back to article Seagate squeezes out 4TB desktop monster

Seagate seems set to replace its desktop Barracuda brand with the Desktop HDD brand and introduce a 4TB desktop drive with it. The Desktop HDD 15 line runs up from 250GB through 320GB and 500GB all the way to 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB. It uses 1TB/platter technology, spins at 7,200rpm, has a 64MB cache, transfers data at up to …

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  1. El Presidente

    But at what price?

    High time the EU looked into the uniformly astronomical prices of hard drives.

    1. jai

      Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

      really? Amazon are selling the Hitachi 4tb Desk for £150 and the 4tb Pro for £175

      those prices don't seem astronomically high to me. i remember when an 80gb drive would cost that much!

      1. Steve Brooks

        Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

        And I remember when a 300Mb HDD cost that much, and if I care to think even further back I can remember when a 300Mb HDD cost AU$10,000. Some people expect to much for their money.

      2. Craig McAllister

        Re: But at what price

        My first hard drive was a 52MB SCSI effort for my Amiga.

        It was £350 as I recall, circa 1991. I have used a PC/XT with a 5MB Hard drive though..

        4TB for £150 is a bargain (although oddly I can only see this price for USB drives, the bare drive itself is more??!)

        I suppose you would just buy the USB drive and pull it out of the case for a sata-III install.

        :)

        1. Gerhard Mack

          Re: But at what price

          >I suppose you would just buy the USB drive and pull it out of the case for a sata-III install.

          Be careful trying that these days. I have had at least one drive come to me for repair that had the USB3 connector built into the drive's electronics directly rather than the USB -> SATA adapter were all used to.

          1. Suricou Raven

            Re: But at what price

            Makes some sense as a power-and-cost saving trick. The reason for SATA (and IDE before that) drives in USB enclosures has always been to take advantage of the economy of scale that comes from the big production lines. But with the increasing sales volume, it might make sense now for drive manufacturers to run a second line for USB-interfaced boards. They can keep the same mechanical side, after all: Same mechanics, different board attached.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: But at what price

          reference "pulling IT out", this appears to be a particularly nasty case of a well-sealed box, that hitachi.

        3. Katie Saucey

          Re: But at what price

          My first was an Amiga 500 add-on drive. About 80MB I think. At the time (1990 ish) we had to drive almost 300 km to Toronto to get one. Pretty sure it was upwards of 800CAN$ (my dad bought it for me). 80MB was incredible to me back then, as such, it's pissing me off to no end that I'm downloading a 158MB(!) printer firmware update package right now.

          1. Jim 59

            Re: But at what price

            Nice. These early Winchesters seem tiny to us but they were superb at the time, compared to using floppies. Like - Wow! The computer just saves all your data without you having to do anything!

          2. jon 68

            Re: But at what price

            My very first purchased drive was a seagate 10MB MFM drive, that's personal purchase not work.

            after that it's just gotten insane.. as drive prices fall, i seem to gather more and more unused storage.. a nasty habit I intend to break. I'm around 35TB right now on my NAS.. and it's mostly empty.

        4. AbelSoul
          Thumb Up

          Re: But at what price

          My first was also for an Amiga.

          I remember saving up a bit longer so I could afford the maximum amount of storage sold by the store at the time: 500MB for £500. Never filled it either and it still works two decades later.

        5. Interceptor

          Re: But at what price

          "I suppose you would just buy the USB drive and pull it out of the case for a sata-III install."

          Problematically, some vendors have been installing direct-USB controllers onto the drives. It's not USB->Interface->Controller in those cases. Unless they've backed off of that.

          With that said, before the floods, I picked up a pair of "Aluratek" 1tb external USB hard drives for $40 each that were just hitachi SATA drives in a case. When those finally die I can slap another in there at least...

        6. Paul 129
          Alert

          Re: But at what price

          No, you can't use that trick anymore

          Typically a USB-3 drive these days have their own controller card. ie the card on the drive has only USB-3 output

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

        really? Amazon are selling the Hitachi 4tb Desk for £150 and the 4tb Pro for £175

        They were selling for £140 only a few days earlier. £130 in January. And about £120 in the Christmas sale period. Incidentally, ebuyer have increased that "home" version of the hdd from £140 to about £165 or so in the last few days, if I remember correctly.

        But hey, we're in the midst of a high flood season in Sahara, you know.

      4. A Known Coward
        Stop

        Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

        I remember when a 2TB drive cost £50 ... the prices haven't returned to normal since the floods even though the factories are back to full production. The competition commission absolutely should be looking into the prices and questioning why the Seagate/Samsung and WD/Hitachi mergers were allowed when that left just 3 huge companies to dominate the market which isn't in the interests of consumers or competition.

      5. big_D Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

        I remember when a 10MB drive cost over a grand! :-D

        1. ScarletVarlet
          Holmes

          Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

          I remember when 5 MB were 5 1/4 inch, full height and were three grand.

          Thing is, that drive will probably still spin up and work today. By reviews on these new high capacity drives the big question is how long with the 4TB drive last? DOA? A month? A year?

          1. Daniel von Asmuth
            Windows

            Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

            Of course you want to shell out a bit more for a 12 Gb/s 20.000 RPM SAS disc.

            This baby will take 7 hours to copy in its entirety (probably longer than that), so it would stand just 1250 cycles a year, and won't last much longer than that. It holds 32 Terabit, so if the Bit Error Rate be 10^--13, that would be one error in just 30 cycles.

      6. JEDIDIAH
        Linux

        It's not just time and space that are relative...

        ...there's also price tags. Amazon sells a 4TB drive for TWICE what it sells a 3TB for. That's still a hefty premium even if you have foggy memories of 10MB drives.

    2. Androgynous Crackwhore
      Thumb Up

      Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

      Looks like someone's enjoying the great El Reg app débâcle

      1. El Presidente
        FAIL

        Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

        "Looks like someone's enjoying the great El Reg app débâcle"

        Indeed. The app cut off the last half of my post, too.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F@El Presidente

          That's the price of living life on the cutting edge of science and technology.

          1. El Presidente
            FAIL

            Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F@El Presidente

            Don't know about the cutting edge as I'm on the bleeding edge most of the time ;)

            The last half of my post, which El Reg's sparkly new app didn't post, said something along the lines of if the current prices had continued to be on a par with the pre-flood prices they would be a lot less expensive.

            And that's after the fully insured companies have since made record profits.

            1. Philip Lewis
              Trollface

              Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F@El Presidente

              On the foreskin of technology ...

          2. Androgynous Crackwhore
            Mushroom

            Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F@El Presidente

            Curse you Ledswinger. Your quip was funnier than mine. >X(

            1. Danny 4
              Pint

              Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F@El Presidente

              I live life on the edge. Otherwise there wouldn't be enough room.

              My first was the colossal 20 Mb Seagate ST325N SCSI HDD. It came as part of the Amiga A590 for £400 I seem to remember. It was a joy to use after living from floppy disks.

              1. Philip Lewis
                Holmes

                Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F@El Presidente

                Hmm, I had a 5MB monster, an MFM drive IIRC. I shudder to think what it cost back then ...

    3. Code Monkey

      Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

      That is cobblers. These HDD companies do R&D and that ain't cheap.

      Storage is getting exponentially cheaper. and has been for decades. If you want to save money, buy the not-quite-the-latest model.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Linux

      Re: But at what price?

      What price for a shit-box hard drive with a 12 month warranty and a 12th month and one day expiry date?

      Seagate drives are shit and so is their warranty.

      4 Terror Bites of Seagate Drive = just more time wasted formatting it, more time wasted loading it up with more data, more time wasted trying to get it all backed up with it's starting to fail, and more time wasted buying and installing a new 4 Terror Bite hard drive - and after the 5th one in 3 years... switch to Hitachi Enterprise Quality.

      Linux - Don't take no shit from them Microsoft Quality Drives.

  2. Danny 14
    Pint

    best buy a couple

    I'd certainly RAID those though, id say it was a brave soul running these monsters unRAIDed.

    1. John Robson Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: best buy a couple

      Problem is that recovery would likely take out the remaining disk - copying 4TB at a sustained rate of ~100MB/s will take how long?

      40,000 seconds ~ 12 hours of SOLID activity

      Assuming a more realistic continuous rate it's going to take a long time to recover that data. I'd go for at least Raidz2, if not more...

    2. Androgynous Crackwhore
      Devil

      Re: best buy a couple

      RAID 666?

    3. Annihilator
      Headmaster

      Re: best buy a couple

      Repeat though, "RAID is not a backup, RAID is not a backup..."

      The bitrot problem is going to be heeeeeuuuuuge on that array.

      1. Danny 14
        Mushroom

        Re: best buy a couple

        ohe noes, you mentioned bitrot, now i'll mention ZFS and everyone will start shouting and claiming their file system is better. Some n00b will see the word RAID and use RAID 5

        THE END I TELL YOU. THE END.

        1. Daniel B.

          Re: best buy a couple @Danny 14

          Someone already mentioned it, given that a previous poster mentioned "raidz2"...

          1. Wil Palen
            Joke

            Re: best buy a couple @Danny 14

            I thought that was a hip plural with a typo..

      2. Bronek Kozicki
        Holmes

        Re: best buy a couple

        Repeat though, "RAID is not a backup, RAID is not a backup..."

        Yes, but if you want to make a backup to disk (which implies large disk storage), you'd rather keep that backup on RAID. Or two (in different computers/locations).

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can I format it in FAT16?

    I always dreamed to see what would happen if it was formatted in FAT16, and the dog-old OS run out of letters to name the partitions. Would it go Excel spreadsheet style?

    z:\>

    aa:\>

    ab:\>

    and so forth.

    On the other hand, how do I backup this beast? Oh, nevermind.

    1. Code Monkey
      Boffin

      Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

      Based on the options in "Map network drive" you'd get to Z: and that'd be it.

      26 partitions should be enough for anyone, etc. and so on.

    2. Lee Dowling Silver badge

      Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

      I did this once, with an old Pentium that I had Linux on and had an awful lot of old hard drives in it for archive-access and each had at least four partitions on it.

      Windows throws a fit, and won't name the drives after Z:, and Linux just adds more letters to the /dev/ entries. At least, that's how it worked years ago when I did that (think it was XP and early Linux 2.6). Hence, I was able to remove the problem by removing the Windows partitions present on the drives and saving myself several partition names for zero loss.

      1. FunkyEric
        Happy

        Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

        Yep XP runs out of drive letters after Z as well. I regularly map network drives to multiple PC's and have to keep clearing them out when I run out.

        1. JDX Gold badge

          Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

          You can't use Swedish characters, etc, as drive names? How sad.

          Is this still a limitation of Windows out of interest?

          1. Lee Dowling Silver badge

            Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

            Yes, a quick Google says that still even as of Windows 8, you can mount as many NTFS drives as you like (NTFS allows all sorts of fancy mounting now) but if you want drive letters, you can still only go up to Z:. So, basically, if you want things to "just work", you can still only go to Z:. It won't crash and burn, but you'll have to play about if you actually want to use the data on them.

            BTW: My post was wrong, apparently that machine was running a Linux 2.2 kernel. And still allowed more than 26 accessible drives / devices without anything "special" being done. Progress, eh?

    3. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

      Back in the day of DOS & NetWare, you could run into problems whereby a drive letter wasn't a letter but a character. I seem to remember seeing a "[" as a drive letter...

      1. Danny 14

        Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

        yes and netware accepted alt-255 as a character for many things too. Much fun could be had with alt-255

    4. Oddb0d

      Re: Can I format it in FAT16?

      Under Windows 2000 & later the DosDevices (aka drive letters) are merely references in the registry that point to the actual storage volume which could be an mbr partition, gpt partition or unpartitioned media like a USB stick or optical disc i.e. they are only shortcuts & are completely arbitrary as far as the OS is concerned.

      Drive letters are only for backwards compatibility so the limit remains as it has since the DOS age (maybe since CP/M & QDOS):- 26 letters less the one used for the system drive.

      Maximum partitions per drive would be a much more interesting question, I've found someone who has managed to create 350 partitions on a single drive inside a virtual machine but the actual maximum eludes me as this may be a limit of the diskpart command.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seagate has now produced 2 billion hard drives :(

    it's because their failure rate is so fucking high, not because people want MORE of them.

    And yes,10 years down the line we will find out - MAYBE - that it was, indeed, an extreme case of "planned obsolescence", and they'll be fined 10 billion rubles (or rupees), of which every Seagate customer (US only) will be entitled to big mac voucher to the value of 10 bucks. And it'll be hailed as another case of "ultimate justice for the customer". Like shit.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seagate has now produced 2 billion hard drives :(

      Yup... RMAs for sure... but it'll be Yuan we'll be buying our Big Macs with ten years from now.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Seagate has now produced 2 billion hard drives :(

        By which time the uncontrolled trade deficit will have pushed the Yuan to parity with the dollar.

    2. ecofeco Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Seagate has now produced 2 billion hard drives :(

      Not as bad WD or Hitchi. But that's just my personal professional experience.

    3. Katie Saucey
      Meh

      Re: Seagate has now produced 2 billion hard drives :(

      I can only assume Seagate has learned the manufacturing ways of Western Digital then. I've pretty much got their RMA line on speed dial, and the banter with the rep is second nature now. "yup... yup... yes windlg failed it.. twice...here's my email..."

    4. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Re: Seagate has now produced 2 billion hard drives :(

      While Seagate has certainly had their problems and deserve all the grief they are getting presently, the situation is not nearly as dire as some of you would like to make it out to be. I have a pile of perfectly good old Seagate drives sitting on the shelf. They are not sitting there because they failed. They are sitting there because I needed more space and moved on to larger drives.

      DOA is the biggest issue by far. Just buy from a nice reputable vendor with good return policies (like Amazon).

  5. The FunkeyGibbon
    Thumb Down

    Poor old Barracuda...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkitLUbeEg

    Desktop HDD is the kind of terribly dull name that gives the world of computers a dull image.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Poor old Barracuda...

      "Desktop HDD is the kind of terribly dull name that gives the world of computers a dull image."

      Presumably the marketing department was also washed away in the floods. Who says they don't do anything useful?

      1. Jim 59

        Barracuda

        Seagate have been hawking this "Barracuda" label since time began. It is kind of reassuring, but perhaps they could try a few more undersea names ? Shark ? Stingray ? Guppy ?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Joke

          Re: Barracuda

          How about Kelp.

          1. Michael Thibault

            Re: Barracuda

            How about stinkfish?

        2. jon 68

          Re: Barracuda

          Back in the early naughties they did have another line they tried to sell as a more affordable version of the barracudas.. the real truth was they had abysmal failure rates, even for seagate, and the line was eventually ended. I remember getting a case of them for builds and all but one of the lot failed in burn in

        3. Androgynous Crackwhore
          Happy

          Re: Barracuda

          Seaslug!

          Seagate Seaslug :D

          Man I'm pleased with myself for that one. Must have been slipped a crapload of cocaine in my cocoa this evening ;o)

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Thumb Down

          Re: Barracuda

          How about "Seagate off shore sewerage outfall"?

          That sums up the quality of their merchandising and their product.

          Shipping shit to different locations.

          Fail - Segate is FAIL

  6. Bobsch

    And yes,10 years down the line we will find out - MAYBE - that it was, indeed, an extreme case of "planned obsolescence", and they'll be fined 10 billion rubles (or rupees), of which every Seagate customer (US only) will be entitled to big mac voucher to the value of 10 bucks. And it'll be hailed as another case of "ultimate justice for the customer".

    Ah, but the legal types will get most of the money.

  7. kodabmx
    Unhappy

    Might not be 7200RPM

    The 4TB drive listed in the specs has an extra platter but uses less power. Maybe this drive runs at 5400 or 5900 RPM. The transfer rates would seem to support that, too.

  8. bricksterr

    15 years from now we'll be shaking our heads at how much we had to pay for a 4 TB drive... oh wait, we already are.

    Massive hard drives are great for back up - redundancy but for the average Joe they promote laziness. Also, the bigger the drive the greater the disaster when it fails or they muck up their PC. Having said that, I've experienced greater reliability out of Seagate than I've had with WD, Deskstar and the least dependable being Maxtor (which Seagate snapped up years ago). YMMV of course.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Warranty

    Has it the 1 year (we think our drives are crap) warranty?

  10. earl grey
    Joke

    I remember.....

    You kids get off my lawn.....

    And i never mount drives any more....

    Too hard on the equipment.

    I let the computer do it..

    That kelp bit is all a wet dream, of course....

  11. Jim O'Reilly
    Holmes

    With two drive suppliers, one could be forgiven for fearing price gouging, but the reality is that, while prices haven't returned to the levels before the Thailand floods of two years ago, the prices are not outrageous. Further, with two vendors chasing a declining desktop PC market, and SSD coming into its own, there may be a price war brewing. Don't expect huge discounts...the margin today still isn't huge.

  12. ecofeco Silver badge
    Pint

    Room to Swing a Cat

    I can almost hear an echo...

  13. jason 7
    Meh

    Has the words...LIABILITY

    written all over it.

  14. Silverburn

    Yay...eventually some some drives to max out my Drobo at last. Not because I have to, but just because I want to. Even with my HD movie collection growing, 10-and-a-bit TB is a lot of storage.

    And given Seagate's reputation, a chance to see just how good Drobo is at dealing with dead disks...

    Interesting sidenote: a 4x4tb Drobo's index overhead requirements ( circa 18gb) is more than my first PC had in total storage. Progress ftw.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    4TB and FRAPS, the perfect marriage.

    Some people like to record their online gaming session using FRAPS. A little snag is, the thing records raw uncompressed AVI after the graphic card produces the output, because it must save processing power for the gaming itself. As a result, 2 minutes of footage burn 500MB of storage. The software offers no option of compressing, only after the video is recorded that you can compress it.

    4TB would be a hell of scratch-disk.

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