Seagate starts shipping 8TB hard drives, with 10TB and HAMR on the horizon

[Cuffy]

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/186624-seagate-starts-shipping-8tb-hard-drives-with-10tb-and-hamr-on-the-horizon?

At last.....
Wait up people! Don't jump and order an 8tb drive as soon as Newegg lists it on the front page.
I read someplace on the internet that (and if it's on the internet it must be true) most of our current machines using BIOS and MBR will not boot to a drive over 2tb.

Going to have to get familiar with GPT and UEFI on 64 bit machines before you put your memnoirs on a drive large enough to hold them.

[Cuffy]

http://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/

Chris Hoffman at How-to-Geek is coming out with some answers on this topic.
Chris is a good head (except he's the guy using "lazyload"... not so good)
and I'm sure everything you need to know will come out of HTG as the technology progresses.

[TaoPhoenix]

This is rapidly becoming more tech than most people need, and now it's becoming things like ugly "end of life" policies that are becoming the limiting factor.

Not counting slight hardware age concerns, I completely nailed my forward-looking project machine from 2006, and haven't seen any real use need to upgrade except a couple of obscure one-day experiments.

My system has twin 1-TB drives and I barely have touched the second one.

[Cuffy]

"Build it and they will come"
We can't wait for new toys and the sad part.....
we're probably throwing away more store space than we're using!
Look at the numbers of drives returned to manufacturers that are perfectly good. Bad format? whatever, and they go back.

When DBAN hit the street several years ago and appraised of the rate of returns on good drives, I started a little experiment.
I loaded DBAN on an old test machine and scrambled around here rounding up "pulled" drives. I found 21 drives, not including a couple of old MFM drives which I didn't clean, ratholed under the bench, in the bookshelf, out in the garage, etc., and "wiped" all 21. Of that 21, 19 were still serviceable. I posted my results and other guys had experienced the same results. I'm sweating a drive being almost full and I've got stacks of storage space.!

Technology bites again though, because the older drives are all IDE and motherboards with IDE headers are scarce.
Woe is me...... nobody loves me.... and my hands are cold.........
will my troubles never end?
YMMV

[Deozaan]

I have a 128GB (or so) SSD for my OS drive and a 2TB drive for everything else. I keep pretty much everything and have never really felt the need for more space like I did in the old days of having a 256MB drive with DOS/Windows 3.11 (or was it 95?).

One time I saw in My Computer the color of the free space was red and I "only" had 30GB left, so I uninstalled a bunch of games from my Steam library that I haven't played in forever and now I'm sitting pretty again at about 700GB free with lots more I could delete to make room if I needed to. I think 2TB will suit me fine for quite some time.

Then again, I'm not into photography so I don't have a bunch of RAW images to store. And I don't rip/download movies for watching/streaming to my TV, so I guess people who do those things would probably appreciate the 8TB and 10TB drives.

[40hz]

Don’t let Superboy find out about this. He'll be among the first to get one. And knowing him, he'll probably order a dozen to start. Just because.

[ewemoa]

While I don't feel the need for more space on a single drive, what I wouldn't mind having is better redundancy across multiple storage units without a lot of hassle (e.g. configuration, maintenance, compatibility limitations, etc.).

I had hopes for the like of Drobo -- anyone used one of their products lately?

[Cuffy]

I'm afraid that's the prevailing attitude in some circles! There's no such thing as too many hard drives nor too much beer.
We all have our priorities.
We invited the local golf pro to the company picnic one year. The invitation said, it's potluck, bring something that you would ordinarily take to a picnic.
He shows up at the picnic with a quart of Old Bushmill's, and when the young lady manning the table where incomers were placing their contribution to the feast remarked "the invitation said "something you usually take to a picnic" his retort was "Old Bushmill's is the ONLY thing I take to a picnic!
We all have our priorities, can't fault us for that.  

[superboyac]

Don’t let Superboy find out about this. He'll be among the first to get one. And knowing him, he'll probably order a dozen to start. Just because.

ok it's true.  Although they're getting so big now, I'm running out of ways to fill them up.  I'll figure something out.  This 4k fad is promising to be a terabyte-friendly technology, maybe coupled with some SDI connected video feeds.  I'm on it...

[Cuffy]

I don't generate much that contributes to society or the world economy, that's worth saving??
I use Macrium Reflect once in awhile and if a crash occurs between images, meh, no big deal!
I know..... bad attitude, but I think I've only ever had to reinstall from an image once and that was because I was doing something stupid and fully expected to crash and burn.
If you're gainfully employed or contributing to mankind I fully understand your concern but I've never heard of Drobo, and really can't offer any sage advice for other solutions.  

[Edvard]

ok it's true.  Although they're getting so big now, I'm running out of ways to fill them up.

I've been thinking about this for a while as well.  I really can't imagine buying a disk that I know I will never use all of.  "Just in case" isn't the greatest argument in the world, and I'll probably troll around eBay and back-stock resellers for lower-capacity hard drives for a while to come.  Might there be a market for lower-cost/smaller-capacity drives (like 1-2 TB after 10 TB drives are the norm) from people who just don't use that much?  

OR...

As I posted about here, your unused space would be perfect for helping maintain a decentralized internet.  Now that I would buy a new drive for...  

[Innuendo]

Some random thoughts:

Yes, for any drive over 2TB you are going to need a 64-bit OS with support for GPT in both the OS and the motherboard. UEFI is not a hard requirement, though. My Gigabyte motherboard shoe-horned GPT support for drives over 2TB into its Award BIOS. I'm running two 3TB drives along with an 128GB SSD happily.

With Seagate's latest marketing they've taken a really scummy turn in the way they are representing their products. It'll be a long time before I buy one of their products again.

Sadly, other than Toshiba (whose drives have major QC issues), the only other hard drive manufacturers are Seagate and Western Digital. Every other company has been swallowed up by those two.

As for Drobo, when last I checked into them, they were the Apple of the NAS world. You'll get a nice streamlined interface with only the basic options while being afforded the privilege of paying a premium for it.

[Renegade]

10 TB drives would be very sweet for my NAS, but I don't think my hardware/OS will support it. Officially, 2 TB is supported IIRC. (FreeNAS)

But it would give me soooooooooooo much space... I'm actually starting to run out, and will need to delete some stuff. The question now is can I hold off long enough?

Gear lust is in overdrive now!