I get it. But the moment we invoke RAID, or ZFS, we are outside what standard consumers will ever interact with, and therefore into business use cases. Remember, even simple homelab use cases involving docker are well past what the bulk of the world understands.

Not necessarily.

The trouble with spinning platters this big is that if a drive fails, it will take a long time to rebuild the array after shoving a new one in there. Sysadmins will be nervous about another failure taking out the whole array until that process is complete, and that can take days. There was some debate a while back on if the industry even wanted spinning platters >20TB. Some are willing to give up density if it means less worry.

I guess Seagate decided to go ahead, anyway, but the industry may be reluctant to buy this.

Windows Server storage solutions. I took them out of the array and they still weren't recognized in Disk Management so I assume they're shot. It was just weird having 2 fail the same way.

I would assume with arrays they will use a different way to calculate parity or have higher redundancy to compensate the risk.

Can't wait to see this bad boy on serverpartdeals in a couple years if I'm still alive

This hard drive is so big, it's got its own area code

if I'm still alive

That goes without saying, unless you anticipate something. Do you?

I'm not in the know of having your own personal data centers so I have no idea. ... But how often is this necessary? Does accessing your own data on your hard drive require a scrub? I just have a 2tb on my home pc. Is the equivalent of a scrub like a disk clean up?

Howdy!

twenty!?

I don't have experience with windows server, but that indeed sounds like these are dead. you could check them with some pendrive bootable live linux, whether it sees them, like gparted's edition, in case windows just hides them because it blacklisted them or something

If there's higher redundancy, then they are already giving up on density.

We've pretty much covered the likely ways to calculate parity.

I would think most standard consumers are not using HDDs at all.

It's like the petronas towers, everytime they're finished cleaning the windows they have to start again

You usually scrub you pool about once a month, but there are no hard rules on that. The main problem with scrubbing is, that it puts a heavy load on the pool, slowing it down.

Accessing the data does not need a scrub, it is only a routine maintenance task.
A scrub is not like a disk cleanup. With a disk cleanup you remove unneeded files and caches, maybe de-fragment as well. A scrub on the other hand validates that the data you stored on the pool is still the same as before. This is primarily to protect from things like bit rot.

There are many ways a drive can degrade. Sectors can become unreadable, random bits can flip, a write can be interrupted by a power outage, etc. Normal file systems like NTFS or ext4 can only handle this in limited ways. Mostly by deleting the corrupted data.

ZFS on the other hand is built using redundant storage. Storing the data spread over multiple drives in a special way allowing it to recover most corruption and even survive the complete failure of a disk. This comes at the cost of losing some capacity however.

It matters to me. I got stuff to back up regularly, and I ain't got all weekend.

The only flash drive I ever had fail me that wasn’t made by sandisk was a generic microcenter one, which was so cheap I couldn’t bring myself to care about it.

Yeah, lots of drives of varrying capacity.

Thank you for all this information. One day when my ADHD forces me into a making myself a home server I'll remember this and keep it in mind. I've always wanted to store movies but these days just family pictures and stuff. Definitely don't have terabytes but I'm getting up 100s of gb.

I remember renting a game, and it was on a high density 5.25" inch floppy at a whopping 1.2MB; but or family computer only had a standard density 5.25".

So we went to the neighbors house, who was one of the first computer nerds (I'm not sure he's still alive now), who copied the game to a 3.5" high density 1.44MB disk, then we returned the rental because we couldn't play it on the 1.2 MB HD 5.25" floppy.

.... And that was the first time I was party to piracy.