Seagate intros Innov8: A USB-powered 8TB external hard drive Seagate has introduced an 8TB external drive with no need for its own power cord. Like 2.5-inch external drives which abandoned power cords ages ago, the 3.5-inch innov8 draws power from its host through its USB C wire. Seagate says it uses Ignition Boost Technology “which eliminates the need for a power adapter on an 8 TB …
"I have had several Seagate drives all of which have lived, or continue to live, well beyond their expected endurance. "
So do I - but this is outweighed by having a lot more drives which haven't survived their warranty period.
DM-series Barracudas are a standout. NONE of them have gone past 14 months in service, with most failing at 11-12 months (several hundred drives). This is the first time I've ever seen a particular model of drive from any manufacturer have 100%+ mortality inside warranty period.
Having recently pulled apart my 2tb seagate external drive after it stopped working to find a perfectly fine harddisk with a dead sata to USB3 header I wouldn't trust the non drive bits to last a month after the warranty expires...
Fire because it's a battery near something that just might warm up a touch....
Surely they're not that thick.
If the battery is too flat to spin the drive up, I'd hope that it sits there charging for a little while and then kicks into life.
OK, if you haven't used the disk in a while it might take a minute or two to spin up, but you can spend that time waiting for Windows to recognise that something has been plugged in.
OK, if you haven't used the disk in a while it might take a minute or two to spin up, but you can spend that time waiting for Windows to recognise that something has been plugged in.
It seems to me that with every 'security' patch Windows gets less and less inclined to recognise USB drives when plugged in.
I've even had it ask me if I want to Format the drive. The strange thing is that the drive had been used on that very system less than 10 minutes beforehand. Yes, It was unmounted cleanly.
When I say "dies" I mean ceases to hold a charge. Rechargeables on constant maintenance charge (as in this use case) die a lot faster, and additionally if they are not taken through a full discharge cycle periodically their total capacity diminishes. Modern cells are less prone to memory effect than older technologies, but it still happens. The battery will eventually cease to function, and probably before the electromechanical parts of the drive itself.
I don't like the sound of a shingled drive either. I'd rather have an inconvenient PSU and no shingles.
I wonder what is in my Seagate 1T drive? it replaced a WD 1T USB drive that died without warning. The WD is a USB drive controller, no internal SATA/PATA. I have a bunch of WD 1T desktop drives too, that I mean to connect a terminal to, I think they died of faulty firmware and you can revive them. No receipts :(
Really? So why didn't you or anyone else think of this a while ago?
This is far more innovative and patentable than say, round corners. It's a really clever solution to a long-standing problem.
Shingled recording however, is not, and means I won't be buying it.
If it is just to handle motor start (which is the obvious high-power phase of a drive) then why use a chemical battery, as opposed to, say, a supercapacitor.
Then you need a "health" feedback signal from the supercap to the drive controller so that the drive knows not to schedule too many head seeks in a row (i.e. if the supercap voltage is less than X, delay seek until it's greater than Y).
[ Surely it's not just me who has used one of those cables with two type A connectors to start a portable drive, then unplug the "power only" connector to put the mouse back in? ]
This assumes two things, first, the host system has a USB-C connector and second, whatever is using it has a large enough battery capacity, or are you supposed to use the host system plugged into power.
If this actually works, how long before power adapters appear to allow powering it off the mains?
is what's the heck would you use it for? I'm pretty much the poster-boy for pack-ratting reference materials, utilities (that occupy whole virtual machines of their own), and data sets. Multimedia is about the only thing I can come up with. And the whole shingling thang is problematic there, unless there's some data magic behind the scenes tailored for streamed, serial I/O on SMR. Even so, I'd have to have at least two, too terrified of losing everything when one is lost, damaged, or stolen.
Speaking of the latter case, getting through airport/customs without having the drive audited. They'd have to keep it in order to do it correctly. (How does SMR work with Full Drive Encryption?) For a long, long while.
For crying out loud how about some perspective here people? Has anyone ever used one of those drives with two USB ports, one for power? They're terrible! Having a small internal battery sounds like quite a useful feature for portable drives. The fact that no one has done this before just means that Seagate has done something quite wonderful. "Obvious" would probably lead one to the conclusion that all disk manufacturers don't understand their markets. A better analysis is that these manufacturers do not want to spend an extra penny for something useful to their customers!
Now maybe we'll see some high performance large drives that can be used simply on a bunch of systems with tiny internal disks. Presently most of them!
Congratulations Seagate!
I suspect it is 8TB unformatted as drive manufacturers report sizes, ie 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes as opposed to 1099511627776 bytes that you might be expecting.
In addition to to the TB/TiB difference you will also have the usual loss of capacity due to formatting.
(yes, it annoys me too even though 1TB being 10004 is mathematically (decimal) correct, being an old fogey the binary 10244 is what would seem more logical)
I see this complaint so often I'm surprised an enterprising marketer at one of these HDD companies hasn't said something to the effect, "Hey, let's slightly increase the size of our drives so they format exactly at nTB, mark them as TRUE nTB drives and talk bad about how everyone else is cheating you. We can charge more for the drive and with the "TRUE" branding we'll sell more."
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