For storage density, sure... Also for corporations with deep pockets, sure... But the price/capacity ratio is quite bad - 8 TB drives can be found under $140, so 32+ TB for the price of a single 18 TB - 14 TB drives can be found under $300, so 28 TB for less than this 18 TB But new tech is cool, indeed !

As far as I know every GOLD drive from WD is CMR.

wavetrex:

For storage density, sure... Also for corporations with deep pockets, sure... But the price/capacity ratio is quite bad - 8 TB drives can be found under $140, so 32+ TB for the price of a single 18 TB - 14 TB drives can be found under $300, so 28 TB for less than this 18 TB But new tech is cool, indeed !

These are for cases where you need insane density. If a drive like this lets you get away with needing 1 less server then even at a high $/TB you could still save $.

This surely has to be shingled - can they really pack that much into CMR? If they did there must be something like 5 or 6 platters in there with a huge and very densely packed head assembly. I wonder how reliable that is. Also good luck if it fails and you have to get a professional restore company to extract your 18TB off drive - I saw some only do up to 1TB for something stupid like $500+ plus cost of "donor" drive plus cost of copy-to drive, and every TB after that was extra $75 (so $75 x 17 on this) 😱

geogan:

This surely has to be shingled - can they really pack that much into CMR? If they did there must be something like 5 or 6 platters in there with a huge and very densely packed head assembly. I wonder how reliable that is. Also good luck if it fails and you have to get a professional restore company to extract your 18TB off drive - I saw some only do up to 1TB for something stupid like $500+ plus cost of "donor" drive plus cost of copy-to drive, and every TB after that was extra $75 (so $75 x 17 on this) 😱

What are the chances you lose two drives at the same time, unless it due to external factors? Nobody should keep anything important only on one drive. Of course if the model actually are faulty straight from the factory. It could theoretically happen, but such a thing would show up in user reviews, so it's not an issue, unless you are among the first people making the purchase.

Kaarme:

What are the chances you lose two drives at the same time, unless it due to external factors? Nobody should keep anything important only on one drive. Of course if the model actually are faulty straight from the factory. It could theoretically happen, but such a thing would show up in user reviews, so it's not an issue, unless you are among the first people making the purchase.

Well it can happen - because if it didn't, there wouldn't be so many data recovery houses for sure. A lot of time when/if you keep servers so long that drives die of old age, the strenuous work-out from rebuilding the array can cause a borderline drive to have issues or otherwise start throwing errors and drop-out of the array. If one drops out of an array during a rebuild, you might not be able to rebuild the drive array and have all your data yet (it depends on the drive location, and the RAID level used). So this in a nutshell is why places like back blaze and other similar server / drive array farms replace drives in a timely manner, and when it looks like they've got a bad pool of drives or a batch of drives that's getting up-there in hours, they replace them in the near term. A lot of times when you have people losing arrays due to dual-drive (or more) failure and you hear about it on here, it's either due to a surge taking out multiple drive's logic boards at once, or it's just an old array that most folks with a higher operating budget (e.g. a business's budget vs an individual) would have sought to replace sooner. There is something to be said for hard drives, though. I had a nice Raid 10 array on SSD's and every time the power went out there was about a 33% chance I'd lose a drive in the array. They were supposedly fail-safe designs, with capacitors and such. The drives would just boot up not part of the array, and I'd be forced into a text box and the card firmware trying to fix it. Got sick of it threw the LSI card in a box, went back to using piles of random HDD's for backups that i disconnect when not in use, and was done with it. I don't have time to play admin when I could be bringing in income in making content. Could have had a battery backup unit to avoid this issue altogether, but I already had one explode at my feet, and i had to run out of the house with a burning/smoldering/smoking lithium-ion-powered-bomb of a backup unit in my hands to save the house.

bobblunderton:

Could have had a battery backup unit to avoid this issue altogether, but I already had one explode at my feet, and i had to run out of the house with a burning/smoldering/smoking lithium-ion-powered-bomb of a backup unit in my hands to save the house.

That sounds tough. Maybe you should have used a traditional UPS with lead batteries. In any case if your area has plenty of power problems, a UPS ought to be mandatory for essential computer hardware. I don't have one because I could call the power delivery rock solid here where I live.

wavetrex:

For storage density, sure... Also for corporations with deep pockets, sure... But the price/capacity ratio is quite bad - 8 TB drives can be found under $140, so 32+ TB for the price of a single 18 TB - 14 TB drives can be found under $300, so 28 TB for less than this 18 TB But new tech is cool, indeed !

Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less 🙂 and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.

MegaFalloutFan:

Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less 🙂 and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.

Someone who lives in Europe ;-) It's nice that there in the Desert you get such low prices, but here where the plains are green and the mountains are white, we have higher prices, unfortunately. (Still, nowhere near as high as this ridiculously expensive 18 TB)

MegaFalloutFan:

Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less 🙂 and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.

But paying more for something means it's better... oh wait... LOL!

MegaFalloutFan:

Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less 🙂 and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.

so you buy externals and remove the casing?

I will wait 12 - 14 months so they get a few more firmwares out there to reduce the bugs and start swapping out my 16 drive storage array with these. My 120TB RAID 60 Array is about 80% full so it is almost time to add some more breathing room (up to 216TB).

wavetrex:

For storage density, sure... Also for corporations with deep pockets, sure... But the price/capacity ratio is quite bad - 8 TB drives can be found under $140, so 32+ TB for the price of a single 18 TB - 14 TB drives can be found under $300, so 28 TB for less than this 18 TB But new tech is cool, indeed !

It's for pro even if anyone can buy it, so you should think this way: replace the 8 x 10TB in RAID by 8 x 18TB: yeah what a huge benefit of **TB (** depend on your RAID config) And the financial service, start to talk to the boss about the need of this upgrade and how it will cost over 4 year And the IT about the secure transfer of DATA and the benefit when done... lol

MegaFalloutFan:

Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less 🙂 and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.

If it's in $ for Euro zone you have to add +25% of trump's tax +0,5% to 26% of local tax depending from the country

Kaarme:

What are the chances you lose two drives at the same time, unless it due to external factors? Nobody should keep anything important only on one drive.

Most of us home users with a few big drives do only keep all data on one drive only - just can't afford to be buying extra 30TB of backup at prices of drives here.

Kaarme:

What are the chances you lose two drives at the same time, unless it due to external factors? Nobody should keep anything important only on owne drive. Of course if the model actually are faulty straight from the factory. It could theoretically happen, but such a thing would show up in user reviews, so it's not an issue, unless you are among the first people making the purchase.

What are the chances It happend to me 2 times so far, 1st time I lost 2 Hard-Drives at once just died (WD) 2nd time I lost 2 Ssd's at once 1 was a corsair and the other Amd Radeon R7 ssd. It does happen bro.

nz3777:

What are the chances It happend to me 2 times so far, 1st time I lost 2 Hard-Drives at once just died (WD) 2nd time I lost 2 Ssd's at once 1 was a corsair and the other Amd Radeon R7 ssd. It does happen bro.

Yeah, of course it does happen, but the odds are significantly lower than losing a single one. An external factor could make it happen far more easily, such as a voltage spike.

Spot on bro that is Excactly why I lost my drives.

Kaarme:

Yeah, of course it does happen, but the odds are significantly lower than losing a single one. An external factor could make it happen far more easily, such as a voltage spike.

The issue is failure during a rebuild as rebuild is disk intensive. Conventional RAID 5 becomes more and more dangerous as the drives get bigger as the rebuild time for RAID 5 get obscene for drives at the limits of capacity. Replacements for conventional RAID will become more common as these drives keep getting bigger.

EspHack:

so you buy externals and remove the casing?

Yep