8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?

I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the
partition as GPT.

Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this?

GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support
6 GB/s SATA.

The background agenda: my NAS box is getting tight on space and it
seems logical to move my RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs
my Tivo-on-Steroids DVR app (SageTV).

Current usage is capped at 5 TB on the NAS but, looking at prices of
5400 RPM WD Reds, 8 TB at $275 seems pretty reasonable compared to 6 TB
comprised of 3-2 TB drives at $240.

I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the
NAS) sb a non-issue considering the DVR app is currently happy going
across my LAN to the NAS box.

I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity
in my scheme of things.

Am I missing anything?
--
Pete Cresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the
partition as GPT.

Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this?

GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support
6 GB/s SATA.

The background agenda: my NAS box is getting tight on space and it
seems logical to move my RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs
my Tivo-on-Steroids DVR app (SageTV).

Current usage is capped at 5 TB on the NAS but, looking at prices of
5400 RPM WD Reds, 8 TB at $275 seems pretty reasonable compared to 6 TB
comprised of 3-2 TB drives at $240.

I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the
NAS) sb a non-issue considering the DVR app is currently happy going
across my LAN to the NAS box.

I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity
in my scheme of things.

Am I missing anything?

There are two kinds of drives.

PMR - read speed equals write speed
- one track written at a time
- this is how all the older drives were made
- good stuff, if the flying height is high enough
and there is no "wear phenomenon".

SMR - Shingled magnetic recording
- tracks written in 7 track sets, with zero gap
between tracks in a set. To change a sector might
mean re-writing all seven tracks.
- Read speed 200MB/sec. Write speed 25MB/sec
- If you had a quad tuner, and were writing four
file streams to disk, mixed with 25MB/sec writes,
the queue on the drive could be huge. The drive would
be close to overwhelmed.

The drive may want to do a lot of start/stop to
conserve life. Even if it's designed for a NAS,
these days I would not expect a guarantee of
"always on" performance. The last couple higher
end drives I bought, they're doing start/stop
on me, and I don't know what more expensive drive
to buy, to stop this from happening. When I'd bought
those drives previously, they stayed running and loaded
24/7.

Chances are, you'll be buying an 8TB boat-anchor.

If the thing is PMR, read equals write, then I'd buy it.
Just check the reviews and see if anyone reports that
"the drive runs too hot". I don't know what they're
doing to the drives this year, but whatever it is
(zero flying height?), it isn't a good thing.
The platters could be 1.3TB a piece right now,
up from the previous value of 1TB per platter.
So 8TB might be six platters.

Do your research, check for unhappy customers.

Paul

That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...


Per Paul:
(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the
partition as GPT.

Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this?

GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support
6 GB/s SATA.

The background agenda: my NAS box is getting tight on space and it
seems logical to move my RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs
my Tivo-on-Steroids DVR app (SageTV).

Current usage is capped at 5 TB on the NAS but, looking at prices of
5400 RPM WD Reds, 8 TB at $275 seems pretty reasonable compared to 6 TB
comprised of 3-2 TB drives at $240.

I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the
NAS) sb a non-issue considering the DVR app is currently happy going
across my LAN to the NAS box.

I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity
in my scheme of things.

Am I missing anything?

There are two kinds of drives.

PMR - read speed equals write speed
- one track written at a time
- this is how all the older drives were made
- good stuff, if the flying height is high enough
and there is no "wear phenomenon".

SMR - Shingled magnetic recording
- tracks written in 7 track sets, with zero gap
between tracks in a set. To change a sector might
mean re-writing all seven tracks.
- Read speed 200MB/sec. Write speed 25MB/sec
- If you had a quad tuner, and were writing four
file streams to disk, mixed with 25MB/sec writes,
the queue on the drive could be huge. The drive would
be close to overwhelmed.

The drive may want to do a lot of start/stop to
conserve life. Even if it's designed for a NAS,
these days I would not expect a guarantee of
"always on" performance. The last couple higher
end drives I bought, they're doing start/stop
on me, and I don't know what more expensive drive
to buy, to stop this from happening. When I'd bought
those drives previously, they stayed running and loaded
24/7.

Chances are, you'll be buying an 8TB boat-anchor.

If the thing is PMR, read equals write, then I'd buy it.
Just check the reviews and see if anyone reports that
"the drive runs too hot". I don't know what they're
doing to the drives this year, but whatever it is
(zero flying height?), it isn't a good thing.
The platters could be 1.3TB a piece right now,
up from the previous value of 1TB per platter.
So 8TB might be six platters.

Do your research, check for unhappy customers.

Paul
--
Pete Cresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

I think two 4GB drives might be OK. If you spend $164 CDN,
you get a 5400RPM 4TB drive. If you spend around $275 CDN,
you get a 7200RPM 4TB drive that runs hot. Those are
examples. I've been pretty happy with the $164 one for
doing backups. I've not used it for booting an OS though.

The $164 drive, the advert was careful to *not* mention
the RPMs. Dishonest *******s. And this starts with Seagate,
not my computer store. Seagate doesn't list it either,
but with a little research, you can track down the info.

I don't understand why there should be such a price premium
all of a sudden. One possibility, is they use a different
number of platters, and a different data density. But that's
all that comes to mind on those two examples. It's even hard
to get tech info on platter count in the datasheets now.

Things missing from datasheet:

1) SMR or PMR
2) RPMs
3) Platter count
4) 512n, 512e, 4Kn ?
5) Startup current (1A to 2.5A on spinup). Usually
operating current is listed.
6) Admission of read/write datarates ? The datasheet
used to assume they were equal (because in the slightly
old days, the drives were perpendicular magnetic recording only).

PMR drives are available up to at least 6TB. I don't know
if they've succeeded in pushing PMR larger than that. If you
were looking at a 10TB drive, that's most likely to be
shingled writes SMR style.

Paul

Per Paul:
I think two 4GB drives might be OK. If you spend $164 CDN,
you get a 5400RPM 4TB drive. If you spend around $275 CDN,
you get a 7200RPM 4TB drive that runs hot. Those are
examples. I've been pretty happy with the $164 one for
doing backups. I've not used it for booting an OS though.

Before my previous mobo bit the big one, I had 5400 RPM WD Reds in it
doing the job that I foolishly delegated to the NAS box.

No perceived problems, although I never went out of my way to stress it
(as in recording 4 shows concurrently and viewing a fifth).
--
Pete Cresswell

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote:

I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the
partition as GPT.

GPT pertains to the disk, not the partitions.

GPT is the newer partition table format that can handle disks larger
than 2.1TB. If you have a disk this size, you will have to use GPT or
you'll never see anything past 2.1TB.

Once you've got that in place, you can define your partitions. The
NTFS file system will have no problem with a single 8TB partition.

--
Tim Slattery
tim at risingdove dot com

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.

"Tim Slattery" wrote in message
...
"(PeteCresswell)" wrote:

I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the
partition as GPT.

GPT pertains to the disk, not the partitions.

GPT is the newer partition table format that can handle disks larger
than 2.1TB. If you have a disk this size, you will have to use GPT or
you'll never see anything past 2.1TB.

Once you've got that in place, you can define your partitions. The
NTFS file system will have no problem with a single 8TB partition.

One thing to be aware of if you are copying data from an existing disk to
the new 8 TB one, so you don't fall foul of the same thing that I did with
my 4 TB disk...

You may not have sufficient SATA ports on the motherboard to connect both
the old one and the new one at the same time, so you may decide to connect
the 8 TB disk by a SATA-to-USB adaptor temporarily. Don't do it that way
round. You may find that the adaptor can't handle disks of that size - I
think it's the cluster size or the LBA number.

Instead, disconnect the smaller "donor" drive and connect it to the adaptor,
and connect the new 8 TB drive to the motherboard SATA right from the
beginning.

And then copy the data from one to the other.

Doing it the way that I did it, I spent the best part of a data copying data
from my smaller 1 TB disk and also some from the C drive to the 4 TB, only
to find that when I then connected the 4 TB to the motherboard SATA, the
system couldn't detect any partitions and claimed that the disk was
uninitialised. I had to initialise it again as GPT and make a whole-drive
NTFS filesystem, and copy everything all over again :-(

I didn't lose any data because I didn't delete any donor copies, but I did
lose about a day in time.

In article , says...

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.

I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks.
Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of
1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The
6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest
is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn
to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose. Over
the years that amounts to a very large number of disks to store but
given cost is approx. $0.30 a disk that doesn't seem like much. Of the
12Tb currently available on my network, approx 5Tb is used, large
percentage is duplicate copies. None of that includes the older stack of
hard disks I've kept and filled with stuff using an external adapter
cable I have, just in case

"pjp" wrote in message
...
In article , says...

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.

I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks.
Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of
1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The
6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest
is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn
to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose.

It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has
room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA
ports?

Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd
have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB
drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the
system drive that was almost full).

I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1
TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other
things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire
safe when I'm not actually backing up.

Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only
4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!).

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:39:14 -0400, Big Al wrote:

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.


As far as I'm concerned, the best way by far to avoid losing it all if
a drive fails is by doing regular backups to external media, not by
having multiple drives.

Multiple drives are subject to losing all at the same time to many of
the most common dangers: severe power glitches, nearby lightning
strikes, virus attacks, even theft of the computer.

In article ,
says...

"pjp" wrote in message
...
In article , says...

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.

I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks.
Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of
1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The
6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest
is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn
to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose.

It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has
room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA
ports?

Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd
have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB
drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the
system drive that was almost full).

I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1
TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other
things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire
safe when I'm not actually backing up.

Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only
4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!).

For backups and not "real time" stuff I see nothing wrong with USB
external drives even when only USB2 spec. They're perfectly capable of
handling "normal" output requirments, e.g. watching movies etc. off
them.

pjp wrote:
In article ,
says...
"pjp" wrote in message
...
In article , says...
On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...
There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.
I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks.
Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of
1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The
6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest
is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn
to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose.
It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has
room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA
ports?

Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd
have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB
drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the
system drive that was almost full).

I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1
TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other
things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire
safe when I'm not actually backing up.

Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only
4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!).

For backups and not "real time" stuff I see nothing wrong with USB
external drives even when only USB2 spec. They're perfectly capable of
handling "normal" output requirments, e.g. watching movies etc. off
them.

Some of them have capacity limits.

The one I own, is rated for 4TB drives. On the manufacturer web site,
it says the product is now rated for 8TB drives, but it also says
they changed some component inside the thing. And that's something
that is poorly defined on those things (firmware?). Some storage
controllers have an internal firmware, plus an interface on the
chip to add an external EEPROM for more or different firmware.

I would prefer there was a theoretical reason a certain size
is listed in the advert, rather than it looking like a "guess"
by the manufacturer. The specification method is sloppy by
these companies, leaving it to the consumer to do the testing.
And that's not right, when the answer is at their fingertips
(just call the dude at Asmedia and ask, FFS).

Paul

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 22:11:08 -0300, pjp
wrote:

In article ,
says...

"pjp" wrote in message
...
In article , says...

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.

I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks.
Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of
1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The
6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest
is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn
to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose.

It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has
room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA
ports?

Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd
have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB
drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the
system drive that was almost full).

I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1
TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other
things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire
safe when I'm not actually backing up.

Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only
4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!).

For backups and not "real time" stuff I see nothing wrong with USB
external drives even when only USB2 spec. They're perfectly capable of
handling "normal" output requirments, e.g. watching movies etc. off
them.

I've never really found a use for external drives. I have at least a
half dozen external docks from when they used to come free with every
hard drive (Newegg), but I think I only used one, once, just to see if
it worked. External drives require shelf space, they require an external
power supply, and until recently they required the painfully slow USB2
interface, so they really have nothing going for them.

For a number of years, probably about 1996 to 1999, I used optical media
to store data. First CDs, then DVDs, including a few rewriteables and a
few dual-layer DVDs, but that fizzled very quickly. I've trashed all of
that except for some music CDs that I burned back then (and labeled with
a Sharpie, a subject of another thread).

IMHO, the only viable data storage solution is internal hard drives,
with the exception of eSATA, which unfortunately never really caught on.
At the moment, I have 3 laptops, one desktop, and a server, and no
optical drives anywhere to be found, as well as no external drives
anywhere. Each laptop has two hard drives, (all are SSDs, actually,
minimum size 500GB, with two 1TB units), and the server has 15 internal
data drives and the 16th drive, a 500GB SSD, mounted above a PCI slot.
To get that many SATA ports, (in addition to the 8 that are on the mobo)
I use a PCIe adapter that provides two SAS ports, with each port
expanded to provide 4 SATA connectors.

--

Char Jackson

On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:39:14 -0400, Big Al wrote:

On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable.

Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes...

There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If
you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered
to the theory that multiple spindles is better.

Multiple spindles are better, until you run out of drive bays, SATA
connectors, or power. Then you get to replace existing drives with
bigger ones. At some point, you look back and figure you'd have been a
lot better off skipping the little drives and going with bigger ones
from the start.

--

Char Jackson