the chineese market, but was sold on newegg, but this is not necessarily seagate's fault, nevertheless.
MacOS does not support S.M.A.R.T over USB.
On all of them, except on the Seagate Expansion model, SMART works fine over USB.
Seagate Expansion is made as an external drive by Seagate, so it is not some custom enclosure that could have been incompatible with the drive.
There is: use ZFS and scrub.
But yeah, crazy that it doesn't support SMART!
Whenever I write that drive, after a power cycle (to be sure that the files are read from disks and not from some cache) I run a script that checks the integrity of the files, to be sure that I can remove them from elsewhere without risking data loss.
With SMART-enabled drives, I usually do that only in the rare cases when a drive reports corrected errors, because I have seen cases when a drive miscorrected some errors, resulting in corrupted files. With a HDD without SMART, when the drives finds errors, but it believes to have corrected them successfully, there is no external sign that something could have gone wrong.
The IBM Deskstar 75GXP entirely earned its nickname of Deathstar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_fa...