Just launched? That's odd: I've seen them freely available online for about a month, possibly longer. I'd be tempted by the 8TB model, as I'm a fan of how reliable Toshiba drives are, but it's just not enough of an upgrade for me. (I currently use 2x 3TB Toshiba drives which I'm looking to replace with a single, high capacity drive. Right now, the only realistic contender in terms of reliability is the HGST He10 10TB series as the He12 12TB series of drives aren't yet available and likely will come with a ridiculous launch price per gigabyte.)
O...kay. I'm not sure how my comment was pretentious or how your insult was justified, but based on the quality of your other comment, I'll just bid you adieu and genuinely wish you a nice day.
It's not a good idea to use NAS/RAID-optimized drives standalone.
NAS drives have a firmware that gives up early when it encounters read errors. It assumes there's RAID (or ZFS) redundancy available, that can recover the information from another drive.
It's also not a good idea to use non-NAS/RAID drives in redundant arrays. Regular desktop drives will continue to try to read for a long time (since they assume it's the only way to recover the data), resulting in the read operation stalling, which may result in a RAID controller dropping the drive from the array.
fastest at sequential read... which I really don't get. I mean, if this is a network drive then it is going to be ganged with a bunch of drives, which means you really don't need much sequential performance. Your average 1gbps network connection can only sustain ~105MB/s, and if you happen to have a 10gbps then you are looking at 1GB/s of throughput. If these are meant for RAID then it means on a 1gbps conneciton a single drive taps it out, and on a bigger server 5 drives in a RAID 5 will tap it out easily. But the random IO (which is important for network drives) probably sucks, so there is no real point.
Personally, I would love to see them abandon the speed race entirely. If people are paying for HDDs they are not shopping for performance. You are shoping for bulk and reliability. Lets see some average speed drives that have a 5-7 year warranty on them! That will turn some heads!
So you are thinking a bit too simplistically. First and foremost, you're never going to see those speeds, ever other than in a synthetic workload. Next, obviously they are capitalizing on the tradeoff of the PMR drives, increased sequential performance but they obviously are not showcasing the random performance of these drives which is significantly more important.
The reality is, you'd need 4 of these with ZFS or RAID to really saturate a gig nic, and if you buy more of them you aren't going to be just running gig.
As for the speed race being abandoned no thank you. I care about the performance characteristics of these drives for data warehousing purposes and MTBF. Everything I store has more than one copy so why do I care if one drive dies?
5400RPMs aren't some paragons of reliability. The only differences are slower bearing wear and lower power usage due to less drag. Drives can last 10 years without an issue, and the bearings giving out are usually not what does them in. The speed is basically free and it does make a significant difference to a lot of use cases. I throw around Blu-rays all day long and trust me, it's a lot nicer working between 200MB/s drives than from my 100 or 65MB ones.
They died. Spindle speed and the platters physical size only mattered when using the same data density. One good density jump and a slower drive would overtake it. SSD's have pretty much completely replaced high spin drives in servers. In fact home NAS is about the only place 7200 high capacity drives make sense.
I'm not sure I'd buy a drive with a three year warranty from a company in serious trouble. If the Japanese government doesn't step in with a bail-out Toshiba will be split and sold, probably at a loss.
I was about to post that. Toshiba are in serious trouble. While I'm sure each section will survive in some form, either still as part of Toshiba or bought by someone else, I have doubts as to what would happen with any warranties.
"Toshiba claims up to a 240 MB/s sustained data transfer rate as well as a 4.17 ms average latency time for the N300 8 TB model, which is slower compared to the MN05 8 TB."
What? Data transfer is faster, latency is identical. Again, why do you report the average latency?, because it's just another way of reporting the spindle speed. It just makes you look like you don't understand what it is. Half a rotation (which is the average time to wait for the correct spot to land under the reader) at 7200rpm takes 4.17ms.
When i quickly glanced on the pipeline section i thought i saw "toshiba launches n300 ssd, upto 8tb/sec" boy was i disappointed when my eyes finally got focus.
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nathanddrews - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
Awesome, I'm just running out of space...Thisguysaneckbeard - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
You're not pretentiouslord_anselhelm - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
Just launched? That's odd: I've seen them freely available online for about a month, possibly longer. I'd be tempted by the 8TB model, as I'm a fan of how reliable Toshiba drives are, but it's just not enough of an upgrade for me. (I currently use 2x 3TB Toshiba drives which I'm looking to replace with a single, high capacity drive. Right now, the only realistic contender in terms of reliability is the HGST He10 10TB series as the He12 12TB series of drives aren't yet available and likely will come with a ridiculous launch price per gigabyte.)Thisguysaneckbeard - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
You're pretentiouslord_anselhelm - Saturday, April 22, 2017 - link
O...kay. I'm not sure how my comment was pretentious or how your insult was justified, but based on the quality of your other comment, I'll just bid you adieu and genuinely wish you a nice day.Hul8 - Saturday, April 22, 2017 - link
It's not a good idea to use NAS/RAID-optimized drives standalone.NAS drives have a firmware that gives up early when it encounters read errors. It assumes there's RAID (or ZFS) redundancy available, that can recover the information from another drive.
It's also not a good idea to use non-NAS/RAID drives in redundant arrays. Regular desktop drives will continue to try to read for a long time (since they assume it's the only way to recover the data), resulting in the read operation stalling, which may result in a RAID controller dropping the drive from the array.
Infy2 - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
7200RPM drive fastest on the planet? Whatever happened to the 10k or 15k RPM drives of the old?CaedenV - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
fastest at sequential read... which I really don't get. I mean, if this is a network drive then it is going to be ganged with a bunch of drives, which means you really don't need much sequential performance. Your average 1gbps network connection can only sustain ~105MB/s, and if you happen to have a 10gbps then you are looking at 1GB/s of throughput. If these are meant for RAID then it means on a 1gbps conneciton a single drive taps it out, and on a bigger server 5 drives in a RAID 5 will tap it out easily. But the random IO (which is important for network drives) probably sucks, so there is no real point.Personally, I would love to see them abandon the speed race entirely. If people are paying for HDDs they are not shopping for performance. You are shoping for bulk and reliability. Lets see some average speed drives that have a 5-7 year warranty on them! That will turn some heads!
Runiteshark - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
So you are thinking a bit too simplistically. First and foremost, you're never going to see those speeds, ever other than in a synthetic workload. Next, obviously they are capitalizing on the tradeoff of the PMR drives, increased sequential performance but they obviously are not showcasing the random performance of these drives which is significantly more important.The reality is, you'd need 4 of these with ZFS or RAID to really saturate a gig nic, and if you buy more of them you aren't going to be just running gig.
As for the speed race being abandoned no thank you. I care about the performance characteristics of these drives for data warehousing purposes and MTBF. Everything I store has more than one copy so why do I care if one drive dies?
DominionSeraph - Saturday, April 22, 2017 - link
5400RPMs aren't some paragons of reliability. The only differences are slower bearing wear and lower power usage due to less drag. Drives can last 10 years without an issue, and the bearings giving out are usually not what does them in.The speed is basically free and it does make a significant difference to a lot of use cases. I throw around Blu-rays all day long and trust me, it's a lot nicer working between 200MB/s drives than from my 100 or 65MB ones.
Topweasel - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
They died. Spindle speed and the platters physical size only mattered when using the same data density. One good density jump and a slower drive would overtake it. SSD's have pretty much completely replaced high spin drives in servers. In fact home NAS is about the only place 7200 high capacity drives make sense.HomeworldFound - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
I'm not sure I'd buy a drive with a three year warranty from a company in serious trouble. If the Japanese government doesn't step in with a bail-out Toshiba will be split and sold, probably at a loss.Tams80 - Monday, April 24, 2017 - link
I was about to post that. Toshiba are in serious trouble. While I'm sure each section will survive in some form, either still as part of Toshiba or bought by someone else, I have doubts as to what would happen with any warranties.ajp_anton - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
"Toshiba claims up to a 240 MB/s sustained data transfer rate as well as a 4.17 ms average latency time for the N300 8 TB model, which is slower compared to the MN05 8 TB."What? Data transfer is faster, latency is identical. Again, why do you report the average latency?, because it's just another way of reporting the spindle speed. It just makes you look like you don't understand what it is.
Half a rotation (which is the average time to wait for the correct spot to land under the reader) at 7200rpm takes 4.17ms.
shabby - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
When i quickly glanced on the pipeline section i thought i saw "toshiba launches n300 ssd, upto 8tb/sec" boy was i disappointed when my eyes finally got focus.