
Western Digital's 16TB and 18TB drives: EAMR HDDs enter the retail channel - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15903/western-digitals-16tb-and-18tb-gold-drives-eamr-hdds-enter-the-retail-channel
======
jacquesm
My personal recipe for buying drives: wait until Backblaze has run them for a
year and then pick the winner. That gives a pretty safe strategy. I also buy
them in small lots to avoid having the same firmware and number of hours on
them, and order 3 (cold) spares so I don't have to wait for an order to come
in in case a drive dies. Call me paranoid.

~~~
jedberg
My recipe is "Go to Costco, buy the biggest backup drive they have, shuck the
drive and put it in the NAS. When one dies, repeat."

I end up with a great variety of drives and firmwares that way.

I'm still waiting on that 2TB drive to die so I can put in a bigger drive and
expand the array!

~~~
ed25519FUUU
I’ve heard that many external drives can’t be shucked any longer, as they
don’t include proper sata connectors. Have you encountered that?

~~~
jedberg
I have not yet run into that. So far they've all been fine.

The shucking has gotten harder for sure, I need a lot more force to pry them
apart now. So much that I worry about damaging the drive.

~~~
whoopdedo
Someone knows the trick. Fun anecdote: I bought a 8TB Seagate from a local
retailer at discount because it was an open-box return. It looked fine until I
plugged it in and the drive showed up without the usual setup.exe and the
drive was partitioned oddly. Okay, go to resize the drive and only see 500GB
of space. Defective drive? Maybe that's why it was returned. Then I pull up
the SMART details. The drive reported over 10,000 hours on it, a history of
read errors, and was manufactured by Toshiba.

I looked over every millimeter of that exterior and couldn't see the slightest
mark of a pry tool or even a sticker being out of place. I'm impressed if they
were able to open the case and reseal it that cleanly. Although I also
theorize that someone is stealing empty cases from the factory that they
assemble with "recycled" drives. Either way, it was a professional crime. Not
like the lazy fraudsters who just put a literal brick in the box and hope the
store employee doesn't look inside.

End of story, I got my money back without problem since the store manager
knows me.

~~~
exikyut
Did you tell them what you'd discovered? (If yes, what did they think of the
situation? (Did you get any sense where the drive came from?))

Idle thought experiment: maybe the enclosures were cloned. (ie, the originals
were 3D scanned + cleaned up + etc.) I wonder how much that would cost end-to-
end.

~~~
whoopdedo
Like I said, I'm friends with the manager and he was the one who told me about
nearby stores being hit with a box-of-bricks return.

Looking at the authentic model I eventually got, it's in three parts with the
outer shell a glossy black and and insert that's slate colored with vent
panels for passive cooling. And a Seagate logo inset that doubles as an
power/activity light. The bottom has small rubber feet and the sticker with
model and serial number on it. They didn't have another drive in stock to do a
side-by-side comparison with, but I couldn't notice anything that would have
tipped me off it was a fake. Even tried prying at the seams to see if it came
apart any easier and it was held just as firmly as the real thing.

~~~
jacquesm
Fraud is like life: if there is a way to get free money someone will use it.

------
sillysaurusx
In my experience, buying the “latest and greatest” hard drive is a recipe for
disaster. They should put a sticker on the box that says “warning: will likely
die within one year.”

Maybe I’ve just gotten unlucky over the years though. Can anyone else
confirm/deny that the latest hard drives tend to be unreliable?

(Cue sampling bias...)

EDIT: The article is about an enterprise HD, but I meant to ask a general
question about consumer-grade drives. Presumably enterprise drives are much
more reliable, because reasons. (It would be fascinating to know those reasons
though!)

~~~
hyperman1
One reason: If you send a flush command to a consumer grade hd, it returns
before the flush is done. This makes it look nicer on older HD benchmarking
software. Enterprise hds return when the flush is complete, so databases
acknowledge a commit only when it was actually succesfull.

~~~
james412
I think your wires may be a little crossed. This is unlikely to have ever been
true for magnetic drives, but there is a quite significant grain of truth (no
pun intended) to it for SSD.

Consumer SSDs may indeed return an early indication that a flush is complete,
but whether they are lying depends heavily on your notion of persistence:

\- the SSD may return done once the data is buffered in RAM

\- or once it has reached a temporary log

\- or once it has reached a 'permanent' location on flash

\- or once it has recorded the mapping of data<->location to some separate
directory

\- or once it has updated some separate root pointer pointing to the latest
version of the log/mapping structures in some separate special storage

I don't believe any SSD waits until the last step above before returning done.
Separately, the SSD:

\- may have no electrical power outage protection whatsoever

\- may have supercapacitors fitted

\- the supercap may guarantee full durability of every acknowledged flush

\- or only guarantee atomicity up to some prior acknowledged flush

\- or only guarantee that the drive has /some/ data on it in /some/ state on
the next reboot

SSDs are insanely complex

~~~
jrockway
It is interesting that to remain competitive in benchmarks, SSD vendors have
to sell you an incredibly complicated software system alongside their flash
chips soldered to a circuit board. They can't fix your filesystem, because you
won't switch (and why pay them when your OS comes with one for free). They
can't fix your database, because you won't switch (you already pay Amazon a
million dollars a month for it). So they have to implement all the complicated
parts of a database or filesystem, then try to understand the stream of events
that real databases and real filesystems send it, and then restructure them to
win the benchmark. All of this with no source code and probably no real test
suite, and it all ends up being slower than a database that could just write
to the flash chips directly.

I am also "excited" when I think about how the SSD shards blocks across flash
chips and adds erasure codes, then people put the SSDs in RAID to shard blocks
across SSDs and add erasure codes, then people put a filesystem on top of that
that shards blocks across arrays and adds erasure codes, then put an
application on top of that that writes to 3 replicas and writes erasure codes
to 2 more. Now your "hello world" text file uses 8 gigabytes of storage, but
at least you only lose it if there's one bug in the SSD controller, your RAID
software, your filesystem, or your application. Or a tornado hits the SSD. Oh
well.

HN often contains articles like "abstraction is bad", but even their contrived
examples aren't this scary. I'm still pleasantly surprised when I log into my
computer in the morning and still have a .bashrc.

------
sphix0r
Kinda in the phase of buying disks for a $500-ish~ raid 5 NAS setup. The whole
recent SMR debacle keeps me a bit careful on buying those disks before
extensively checking out all the specs.

Will news like this cause retail price drops anytime soon? Other advice is
welcome too :-)

~~~
dannyw
No. The HDD market is a duopoly.

You’ll find binned versions of these drives in 3 months sold at 40% off in
EasyStores and Elements though.

It’s how they get rid of parts that work fine but don’t pass the specs for
these enterprise drives.

------
mleonhard
The drives are filled with helium. What happens when the helium leaks? I
assume the drives will slow down or fail instantly.

iPhones use MEMS-based clocks that fail when exposed to helium. Are any
servers, NAS devices, or laptops also susceptible to disruption from helium?

~~~
himinlomax
As cptskippy said, the helium is at atmospheric pressure, so a leak would not
fail catastrophically. Helium would more or less slowly diffuse. If the leak
is small enough, helium could get out but larger molecules would have a harder
time. Thus the pressure inside the enclosure would get slightly lower than
atmosphere and leaking would slow down.

The iPhone MEMS failed when a rather large amount of pressurized, cryogenic
helium was leaked during an MRI machine servicing. The quantity of
unpressurized helium in a tiny HDD enclosure is minuscule, and thus the slow
diffusion is unlikely to register above background levels, even at very close
range.

------
jl6
What is this thing Anandtech have started doing with the back button, somehow
inserting an extra ad page in between getting back to HN?

~~~
manigandham
They’re called bounce or exit ads. Meant to catch people from leaving too
quickly, but extremely annoying and filled with clickbait crap and articles
from 8 years ago.

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LAMike
I wonder how many of these hard drives are needed to completely scan the
internet every month and create a "time capsule" drive that you can revisit
and browse ten years later like a yearbook

~~~
soulofmischief
_The proposed project entails constructing a global-scale shared supercomputer
capable of hosting the entire Internet on one platform as an application_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Kittyhawk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Kittyhawk)

~~~
eloff
So, basically where AWS is headed.

I joke, but there's a grain truth there.

~~~
soulofmischief
It's true, though. IBM misunderstood the implications of cloud computing at
the time.

They clearly realized their mistake:

 _In 2013 researchers used the Kittyhawk project to demonstrate a novel high-
performance cloud computing platform by merging a cloud computing environment
with a supercomputer._

------
dirtyid
I remember reading a comment here recently that a few terabytes is enough to
store personal history of all web browsing for life (minus media). Trying to
recall if that's just an observation or an actual application somewhere. So
much content is disappearing, starting to seem like prudent practice.

~~~
ysleepy
I've got almost three years of web history with full text locally in
compressed 10gib, if you go for images and video it will get bigger though.

~~~
dirtyid
How are you doing it? A few terabytes is a small price to pay for all the
esoteric personal interests lost over time.

------
iso8859-1
I remember people complaining about the quality of WD drives. These ones claim
a MTBF of 2.5M hours, workload rating of 550TB/yr, and a 5 year warranty. Can
it be trusted?

~~~
dannyw
Anecdotally, as well as supported by Backblaze, Seagate drives fail more often
than WD.

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-
stats-q1...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-
stats-q1-2020/)

I’ve had one Seagate drive fail, and another that would actually return
corrupt data even immediately after being written. Thankfully I have ZFS which
is how I noticed it in the first place.

I’ve owned more WD drives for longer and I’ve actually never had one fail; at
least before they store so little I graveyard them.

~~~
lukevp
Same experience here, only seagate drive failures over the past 15 years of
owning maybe 30 drives total. WD has never failed. Obviously anecdotal.

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rs23296008n1
More is better. Those RAIDs are never satisfied.

Its a pity we don't have anything remotely similar for optical storage.
Physical limits and all that.

~~~
fnord123
More is not better. Repair time gets slower as the ratio for transport speed
to capacity gets lower and lower. This means that more file pieces can be lost
during the longer repair window resulting in possible data loss.

Keep in mind that when people calculate lifetimes and repairs they usually
assume that drive failures are independent. Given that they are installed at
the same time and usually from the same manufacturer and bought at the same
time (e.g. same batch), it's not great to assume that all these things are
independent.

~~~
jnwatson
In my 50 TB RAID 5, it has never finished a monthly scheduled raid sync
because it takes roughly a week to complete, and performance during the sync
is so bad that it is unusable.

------
truth_seeker
Related:

Continuing Hard Disk Drive Innovation from Western Digital -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPoS94iVC0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPoS94iVC0c)

------
SamuelAdams
Would these be overkill for a personal NAS at home?

~~~
dragontamer
The important bit for NAS is redundancy. If you can afford 2+ of these drives
to run in RAID1, RAID5 or RAID10, then go on ahead.

For me personally, my 5TB x 2 RAID1 (ZFS really, so mirrored) configuration
with 5TB usable is enough for my personal uses. If I need more space, I'll
configure my ZFS with +2 HDDs for another pair worth of space+redundancy.

~~~
duncanawoods
If you can only afford 2 then I decided against RAID/ZFS. The issue is that
"raid is not backup" and I fear user error as much as hardware error so
instant mirroring would be just as bad.

For my home bulk storage, I just have two normal 14TB drives and a nightly
cron to rsync archive (new files only) from the primary to the backup. This
gives me enough of a backup for both user error and hardware failure. It
doesn't protect against a house-fire but that is ok.

I should maybe have considered BackBlaze but I can't believe they are going to
last long if they continue offer flat-rates for multi-TB attached NAS.

~~~
dragontamer
> If you can only afford 2 then I decided against RAID/ZFS. The issue is that
> "raid is not backup" and I fear user error as much as hardware error so
> instant mirroring would be just as bad.

Mirroring is for preventing hardware failures.

ZFS Snapshots are one protection against user-error. Backups are another.

~~~
duncanawoods
I was tempted by ZFS but it just felt like too much trust to put in something
complex as a novice. Just reading about it led me to too many data-loss
stories. I have had enough corporate IT teams tell me their RAID went down
with total data-loss and their tape drive recovery isn't working to find a lot
of virtue in "dumb-as-hell" infrastructure design!

~~~
dragontamer
Spend an hour setting up a ZFS on old hardware. Play with snapshots and
manually delete test documents until you are confident on how the feature
works.

~~~
npongratz
Highly recommended! One can even learn about, and experiment with, ZFS using
files sitting on a disk by setting the files up as loopback devices. For
example:

[https://dev.to/nikvdp/https-nikvdp-com-post-zfs-
part1-31fj](https://dev.to/nikvdp/https-nikvdp-com-post-zfs-part1-31fj)

~~~
dragontamer
Hmm... that's a good idea.

It may be simpler to play with ZFS on VMs. The VM-disks will be small and
inefficient, but "good enough" to prove whether or not the system works.

Not that I've tried any of this before. I happened to have an old computer
lying around with ~4 small hard drives that I messed with to learn the ins-
and-outs of ZFS the first time I used it. (Shuck hard drives, pull them out of
laptops, etc. etc. Its not really that hard to get 4 hard drives to play with,
especially if you ask your friends for ancient laptops with 200gb drives or
something)

------
nwallin
The performance specified in the article lists only its sustained transfer
rate, with no mention of sustained read speed, sustained write speed, random
4k reads, random 4k writes, or any other useful performance metric. The caches
are freaking enormous- 512MB.

Am I to understand that these are SMB disks? The article does not mention SMB
at all, which is surprising to me given WD's recent history.

~~~
wmf
Hard drives are hard drives. They can do around 100 IOPS.

These are CMR not SMR as the article mentions.

~~~
nwallin
...Ah. I see now why the article didn't mention SMB. Because that's not a
thing. Oops.

------
smart_jackal
Whoever has the need to store that much data?

~~~
Hamuko
Can't think of a single company that might want to store 18 TB on a single
disk? These are enterprise-class products after all.

~~~
folkhack
Working on a security solution right now and I can 100% tell you I can think
of _multiple_ companies that need an on-site 18TB datastore, even "small"
companies. Also have worked with _tons_ of creative agencies. Video, photo,
etc all can take huge amounts of disk to safely store.

Sorry to disagree but your assumption that these are "enterprise-class"
products is incorrect. There are lots of business needs that require large on-
prem storage solutions without being an "enterprise-type" business.

Edit: downvotes? Really? I'd really love to see someone make a case against
this.

~~~
Hamuko
> _Sorry to disagree but your assumption that these are "enterprise-class"
> products is incorrect._

Well, it literally says Enterprise Class SATA HDD on the drives.

