Western Digital recently announced new data center HDDs that increase Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) capacity to 32TB and Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) capacity to 26TB. The company...
Well I have no experience with these particular drives, but they do seem to have 11 platters. Which is beyond insane as far as I’m concerned. More platters means more moving parts, more friction more noise (all other things being equal).
Tell that to my IBM 10GB 10.000 RPM U2W SCSI from back then. To this day I have never witnessed a noisier harddrive… But that PC was pretty epic, including the biggest mf of a mainboard I ever had (the SCSI controller was onboard).
not sure what you’re on about, i have some cheap 500GB USB 3 drives from like 2016 lying around and even those can happily deal with sustained writes over 130MB/s.
You’ve made me uncertain if I’ve somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I’ve been dd-ing /dev/random onto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.
EDIT: I’ve now been doing 1.2GB/s onto an 8 drive RAID0 (8x 600GB 15k SAS Seagates) for over 10 minutes with no noticable slowdown. That comes out to 150MB/s per drive, and these drives are from 2014 or 2015. If you’re only getting 60MB/s on a modern non-SMR HDD, especially something as dense as an 18TB drive, you’ve either configured something wrong or your hardware is broken.
My NAS uses a pair of SAS drives, and they make noises at boot up that would be concerning in a desktop. They’re quite obnoxious. But I keep them in part of the house where they don’t bother me.
Drives like this are hermetically sealed with an inert gas like argon or helium on the inside. Even the presence of oxygen and nitrogen molecules can compromise the drive. If dust is getting to the moving parts of your hard drive, it’s toast no matter where it’s installed.
Most consumer drives are filled with atmosphere seperated by a very fine filter to prevent any dust particles entering. Helium drives are used to increase efficiency as there is less drag.
I’ve found that the only thing you can hear through a closed basement door are noisy high speed fans, e.g. from used 19" servers, disks produce much less noise.
Nah, I’m living outside the US, my home is made from proper bricks and concrete. A bit slower to build but rather good when it comes to sound insulation. I could imagine with those strand board walls that might be a problem though.
If you eyeballing these, please remind that these babies tend to be LOUD AS FUCK, so might not be suitable for home server use.
Are they any louder than any HDD from the last 30 years?
If so, im actually curious why that is
Edit: fixed to say HDD not SSD
Well I have no experience with these particular drives, but they do seem to have 11 platters. Which is beyond insane as far as I’m concerned. More platters means more moving parts, more friction more noise (all other things being equal).
Oops, yes. I definitely would expect these to be much louder than your 6 GB 1998 model HDD wrangling under stress of copying files at 30 MB/s.
Tell that to my IBM 10GB 10.000 RPM U2W SCSI from back then. To this day I have never witnessed a noisier harddrive… But that PC was pretty epic, including the biggest mf of a mainboard I ever had (the SCSI controller was onboard).
Ah, the sound of turning on the SCSI storage tower.
KA-TSCHONK. WeeeeeeeeEEEEEIIIIIII… skrrrt, skrrrt, clack.
Either that or KA-TSCHONK, silence, if there were already too many boxes on that circuit at a lan party 😁
Your everyday modern HDD does not much more than 60MB/s after the on-disk cache (a few GB) is full.
not sure what you’re on about, i have some cheap 500GB USB 3 drives from like 2016 lying around and even those can happily deal with sustained writes over 130MB/s.
When the cache isn’t full, yes, that’s true. Copy a file that’s significantly bigger than cache and performance will drop part way through.
You’ve made me uncertain if I’ve somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I’ve been
dd
-ing/dev/random
onto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.EDIT: I’ve now been doing 1.2GB/s onto an 8 drive RAID0 (8x 600GB 15k SAS Seagates) for over 10 minutes with no noticable slowdown. That comes out to 150MB/s per drive, and these drives are from 2014 or 2015. If you’re only getting 60MB/s on a modern non-SMR HDD, especially something as dense as an 18TB drive, you’ve either configured something wrong or your hardware is broken.
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My NAS uses a pair of SAS drives, and they make noises at boot up that would be concerning in a desktop. They’re quite obnoxious. But I keep them in part of the house where they don’t bother me.
Just don’t put it in your bedroom. All those dead skin cells wouldn’t do good to it anyway.
Since when is dust a concern for hard drives??
I was talking about the server in general
Drives like this are hermetically sealed with an inert gas like argon or helium on the inside. Even the presence of oxygen and nitrogen molecules can compromise the drive. If dust is getting to the moving parts of your hard drive, it’s toast no matter where it’s installed.
Most consumer drives are filled with atmosphere seperated by a very fine filter to prevent any dust particles entering. Helium drives are used to increase efficiency as there is less drag.
I’ve found that the only thing you can hear through a closed basement door are noisy high speed fans, e.g. from used 19" servers, disks produce much less noise.
Comparatively, yes - that’s auditory masking for you. On a relatively quiet place like a home, these will sound like rats running wild in your pipes.
Nah, I’m living outside the US, my home is made from proper bricks and concrete. A bit slower to build but rather good when it comes to sound insulation. I could imagine with those strand board walls that might be a problem though.