Subscriber Discussion

6TB Hard Drive For Surveillance? New Seagate Release

Rv
Rogier van der Heide
Apr 07, 2014

Apprerently Seagate has announced it's first 6 TB HDD.

The Enterprise Capacity drive has these features:

  • 7,200rpm spin speed,
  • 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6TB capacity points,
  • 128MB cache,
  • encryption option with Secure Instant Erase or SED FIPS 140-2 option,
  • SAS 12Gbit/s and SATA 6Gbit/s interface options and
  • a 25 per cent increase in areal density.

Seagate says its neat new drive can be used for:

  • hyperscale applications,
  • high-capacity RAID storage,
  • mainstream enterprise external storage arrays (SAN, NAS, DAS),
  • cloud data centres—replicated bulk data storage,
  • enterprise backup and restore—D2D, virtual tape and
  • Centralised surveillance.

More to be found here

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Aaron Saks
Apr 07, 2014

Hitachi already relased 6Tb hard drives in 2013. They are hermetically sealed filled with Helium, allowing them to run at lower power, cooler, and increased capacity. In addition, they now can be liquid cooled - immersed in liquid. That could be very beneficial for disaster recovery in case of flood, fire supression system activation, spilled coke, etc...

increases capacity while lowering power consumption and operating temperature - See more at: Western Digital | Empowering the World's Data Infrastructures">Western Digital | Empowering the World's Data Infrastructures
increases capacity while lowering power consumption and operating temperature - See more at: Western Digital | Empowering the World's Data Infrastructures">Western Digital | Empowering the World's Data Infrastructures

Hopefully the competition for 6Tb drives will lower prices so they are practical.

See Ultrastar He6.

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Carl Lindgren
Apr 07, 2014

"...they now can be liquid cooled..."

Works for me...

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Luis Carmona
Apr 07, 2014
Geutebruck USA • IPVMU Certified

Of course they don't mention how "well" the drives work in those applications. You can tow a 25ft boat with a Ford Escape, doesn't mean it's going to do it very well or as well as a F250.

YL
Yair Lax
Apr 07, 2014

I wouldn't use such a large drive. Depending on what your storing this could be years of data.

ML
Mark Lewis
Apr 07, 2014

Raid 5 rebuilds will now take 2 weeks ;)

BS
Bryan Shalke
Apr 09, 2014

This is where video surveillance breaks away from the typical IT market. RAID 5/RAID 6 is rarely used for enterprise storage. The new defacto standard is "OBR10" (One Big RAID 10). This is because hard drives are HUGE for most of the things people use them for - a few TB should be enough to store every version of every document a typical small business will make for the lifetime of their storage appliance. Any enterprise that needs something like a 3PAR SAN is big enough that dropping 6 figures on it is less of an issue than insane rebuild times.

Unfotunately, we're not there yet for video surveillance. Once 10TB or larger drives are available and reasonable, I think we'll cross that threshold of "Just put it in a RAID 10."

This will likely lead to other changes in the industry. Why even bother with H.265 when you can stuff 120TB+ in a 2U enclosure for <$10K? 30 days? Let's keep everything forever. Why not? This is also going to coencide with the shift from 10/100/1000 to 100/1000/10000 for most network interfaces.

I dare say that bandwidth and storage is going to stop being a limitation for video on the LAN in the next 10 years. Resolution won't see nearly the same level of increase, as lens technology hasn't been advancing at the same pace. We can already do 60+FPS, but I rarely see a need for >8, so that won't likely be an issue any time soon either.

I say bring on OBR10, bring on GbE NICs being "You still use those?" and bring on HDDs so big, we don't know what to do with them.

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Mike Dotson
Apr 07, 2014
Formerly of Seneca • IPVMU Certified

The other new thing on these drives to watch for is called "advanced format sector" which is a 4K sector size instead of the historical 512 byte one.

The trick in this is whether or not 512 is native or emulated...and how the OS and hardware subsystems support the 4K part.

We are still evaluating the performance of these drives in our storage offerings.

A ref for the Advance Format

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