8TB and no helium

[LunarMist]

All this talk of multi-terabyte systems and I have trouble filling 500GB. What do you guys run in your personal systems? Daily drivers, that is, not home servers or whatever. ddrueding and Santilli are the only two people I can think of off the top of my head who detail system specs in their signatures other than myself.

I create content, primarily still photos. I'm not sure how the hardware list is transferred to the signature. Perhaps it doesn't work because I use the old Windows 7.

The main machine is a 5930K at 4.5GB with 64GB RAM. There are three SSDs from 256-1TB including the Samsung M.2 XP941, Crucial M550, Samsung 830, 9 HDDs and an optical drive interballs, plus 6 external drives. The HDDs are a mixture of 6TB and 4TB.

 

[Chewy509]

What do you guys run in your personal systems? Daily drivers, that is, not home servers or whatever.

User data for me is approx 800GB; documents, home movies, photos, source code, application assets, etc.

Home 1 (mine): Intel i7-4790, 32GB RAM (4x 8GB DDR3-1600), ASRock H97M-PRO4, eVGA GTX760 OC 2GB, Intel 530 240GB SSD, Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm HDD, LG BluRay-RW, Hyper212 Evo HSF, SilverStone TJ-08E case, SeaSonic G550W PSU, 2x 20" LCDs, Arch Linux
Home 2 (wife): HP m6 Envy, i5-3230M, 16GB RAM, 750GB HDD, AMD Radeon gfx, DVD-RW, Win7 Pro.
Home 3 (son): HP 15-p001au, AMD A4-6210, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, DVD-RW, Win7 Pro.
Home 4: Asus 1015 netbook - Atom N570, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Win7 Pro.

All machines backup to my desktop (the internal 2TB HDD is treated as near-line storage for archives/backups), and I backup to another 2TB external. The 2TB external is about 75% full...

 

[LunarMist]

I've discussed my storage setup before. I'm sure you've read those posts.

For sed's benefit: My main desktop is a 32GB Haswell-E @ 4GHz (12 threads) with a GT 970, a 500GB Plextor M.2 and 1TB Corsair SSD + a few 3 or 4TB drives. My main file server has 24 4TB and 18 3TB drives at the moment (one array is offline) + 4 240GB SSDs for storage tiering. It's a 24-thread 3GHz Westmere Xeon machine. I also have a 48GB i7 980X hosting warm copies of important systems I administer, a 16GB i3 NUC in my living room, a Surface Pro 2, a 17" 2011 MBP, a Thinkpad T420, a Dell Venue 8 and some other random systems (e.g. the Pentium 4 I built to play games in Windows 98, my Thinkpad collection) and tablets.

Sure, but I did not do the math. Will you ever have large enough drives to reduce the total number or is the data growth overwhelming the drive capacity growth?

 

[Stereodude]

Home 4: Asus 1015 netbook - Atom N570, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Win7 Pro.

That has to be painful. I guess that's why no one uses it.

WinXP on an Atom was bad enough.

 

[Chewy509]

That has to be painful. I guess that's why no one uses it.

WinXP on an Atom was bad enough.

It's okay for Youtube, TuxPaint and GCompris which is what my 5yr old daughter does with it... (The 2GB RAM helps, as Win7 will use 700MB for itself).

I've still got another Asus 1001HA netbook kicking around (Atom N270, 2GB RAM) running Arch Linux, and besides the slow startup is still very usable for light web browsing even running GNOME3 as the desktop. (The Atom N270 is a single core w/HT, 32bit only, the Atom N570 is dual core w/HT and 64bit, both are the same clock speed, but the N570 has a slightly better GPU setup).

 

[Mercutio]

Sure, but I did not do the math. Will you ever have large enough drives to reduce the total number or is the data growth overwhelming the drive capacity growth?

I have enough drives for at least two full copies of my data set plus spares and parity snapshops. I'm probably fine on that front for at least two years. I try to replace an array at a time to give the library room to grow. I'm kind of stuck at the moment as far as with what to replace the 3TB drives that are coming to the end of their life cycle. Excess drives get used for storage in off-premises machines.

 

[Bozo]

My system is so old, I don't remember what's in it. Or maybe it's my age. :-D

 

[Mercutio]

Bozo is a wise man with better things to do with his cash.

 

[snowhiker]

Doh!

 

[snowhiker]

Bozo is a wise man with better things to do with his cash.

/thread

 

[sedrosken]

Well, honestly, now I just feel inadequate. ;-)

I completely understand how that kind of data just piles up for you guys, but on my own with no setup files to worry about (seriously, I've got about 130GB of setup files sitting on the NAS) I have serious issues filling up 250GB. My videos folder (all downloads from Youtube, or de-DRMed episodes of various cartoons from back when I had iGoons) stacks up to about 34GB, but then, this is all at 360p MP4 quality. I've got almost two hundred of them. My pictures folder is pretty much non-existent, housing wallpapers and some things I found funny enough to save. I don't have an exorbitant amount of music, only about 200 tracks total, and it's all in MP3 rather than AAC, WMA, OGG/WAV (shudder) or FLAC. Most of what fills my drive is game installations (that I rarely if ever play now, mostly for lack of time, but still feel compelled to install for some reason). Steam games in particular are a big space hog. I only have a few free-to-play games from it on there, but together they easily make up 55-60GB.

Also, snowhiker, sorry for snubbing you. As I said, it was off the top of my head.

 

[snowhiker]

Well, honestly, now I just feel inadequate. ;-)

Absolutely no reason to feel inadequate as far as your computer, their specs or the total amount of storage you have.

Most everybody here is 15 to 40+ years older than you so we have a bit of a head start. When I was your age storage was $25-$40 dollars/megabyte. The cost per byte for HDD storage is 6 orders of magnitude cheaper today than the mid 1980s. So I guess you do have it a bit easier.

Your time will come. When were old geezers in wheelchairs filling our diapers you'll have 48 zettabytes of storage in your phone and wonder how anybody got by with "only" 48 TB of storage.

Also, snowhiker, sorry for snubbing you. As I said, it was off the top of my head.

LOL. No worries.

 

[Mercutio]

The main machine is a 5930K at 4.5GB with 64GB RAM. There are three SSDs from 256-1TB including the Samsung M.2 XP941, Crucial M550, Samsung 830, 9 HDDs and an optical drive interballs, plus 6 external drives. The HDDs are a mixture of 6TB and 4TB.

Lunar, what RAM are you using to stay stable at 4.5GHz with 64GB installed? I can stay stable at 4.5GHz with 2x8GB Crucial 2133 sticks, but the minute I put the other two back in, I need to be back at 3.8GHz or else it's a 50/50 chance that my rig won't even boot. Are you just overvolting the crap out of your RAM or something?

 

[LunarMist]

Lunar, what RAM are you using to stay stable at 4.5GHz with 64GB installed? I can stay stable at 4.5GHz with 2x8GB Crucial 2133 sticks, but the minute I put the other two back in, I need to be back at 3.8GHz or else it's a 50/50 chance that my rig won't even boot. Are you just overvolting the crap out of your RAM or something?

The RAM is Sporty Crucial Ballistix 2400. I don't recall the memory settings, but they are only a little over the base voltages if that. The CPU is a bit higher voltage. I would not claim that the computer is perfectly stable at 100% CPU all day; it would be too hot for good longevity. It does the burning test for 30 minutes, which is more load than it ever sees in real life and never crashes on three simultaneous conversion jobs or anything. I did not see any difference between 32GB and 64GB. Could your board or RAM be defective?

 

[Mercutio]

I tend to be conservative with overvolting since I want it to be as quiet as possible. Oddly enough, if my machine boots at high OC settings, it's fine seemingly no matter what I throw at it (mostly lots and lots of Handbrake). I haven't had it bluescreen even once. It's just that the board won't pass control to the OS for reasons I don't fully understand.
You are definitely using faster RAM than I am. I'm sure that does help.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm kind of stuck at the moment as far as with what to replace the 3TB drives that are coming to the end of their life cycle.

I just deshelled and installed 6x 5TB Seagate drives in my file server. They're in a double-parity array, but I have concerns about how well they'll work in an array since I'm almost positive they're 5900rpm units. If they don't work, they'll get turned back in to externals. 5TB is big enough for pretty much anything and they were still $30 cheaper than any 4TB internal drive.

 

[LunarMist]

I just deshelled and installed 6x 5TB Seagate drives in my file server. They're in a double-parity array, but I have concerns about how well they'll work in an array since I'm almost positive they're 5900rpm units. If they don't work, they'll get turned back in to externals. 5TB is big enough for pretty much anything and they were still $30 cheaper than any 4TB internal drive.

How much effort is there to disembowel the drives? The old Seagates were just awful with the pentagonal tamper resistance.

 

[Mercutio]

I used a small flathead screwdriver and a couple pry tools. It took about two minutes per drive and cost a few of the plastic tabs. The only screws were used to stabilize the drive to rubber grommets, not hold anything down.

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks. Did you ever get the 8TB archival drives?

 

[timwhit]

I would like to buy a couple of these when the price is down to a normal level. I thought they were supposed to retail for $260?

 

[Mercutio]

Thanks. Did you ever get the 8TB archival drives?

Like timwhit, I'm waiting for prices to return to the realm of reason. I got a good enough deal on the 5TB units to pull the trigger on those instead.

 

[LunarMist]

3x5TB is almost 2x8TB.

 

[Handruin]

How much effort is there to disembowel the drives? The old Seagates were just awful with the pentagonal tamper resistance.

I used a small flathead screwdriver and a couple pry tools. It took about two minutes per drive and cost a few of the plastic tabs. The only screws were used to stabilize the drive to rubber grommets, not hold anything down.

I know this is slightly off topic, but for dealing with all kinds of screws in various PC and electronic components I picked up this TEKTON 2841 Everybit and Electronic Repair Screwdriver Bit Set, 135-Piece and it has been great. It has all the various bits one might need for managing your stuff and is reasonably priced. I also got a couple of the Titan 11061 Mini Magnetic Parts Tray for keeping parts from rolling away.

 

[Stereodude]

I also got a couple of the Titan 11061 Mini Magnetic Parts Tray for keeping parts from rolling away.

Works great for holding floppy disks too!!!

 

[LunarMist]

Why? Are floppy disks rolling away?

 

[snowhiker]

Works great for holding floppy disks too!!!

Why? Are floppy disks rolling away?

LOL. Both of you.

 

[LunarMist]

What about the Bernoulli disks? :rofl:

 

[Mercutio]

I got a good enough deal on the 5TB units to pull the trigger on those instead.

The 5TB drives don't seem to drop out of arrays the way SOME drives do, but alone or in groups, they have a very odd behavior where they'll write at full speed for a while (150MB/sec for a single drive) then slow down to something more like 40MB/sec for sustained writes that last more than perhaps 10 minutes. It takes about twice as long to fill the 5TB Seagate drives as it would to fill a single 4TB Ultrastar.

 

[snowhiker]

^^^ Some type of goofy power saving mode perhaps?

 

[Mercutio]

Could be. I suppose it's only a serious problem if you're expecting high write performance. I wouldn't want to write large backups to one, for example.

 

[LunarMist]

The 5TB drives don't seem to drop out of arrays the way SOME drives do, but alone or in groups, they have a very odd behavior where they'll write at full speed for a while (150MB/sec for a single drive) then slow down to something more like 40MB/sec for sustained writes that last more than perhaps 10 minutes. It takes about twice as long to fill the 5TB Seagate drives as it would to fill a single 4TB Ultrastar.

I pulled some of the 5TB drives from the enclosures. According to the HDTune they are 5900RPM. The large files (4GB) sustained writes are fine, though the small and medium-sized files are not so good. It slows down near the end of the drive in any case, but that may be the low RPM.

 

[Mercutio]

Try writing a 50GB file and watch write speed. I've only been testing with my spare drive, but they all seem to exhibit slower sustained writes over time. 4GB might not be enough to see the slowdown.

 

[CougTek]

The 5TB drives don't seem to drop out of arrays the way SOME drives do, but alone or in groups, they have a very odd behavior where they'll write at full speed for a while (150MB/sec for a single drive) then slow down to something more like 40MB/sec for sustained writes that last more than perhaps 10 minutes. It takes about twice as long to fill the 5TB Seagate drives as it would to fill a single 4TB Ultrastar.

What drive model does that? I'm considering the Seagate Enterprise NAS drives (ST5000VN0001) for a new storage unit. I don't want to be f**ked with a bad purchase.

 

[LunarMist]

What drive model does that? I'm considering the Seagate Enterprise NAS drives (ST5000VN0001) for a new storage unit. I don't want to be f**ked with a bad purchase.

I think he means the ST5000DM000, which is just a consumer 5900 RPM drive.

 

[Mercutio]

Correct. These are the DM units.

 

[timwhit]

I would like to buy a couple of these when the price is down to a normal level. I thought they were supposed to retail for $260?

Amazon is now selling these for $277.

 

[LunarMist]

Amazon is now selling these for $277.

Yeah, ~$279 seems to be a common price and they were out a few weeks ago. After reading about the problems, I decided to pass.

 

[timwhit]

I bought one of the 8TB drives for around $280. Hopefully, it doesn't die with 8TB of data on it. That will take a long time to download from Crashplan.

 

[Mercutio]

I bought one of the 8TB drives for around $280. Hopefully, it doesn't die with 8TB of data on it. That will take a long time to download from Crashplan.

Have you had an opportunity to check drive performance yet? I'm curious to know if it has the same issues as the 5TB models.

 

[timwhit]

No, I can run something on it if you'd like, but it will need to run on Linux. Also, it has around 2 TB of data on it already.