New 4TB drive spaffs half a telly season into your eyes AT ONCE

Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders, TV set-top boxes and other such entertainment gear. The Video 3.5 HDD can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with an initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year. It has a wide range of capacity points - 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and …

[cyke1]

um

"Seagate claims the 4TB Video 3.5 HDD can deliver up to 16 simultaneous high-definition video streams"

Like to know their idea of HD.

"The Video 3.5 HDD can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with an initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year."

what does it go up to after the first year?

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: um

Well, Bluray sets a minimum of around 7MBytes/sec, so if these disks really can do the 180MB/s claimed, that is > 16 channels at Bluray definition.

I'd be more concerned with the "initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year.". Out of every 1000 drives they ship, more than 5 will fail in the first year? That's worrying.

As for the price, $175 seems more likely, looking at other 4TB drives on sale.

[Cliff]

Re: um

In the late 90's-ish I listened to Brewster Kahle who set up the internet archive. At the time it was by far the biggest data problem on the internet. They worked with drive manufacturers, but they found a real-world failure rate of 6%/year. These drives don't just hang out serving a domestic few bits now and again, they spin like crazy 24/7. When you use that as a comparison, 0.55%/year doesn't look too shady any more, actually rather good.

[Righteously Indignant]

WD Red?

are these competitors for Western Digital's Red drives? Can they be used in NAS or home servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: WD Red?

>Can they be used in NAS or home servers?

Good question. I'd like to know if they can be used in toasters?

[B Candler]

Re: WD Red?

Not that I have tested this exact model, but Seagate now nobble their consumer drives so that they can't be used in RAID. Specifically, they disable Error Recovery Control. In the event of a read error, the drive will retry forever instead of giving up after a few seconds so that the RAID controller can find the data on another drive. Result: the drive gets kicked out of the array, and the whole array goes into degraded mode, just for one bad block.

Under Linux this is easy to test:

/usr/sbin/smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/sda

If this command works, then you've enabled ERC with a 7-second timeout. If the command is rejected then your drive doesn't support ERC, so tough.

WD Red drives do have ERC, so I'd strongly suggest those instead for any sort of home RAID. Hitachi drives used to be a good bet too, but they've changed hands so you should check.

[B Candler]

Re: WD Red?

Example of a nobbled drive:

# /usr/sbin/smartctl -i /dev/sdb

...

Model Family: Seagate Barracuda (SATA 3Gb/s, 4K Sectors)

Device Model: ST3000DM001-9YN166

...

Firmware Version: CC4C

User Capacity: 3,000,592,982,016 bytes [3.00 TB]

...

# /usr/sbin/smartctl -l scterc /dev/sdb

...

Warning: device does not support SCT Error Recovery Control command

[Mikel]

Citation needed

"The 4TB drive 3.5in DVR HDD costs $75.99 on Amazon or $79.99 on New Egg, we're told."

I'm afraid I'm going to need a link to that. Anybody?

[diodesign]

Re: Citation needed

Ignore that - it was the price of the 1TB model :-(

C.

[BristolBachelor]

Re: Citation needed

More like WARNING needed. Do NOT buy drives from Amazon.

I bought a whole batch of drives from Amazon.co.uk (they weren't available locally anywhere at the time), and they just dropped them in the bottom of a huge box that HP would be proud of, with no packaging. By the time they reached me, one had hit the metal case of another occupant of the box so hard it was dented. 2 disks were DOA and 2 more failed initial format, another died during a DOS based test. They all went back. Bought the same discs from a German retailer, and each came in its own padded box.

[Callam McMillan]

Re: Citation needed

I'll echo the comments about Amazons disk packaging. A colleague ordered three drives for his NAS and they arrived in just the way you said. Fortunately his seemed to be ok despite that!

[Arisia]

Shurely sum mishtake - $75.99 for 4TB!??

It's £140 for a 4TB drive here!

[diodesign]

Re: Price

That price is for the 1TB drive :-( So ignore it.

C.

[Lee D]

Maybe a missing "1" somewhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but you live in the UK.

Where prices need to be insanely greedy.

[Andy The Hat]

Oh no! "which is ... the rustling of small leaves."?

Would that be dry leaves, sappy leaves, wet leaves, pointy cactus type leaves? What is the average leaf density, the air flow rate and do the leaves actually touch? What is small?

Please be more scientific. What about an equivalence to well-watered petunias per cubic metre in a brisk May northerly with the hearing aid set at 'annoying relation' ...?

[Wish You Were Here]

the rustling of small leaves.

Do we have a reg standard measure for noise? If not we should have.

[Robert Ramsay]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

I propose "the Eadon"

[Richard 81]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

I think we need a few smaller standard units too.

[John Smith 19]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

"I think we need a few smaller standard units too."

The milliEadon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

The unit of measure would need to be the psithurism.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psithurism

I can't tell you how long I've known that word and waited for the chance to idly throw it into a conversation. ;)

[TheDysk]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

"I can't tell you how long I've known that word and waited for the chance to idly throw it into a conversation."

Why can't you tell us? Have you forgotten? has it been that long? :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

"Why can't you tell us? Have you forgotten? has it been that long? :-)"

Actually I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. ;)

[TeeCee]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

Now you're jutht taking the psith.

[Cliff]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

Wiktionary entry last updated 2 days ago - are you sure you didn't just make it up? ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

So how much is an Eadon anyway? 100dba? Seeing as a single instance is enough to make you reach to cover your ears...

[Steven Roper]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

If you people are going to honour Eadon with a Reg unit, may I suggest using the Eadon as a measure of irrelevancy rather than sound volume. After all, his posts are a lot more infamous for being irrelevant to the thread than being actually noisy...!

[Dave Pickles]

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

The noise output of the drive is 2.3 BELS according to the Seagate website (another case of disk drive specmanship?). 23dBA is rather more believable.

[unwarranted triumphalism]

Just wait till $ky catch up with this...

No doubt in 2023 they will be proudly trumpeting their new 4TB Sky+ box... at a bargain price of £599.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders

Yet you'll be hard pressed to find a Highstreet DVR with 1Tb.. new humax youview box is a mere 500gb.

Why is the highstreet so backwards? if they were up to spec I might actually spend some cash instead of going into a shop and coming out empty handed moaning that its all 10 year old crap.

[Alan 6]

Re: Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders

It's probably because the high street is used to white goods update timescales - how often are washing machines and freezers updated, once every couple of years or so.

High street retailers are not geared up for stocking items that will be out of date in 8 weeks or so when the next high capacity drive is released

[Joe Montana]

Re: Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders

Go for a dreambox, they come without drives but will take and format a standard sata drive (2.5 or 3.5" depending on the model)...

Hard drive technology moves a lot faster than tv does so while a diskless stb will have a reasonable shelf life, hard drives either become obsolete or the price drops to much less than you paid for it so it makes little sense to tie the two products together.

[Shell]

Re: Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders

My Virgin Media DVR (Tivo) has a healthy 1Tb in it. Standard model.

[Cliff]

Re: Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders

>>Why is the highstreet so backwards?

Good question, and I suspect the answer will be because bleeding edge is bleeding expensive. The potential market for a 4TB PVR at £600+VAT might be 1 person in 10,000. The market for 500GB PVR's at £60 inc VAT might be 2000 people per 10,000. Stocking a slow-selling high-ticket item like that is a major cash tie-up, especially when its price crashes so quickly (and all the other manufacturers and rebadgers are making 4TB PVR's), better to serve the mass audience and allow specialist stores to deal with the few with high demands.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Seagate has a new 4TB 3.5in hard disk for digital video recorders

It does surpeise me that domestic PVRs aren't sold with a removable drive bay - but then again some twat would try and shove an unsuitable drive in place.

BTW, 180Mb/s in linear reads is NOT 16 streams - as soon as you try to read multiple real streams the head will start seeking like a bastard and throughput will drop down to 40-50MB/s at most.

[Amorous Cowherder]

Numbers!

Hmmm, lots of lovely numbers that should give the "measur-bators" something to get excited about!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Seagate

I stopped reading.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

16 channels simultaneously?

Just don't cross-connect it to an electric monk, it will try to believe all 16 channels simultaneously.

Mine is the one with "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" in the pocket

[jimborae]

Decimal point in the wrong place!

"...can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with an initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year. "

Surely this is a mistake and the decimal point should be two places to the to the right. They are Seagate drives after all.

[TWB]

4TB too big for me

I have a 1 TB Humax PVR and we rarely watch things twice so manage the stuff on it (delete stuff we've watched). We run at about 500GB full and there is stuff on there from over a year ago that I will probably never get around to watching. I wish I had the luxury of time some people do....

[Richard 12]

Re: 4TB too big for me

I have the 500GB version, it's nowhere near big enough.

I would much rather have a bigger one - because then I could go to town on "auto-record anything looking vaguely interesting" without worrying that it would run out of space and be unable to record something I really, really want.

The high capacity is so I can delete stuff at leisure.

I often go away for long periods, and find it really annoying when I come back to find Episode 3 of %great_new_series% is coming up, and I've missed the opener.

With a bigger drive I could have more stuff recording on the off-chance it's good, to be deleted when I find its awful.

[TWB]

Re: 4TB too big for me

"I would much rather have a bigger one " - oo-errr!

I reckon you would spend more time managing the stuff on it than watching any TV - but please fit one and let us all know how well you get on.

[dave 93]

Impressive numbers, but...

is it the last gasps of the 'rotating rust' technology?

A 4G solid-state drive could stream many more simultaneous feeds.