Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate

with this I can store at least 3 modern "AAA" games

I wanna fuck this HDD. To have that much storage on one drive when I currently have ~30TB shared between 20 drives makes me very erect.

Average Lemmy user
- Ain't nothing about me is average except for the size of my cock.
nephew

Why did they make an enterprise grade drive SMR? I’m out.

Because they simply cannot do it otherwise.
- That’s fine…they don’t need to release it under their Exos line of enterprise drives. SMR don’t do well in raid arrays especially not highly utilized ones. They require idle time to cleanup and the rebuild times are horrendous.
For affordable set it and forget it cold storage, this is incredible. For anything actively being touched, yeah definitely a pass.

Seagate so how long before it fails?

In my experience, not all Seagates will fail but most HDD's that fail will be Seagates.
- Because Seagate sell the most drives and all drives fail?
About 3 hours.
It comes with three monkeys inside for redundancy:
At least it's not a WD POS

Hello! 👋

Well, largest this week. And

Yeah, $800 isn’t a small chunk of change, but for a hard drive of this capacity, it’s monumentally cheap.

Nah, a 24TB is $300 and some 20TB's are even lower $ per TB.

I bought 8TB for something like $300. 36TB seems quite attractive.
Depends on your use case. The linked drive according to seagate’s spec sheet is only rated for about ~6.5 power-on hours per day(2400 per year). So if just in your desktop for storage then sure. In an always (or mostly) on NAS then I’d find a different drive. It’ll work fine but expect higher failure rates for that use.
Omg I really have been out of the loop. I originally filled my 8 bay NAS with 6tb drives starting back in 2018. Once they would fill, i added another. 3 years ago, I finally ran out of space and started swapping out the 6tb for 10tb. Due to how it works, I needed to do 2 before I saw any additional space. I think i have 3 or 4 now, and the last one was 2 years ago. They did cost around $250 at the time, and I think i got 1 for just over $200. The fact that I can more than double that for only $300 is crazy news to me. Guess I am going to stop buying 10tb now. The only part that sucks is having to get 2 up front...
I paid $600+ for a 24 TB drive, tax free. I feel robbed. Although I'm glad not to shop at Newegg.
- Yes, fuck Newegg (and amazon too). I've been using B&H for disks and I have no complaints about them. They have the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB at $479 currently, but last week it was on sale for $419. (I only look at 5yr warranty disks.)
  I was not in a position to take advantage as I've already made my disk purchase this go around, so I'll wait for the next deep discount to hit if it is timely.
I got some 16TB drives recently for around $200 each, though they were refurbished. Usually a refurbished drive will save you 20-40%. Shipping can be a fortune though.
- Refurbished drives sound scary. Any data to point towards that not being a problem?

It will take about 36 hours to fill this drive at 270mb/s

That’s a long time to backup your giraffe porn collection.

How did you know about my giraffe porn?
What kind of degenerate do you think I am? That’s 36 hours to back up my walrus porn collection.
How you 'bout to call me out like that ?

That's a lot of porn.

And linux distros
- Honestly, when I first got into forums, I thought they were literally talking about Linux distros, because at the time, that's literally all I was seeding since that's what I was into.
- Just say it's full of porn, it's easier to explain
- I have around 150 distros seeding 🤣. I need to get those numbers up!
- Werd
You wouldn't download your mom.
- No, but I have downloaded yours.
You'd go broke. Of course it's all Linux, family archives and DNA test data, BTC blockchain, backed up FOSS projects, archives of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and OpenStreetMap, and of course - POVRay renders.

Do you need it? Probably not. Do you want it? Oh, yeah.

I feel seen

Yeah, but it's Seagate. I have worked in data centers, and Seagate drives had the most failures of all my drives and somehow is still in business. I'd say I was doing an RMA of 5-6 drives a month that were Seagate, and only 4-5 a year Western Digital.

Is that just observational, or did you keep track? Backblaze does track their failures, and publishes their data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2025/
- And they do have more Seagate failures than other brands, but that's because they have more Seagates than other brands. Seagate is generally pretty good value for the money.
I use all WD Golds for storage now but I have some Seagate barracudas from 2005 that still work. I don't use them anymore but the data is still there. I fire them up every so often to see. I know that's purely situational. I pretty much only buy WD now.
What models of Seagate drives?
I've been running x4 Seagate ST8000NC0002s 24/7 for almost 5 years, plus 2 more I added about 6 months ago and they've never given me any trouble.
To be fair, the only HDDs I've ever had that failed were two I dropped because I wasn't being careful enough.
I hear you. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a Seagate drive not fail on me.
My 1st thought was "but it's a Seagate" ...
Every drive I've had fail has been a Seagate. I replace them out of habit at this point.
Out of the roughly 20 drives I've bought over the last decade or so, the only two failures were Seagate and they only made up five of the drives purchased. The other 15 are WD and all have been great (knock on wood).
- I've had the same experience. The first HDD that failed on me was a Barricuda 7200.11 with the infamous firmware self-brick issue, and a second 7200.11 that just died slowly from bad sectors.
  From then on I only bought WD, I have a Caviar Black 1TB from oh, 2009-ish that's still in service, though it's finally starting to concern me with it's higher temperature readings, probably the motor bearings going. After that I've got a few of the WD RE4 1TBs still running like new, and 6 various other WD Gold series drives, all running happily.
  The only WD failure I've had was from improper shipping, when TigerDirect (rip) didn't pack the drive correctly, and the carrier football tossed the thing at my porch, it was losing sectors as soon as it first started, but the RMA drive that replaced it is still running in a server fine.

Defragmenting...

Man, I used to LOVE defragmenting drives. I felt like I was actually doing something productive, and I just got to sit back and watch the magic happen.
Now I know better.
I've never had to defragment the ext4 drives in my server. Ext4 is fairly resistant to fragmentation.

Imagine having that...then dropping it...

Summon Linus

I think if I needed to store 36TB of data, I would rather get several smaller disks.

But if you hate your data there's no quicker way to lose it than a single 36TB Seagate drive.
- That's why Seagate is the last word in the title.
But if you need a Petabyte of data you'll appreciate this existing
I don't think the target audience of this drive is buying one. They are trying to optimize for density and are probably buying in bulk rather than paying the $800 price tag.
That's roughly what I have now, and I only have about 200gb left, so I kind of wish I could get a little more right now. This is across 7 drives. I really hope storing data becomes faster and cheaper in the future because as it keeps growing over the past few decades, it gets longer and longer to replace and move this much data...
- Well, it does cost less and less every year. I bought two 8TB drives for $300 each or so, and today a 24TB drive is about that much.
Multiple drives in a RAID.

So how much data would I lose when it dies?

Edit for those who didn’t read the smirk, yes 36Tb, as a way to point out what someone answered below: if you’re using a drive this big have your data recovery procedures on fleek.

about 36TB?
- Nooooooooo not all my pr0ns!!
Assuming you aren't striping, up to 36 TB. If you follow even halfway decent practices with basically any kind of RAID other than 0, hopefully 0 Bytes.
The main worry with stuff like this is that it potentially takes a while to recover from a failed drive even if you catch it in time (alert systems are your friend). And 36 TB is a LOT of data to work through and recover which means a LOT of stress on the remaining drives for a few days.
- aren’t striping
  I think you mean "are striping".
  But even with striping you have backups right? Local redundancy is for availability, not durability.

You need a week to fill the hecking disk. flips server rack up in disappointment

But this would be great for tape-like storage where you only need to write once and maybe query little individual bits of it. Slap RAID on top of it and you've got yourself your own nation state intelligence service datastore.

Not really https://www.techradar.com/pro/worlds-largest-ssd-is-on-sale-for-almost-usd12-400-and-yes-it-is-quite-a-bargain-if-you-can-afford-it-of-course

SSD ≠ HDD
- Never change pedantic Internet, never change!

Hello