Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate
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A lot of modern AAA games require an SSD, actually.
On top of my head:
Cyberpunk, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Space remake, Starfield, Baulder's Gate 3, Palworld, Ratchet & Clank: Rift ApartBoth Cyberpunk and BG3 work flawlessly on the external USB hard drive that I use. The loading times suffer a bit, but not to an unplayable degree, not even close
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In my case, 10+years ago I had 6 * 3tb Seagate disks in a software raid 5. Two of them failed and it took me days to force it back into the raid and get some of the data off. Now I use WD and raid 6.
I read 3 or 4 years ago that it was just the 3tb reds I used had a high failure rate but I'm still only buying WDs
Thanks, yeah that makes sense.
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Is Seagate still producing shitty drives that fail a few days after the warranty expired?
Some models are quite a bit worse than average while some are on par with competition
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Can someone recommend me a hard drive that won't fail immediately? Internal, not SSD, from which cheap ones will die even sooner, and I need it for archival reasons, not speed or fancy new tech, otherwise I have two SSDs.
If you're relying on one hard drive not failing to preserve your data you are doing it wrong from the jump. I've got about a dozen hard drives in play from seagate and WD at any given time (mostly seagate because they're cheaper and I don't need speed either) and haven't had a failure yet. Backblaze used to publish stats about the hard drives they use, not sure if they still do but that would give you some data to go off. Seagate did put out some duds a while back but other models are fine.
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Do people actually use such massive hard drives? I still have my 1 TB HDD in my PC (and a 512 GB SSD), lol.
This is an enterprise drive, so it's useful for any usecase where a business needs to store a lot of lightly used data, like historical records that might be accessed infrequently for reporting and therefore shouldn't get be transfered to cold storage.
For a real world example, the business I'm currently contracting at is legally required to retain safety documentation for every machine in every plant they work in. Since the company does contract work in other people's plants that's hundreds of PDFs (many of which are 50+ page scans of paper forms) per plant and hundreds of plants. It all adds up very quickly. We also have a daily log processes where our field workers will log with photographs all of their work every single workday for the customer. Some of these logs contain hundreds of photographs depending on the customer's requirements. These logs are generated every day at every plant so again it adds up to a lot of data being created each month
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with this I can store at least 3 modern "AAA" games
Oh definitely, game sizes are getting extreme and I prefer smaller indie games now 🥲
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Is that just observational, or did you keep track? Backblaze does track their failures, and publishes their data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2025/
Three companies, kept track, but not after I left. It was always funny to me that they bought out Atlas and Maxtor. "Of course they did. Why not dominate the market on shitty drives? lol" I am surprised they hadn't bought Deskstar.
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What models of Seagate drives?
I've been running x4 Seagate ST8000NC0002s 24/7 for almost 5 years, plus 2 more I added about 6 months ago and they've never given me any trouble.
To be fair, the only HDDs I've ever had that failed were two I dropped because I wasn't being careful enough.
All over the map: Barracuda, SkyHawk, Ironwolf, Constellation, Cheetah, etc...
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I'm gonna need like 6 of these
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Can someone recommend me a hard drive that won't fail immediately? Internal, not SSD, from which cheap ones will die even sooner, and I need it for archival reasons, not speed or fancy new tech, otherwise I have two SSDs.
My WD Red Pros have almost all lasted me 7+ years but the best thing (and probably cheapest nowadays) is a proper 3-2-1 backup plan.
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Hard drives aren't great for archival in general, but any modern drive should work. Grab multiple brands and make at least two copies. Look for sales. Externals regularly go below $15/tb these days.
Word for the wise, those externals usually won't last 5+ years of constant use as an internal.
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they were selling wd red (pro?) drives with smr tech, which is known to be disastrous for disk arrays because both traditional raid and zfs tends to throw them out. the reason for that is when you are filling it up, especially when you do it quickly, it won't be able to process your writes after some time, and write operations will take a very long time, because the disk needs to rearrange its data before writing more. but raid solutions just see that the drive is not responding to the write command for a long time, and they think that's because the drive is bad.
it was a few years ago, but it was a shitfest because they didn't disclose it, and people were expecting that nas drives will work fine in their nas.
I've had a couple random drop from my array recently, but they were older so I didn't think twice about it. Does this permafry them or can you remove from the array and reinitiate for it to work?
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A lot of modern AAA games require an SSD, actually.
On top of my head:
Cyberpunk, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Dead Space remake, Starfield, Baulder's Gate 3, Palworld, Ratchet & Clank: Rift ApartCyberpunk literally has an HDD mode, I play it of an HDD every day.
With sufficient ram to load everything in you'll just have longer load times, no hdd hitchiness
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Makes me shudder. I have to replace a drive in my array, because it is degraded. It's a 4TB. Imagine having to replace one of these. I'd much rather have a bunch of cheaper drives, even if they are a bit more expensive per TB, because the replacement cost will eventually make the total cost of ownership lower.
Also, repeat with me: "Please give me a Toshiba or Hitachi, please"
Until you run out of ports or cage space
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That's a lot of porn. And possibly other stuff, too.
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Word for the wise, those externals usually won't last 5+ years of constant use as an internal.
I've got 6 in a random mix of brands (Seagate and WD) 8-16Tb that are all older than that. Running 24/7 storing mostly random shit I download. Pulled one out recently because the USB controller died. Still works in a different enclosure now.
I'd definitely have a different setup for data I actually cared about.
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36 Typical Bananas
28 plantains
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That's a lot of porn. And possibly other stuff, too.
It isn't as much as you think, high resolution, high bitrate video files are pretty large.
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If you're relying on one hard drive not failing to preserve your data you are doing it wrong from the jump. I've got about a dozen hard drives in play from seagate and WD at any given time (mostly seagate because they're cheaper and I don't need speed either) and haven't had a failure yet. Backblaze used to publish stats about the hard drives they use, not sure if they still do but that would give you some data to go off. Seagate did put out some duds a while back but other models are fine.
The back blaze stats were always useless because they would tell you what failed long after that run of drives was available.
There are only 3 manufactures at this point so just buy one or two of each color and call it a day. ZFS in raid z2 is good enough for most things at this point.
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That's a lot of porn. And possibly other stuff, too.
And possibly other stuff, too.
Ehhh don't test me