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Seagate 8-10 Tb archival hdds – an alternative to LTO or XDCAM?
If I’m not mistaken, are the Seagate 8 Tb archival 3.5″ hdds are designed to compete with LTO tape and XDCAM disc archival media? They advertised it that way but still skeptical since they are still hard drives and are prone to failure at any time.
I have many of them for the ever growing media asset as a near-line interim storage solution over RAID. They are working fine after 1.5 years. But don’t know if it’ll spin up after 3-6 years when it’s in cold storage. Still archiving to LTO-6 on a weekly basis. If the archival hdd is more reliable than standard hdd, this may be a good short-term interm holding where the data will change in a year or less.
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2 Replies
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The main thing that makes these “Archive” drives is that they’ve reduced the rotational speed (and a few other less pronounced diffs), sacrificing performance for higher levels of reliability. It is interesting that they don’t specify the RPM ratings in the specs any longer, but that was discussed when these drives were first introduced.
The result is an 800Khr MTBF rating with vary low vibration and and very low (relatively) power consumption.
However, the tech is too new to provide an unpowered shelf life expectancy, and THAT is one very important thing to keep in mind for long term archival strategies.
I’f you;re building a huge storage environment and power needs are built into the budget modeling, then these drive could provide a very good mid-range solution. However, unless you’re a large scale operation, keeping large numbers of disks powered for indefinite periods may not be fiscally possible.
LTO will always be the most cost-effective solution for long term archival with no power requirements and ease of storage (~1.8¢ / GB for LTO-6) with Sony’s ODA or other optical media (Blu ray, etc) being better alternatives than disk.
HTH,
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
The electricity cost for me sky rocked over the years for keeping these drives online. The power company’s tier price structure gets really expensive. I already implemented small to medium scale solar panels, 12v AGM batteries and running the hdds and computers all at 12vdc. It’s a waste not to capture the sun’s natural energy during day time hours.
Looks like LTO-6 is still the most economically viable medium for long-term archival. LTO-7 will be next in line several years from now.
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