back to article Seagate's LaCie touts a 25TB (not a typo) box o' disks for your DESK

Seagate subsidiary LaCie has launched a set of external storage boxes using a 5TB Seagate hard drive – even though disk maker Seagate hasn’t officially launched a 5TB part. So far only Toshiba has officially announced a 5TB drive and that was only a few days ago. Tosh’s 5TB disk is for internal use rather than external drive …

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  1. Craigness

    Pr0n

    Lots.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I have my doubts..

    Hmm, I can't see anyone make a backup of this thing when it's full. Even assuming a transfer rate of 600MB/s (which would be nothing short of miraculous) it will take over 12 hours to make a copy.

    From that we can conclude that this encourages 25GB of data to be at risk. And I would not like to feed the people who will run this thing without a UPS...

    1. Nigel 11

      Re: I have my doubts..

      Well, to grab a linux command: rsync.

      The first rsync will take many hours, maybe days. Just carry on using it while that completes.

      Once done, stop modifying it, and repeat the Rsync command. The second pass will copy only the data that has been changed since the first pass, so quite possibly only a few minutes.

      The same approach doubtless exists under other names. Back in the days of tape, they were called full and incremental backups.

  3. Mikel

    Cat pictures

    That is a lot of cat pictures.

    AC: you network sync these with your friends'. Don't you have Google Fiber?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cat pictures

      AC: you network sync these with your friends'.

      Not a chance. They can collect their own pr0n.

      Don't you have Google Fiber?

      You must be joking. I'm willing to bet Google fiber either comes with the same T&Cs they use at the moment. Slightly paraphrased it reads "you give us a perpetual license to anything you submit to our service, and we can change bits of it but still attribute it to you, and you can't sue us for it." - feel free to check it out for yourself (don't get deluded by the "limitations" of the 3rd parties they can hand it to, it's sufficiently open to enable the hotdog vendor in front of the building to get your data if so required).

      No thanks, I prefer the NSA having to at least *work* to steal my information. Thanks to idiots using WhatsApp I'm sure they already have my phone number.

  4. moylan

    what i really really want

    what i really really want is them to bring back bigfoot drives. slow but huge compared to other drives of their day.

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge

      Re: what i really really DO NOT want

      I remember a lot of those Bigfoots crashing sooner rather than later and some being damn loud. I also remember buggy firmwares with data corruption bugs.

      If you can fit say, five 3,5 drives on space occupied by three 5,25" drives what's the point? The data density would differ that much if at all. 20 years ago many computer cases had many 5,25" slots whereas nowadays outside realm of enthusiasts there may be a single such slot already occupied by the ODD.

  5. Andrew Jones 2

    Presumably just like the other 5 of these things we have had (ranging from 320GB to 1TB) they will mysteriously stop working a few weeks outside the warranty period. In every case, there is nothing wrong with the disk, they work fine in desktop computers - but the Lacie box just refuses to power up (other than a single flash of the blue LED).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Did you try?

      Did you try replacing the power supply? They seem to have a history of failing, no doubt due to the rotten quality of AC power that we all must suffer through in today's world. Replacements are readily available on LaCie's website.

      1. MCG

        Re: Did you try?

        I've been in the same boat with LaCie drives conking out - it has never once turned out to be the PSU - it always without fail seems to be the interface inside the case that fails, probably due to lack of adequate cooling.

  6. Tannin

    A very useful task for one of these IS backup - all the PCs on your home or small office network, for example. Assuming half-decent backup software, performance isn't really an issue.

    And to back it up, well, the obvious device is another one the same. I'm sure Seagate won't mind if you buy two or three of them.

    25TB in one go is a very attractive proposition.Pencil me in as a prospective buyer. (OK, I'd rather just use a couple of 15TB internal SATA drives, but that's not something we will be able to buy any time soon.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      And to back it up, well, the obvious device is another one the same. I'm sure Seagate won't mind if you buy two or three of them.

      Oh dear. You have never heard of the concept of offsite backup then?

      1. Robert E A Harvey

        offsite?

        25TB? offsite? that's going to hurt the wallet.

    2. Tromos

      @Tannin

      25TB in one go loses some of its attractions when it comes at a $1000 premium over 5 lots of 5TB, presumably using exactly the same drives from the same manufacturer. How on earth can this be justified? The larger box can't cost 5 times as much, the larger PSU likewise. When you also factor in a single PSU or interface failure depriving you of access to all 25TB, it loses every last vestige of attraction for me at least.

    3. Nigel 11

      Depends what you mean by a "drive" and how much space you've got inside. Look up "SATA port multiplier", and how Backblaze make their 146Tb storage pods (mostly) out of commodity hardware.

  7. John H Woods Silver badge

    25TB at RAID5? ...

    Selecting this option should result in the BIOS displaying a dialog calling you a moron and phoning home to arrange for collection by the vendor.

    1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

      Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

      What's the problem with RAID5 here?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

        http://www.baarf.com/

        And thousands of other people like myself will give you many reasons why RAID5 is not cool (TM). But, go ahead and try it yourself. Don't forget to compare it to RAID types to see what kind of performance you are really getting and what kind risks you really run. Or you could just go with the literature and for out lots of money for this snake oil.

      2. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

        Great, downvoted for asking a question. All I wanted to know is why it was such a bad idea that using it makes you a moron. Mostly so I don't become a moron. Thanks anonymous regtard!

        1. SD2

          Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

          Read up on Unrecoverable Read Errors and RAID5.

          P.S.: I didn't downvote, just answering your question.

          Anyway, 25TB in RAID0 LOL That's a recipe for disaster.

          1. P. Lee

            Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

            RAID5?

            Stripe, mirror and have a hot spare.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

          Downvoted for whinging about downvotes. Don't let idiots affect you (which makes me an idiot, but I did it deliberately because I'm just an evil sod). Don't forget to downvote me.

          1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
            Pint

            Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

            Thanks for the answers/discussion.

            Downvoted for whinging about downvotes.

            You broke causality!

    2. phuzz Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

      RAID 5 *might* be a problem, but according to the article this box only does RAID 1, 0 and JBOD.

      So that's alright then.

      And could someone explain to me how you're supposed to do RAID 1 across an odd number of disks?

      1. John H Woods Silver badge

        Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

        Did I really misread this, or has the article been amended - I'm sure I read RAID5 in the list. RAID0 is suicidal, and RAID1 can't be used with an odd number of disks, unless you are hotsparing one I suppose, but that seems silly. I'd probably run it five disks in JBOD/RAIDZ3 although I think I'd be tempted to choose 2,3 or 4TB drives.

        1. Nigel 11

          RAID1, odd number of disks?

          You can do RAID1 on an odd number of disks just as long as your operating system or controller lets you split the disks into partitions (most simply, two equal-size partitions per disk). You then make a RAID0 of RAID1s, should you want to view the whole assemblage as a single volume.

          It's actually a slightly enhanced RAID10 that never(?) acquired its own number.

      2. Chris McFaul

        Re: 25TB at RAID5? ...

        if you look at their website, you can do raid 1 on an even number of disks, and have a hot spare, or have two raid 1s and a hot spare, or a two drive raid 1 and a three drive raid 0

        no one said you had to use all five drives in a single raid 1.....

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    With SMR, Seagate really needs to put say 128GB of cache on this drives, mainly if not entirely for writing. Then SMR wouldn't see a penalty unless you were trying to write more than say 128GB.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SMR

    Hhhmmm - word to the wise. SMR = horribly unreliable. So please run RAID6 in any config you use them for. Makes a 5-bay unit a bit less sexy, but double drive failures will not be uncommon. No, sorry, I can't quote my source. Expectations are they'll improve over time as the tech matures.

    1. P. Lee

      Re: SMR

      Coming to think of it, those kind of data volumes on the desktop are probably to do with bulk-increasing intermediate data (most likely video) processing. Perhaps a small graphics house where a designer/editor has a renderer which pulls video on his workstation, processes it and sends it back for the next stage of processing. It's likely to be a cache so that massive files don't have to traverse the network while being worked on, rather than functioning as a server.

      It that case, speed and basic safeguards are probably sufficient, with data being backed-up somewhere else.

      Having said that, I wouldn't like to do a time-machine restore!

  10. Natalie Gritpants

    thus reading should be noticeably faster than random writing

    I think you mean random writing will be noticeably slower than a glacier.

    SMR is the technique used by helical scan tape drives (DDS) to pack the tracks closer than the width of the write head. They also suffer from terrible performance if you don't keep them streaming while writing.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Set it up as JBOD and connect to a system that can use ZFS and RAID-Z2 the lot of them. Then buy another one for a remote site so that if the magic smoke comes out you've still got another copy.

  12. John Tserkezis

    No raid 5, no raid 6, no hot pluggable, mac-only interface, who would buy this? Sure I like to fun of fandroids, but they can't possibly be stupid enough to go for this overpriced, under-featured piece of crap.

    No really, pick any NAS array - any one will do and it'll have a bucketload more features than this, and at comparable prices. It'll have raid 5 & 6, hot pluggable, it can run some basic (and some not so basic) apps, it supports linux, windows and mac clients out of the box. And that's just for starters.

    No, really, why?

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      @John Tserkezis

      I almost agree. But not, for god's sake, RAID5! Disks are cheaper than chips, and data can be anything up to priceless. RAID5 should be forbidden for any arrays other than those using legacy-sized disks. Even RAID6 is verging on silly these days.

  13. CAPS LOCK

    Q: How many of these will be a primary, unbacked up, data store?

    A: Almost all.

  14. Chris McFaul

    maths fail?

    "The 25TB 5big Thunderbolt box can apparently hit a read speed of 785MB/sec, and write at 695MB/sec – but we notice that's using 4TB drives rather than the new 5TB disks, so your mileage may very well vary."

    Exactly how can it be using 4TB drives, if its got five drives and a total capacity of 25TB?

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    this should be enough for the selfies...

    ...but I think a second will be required for photographs of coffee.

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