Seagate Rolls Out 4 TB HDD for Video Storage
Seagate has introduced some new hard drives specifically built for video storage and consumption.
Seagate has announced its new video 3.5-inch lineup of HDDs available in capacities up to 4 TB. These drives are intended to be used in DVRs and set-top boxes, as well as surveillance systems and media centers. According to Seagate, the drives have been specifically engineered for three critical areas: capacity, reliability and acoustics. Seagate boasts an annual failure rate of just 0.55 percent.
"Leveraging Seagate's 10 years of experience understanding the requirements of the video market, we've combined our knowledge on heat, acoustics and power to deliver what we believe to be the most reliable DVR drive in the world," said Scott Horn, VP of marketing at Seagate. "Our commitment to deliver a drive with unrivaled reliability ensures the safekeeping of consumers' content as well as keeping DVRs, STBs, and surveillance systems in the field longer."
The drives will come in capacities ranging from 250 GB all the way up to 4 TB, and all these drives spin at 5900 RPM. Drives up to 2 TB in size have a SATA2 interface, while the 3 TB and 4 TB models have a newer SATA3 interface. So far there has been no word on pricing nor availability.
Sorry seagate, but your product quality is simply not good enought.
... so we can eat it too? LOL
in a more serious note I already use 4TB drives for Video (specifically TV shows).
so... what really makes this drives "better" after all I just store my shows (I don't delete then) on and off all the time, so they should last for a very long time (I think) since there is no constant rewrites to the disk.
As for enterprise drives, my lab has over 25000 drives of various manufacturers. Seagate has been, by far, the most reliable with only five failures in the last year, while being the highest minority drive in the lab at about 30%. (We have just under 8000 Seagate drives of various ages and capacities.) Toshiba 2.5" drives were by far the worst with 45 failures in the last year out of 2000 drives, all of them between one and three years old. When they first came in, the failure rate was higher. However, these are all enterprise level drives, so they should be held to a higher standard. In the desktop world, 2.25% annual failure rate may sound fairly decent. It's certainly not in the enterprise world.
My company has now insisted that our OEM suppliers, Dell and NetApp, use only Seagate drives with the products they build for us. My company believes that Seagate is the most reliable, and the numbers from my lab are part of that proof.
A real hard drive is 7200RPM and if you want a supercharger, get a hybrid 7200RPM model with write caching. I hope they proliferate the desktop market so we can have 4TB+ 7200RPM hybrid desktop drives and I hope that Seagate continues making 7200RPM hybrid laptop drives, even though right now they're just making 5400RPM hybrid laptop drives (can be slow if data isn't cached, I'll never buy one).
Let me guess, this is a 5x800GB platter drive?
The 1 thing I'll give them is that it is rated for up to 70 Celsius operating temperature. Typically drives are rated at 60C. Also operating shock at 80g is a bit higher than average I think.
Their specifications page has bad data though;http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/consumer-electronics/video-3-5-hdd/?cmpid=friendly-_-video-hdd-us
Says only 3 watts idle power consumption even on the 4TB model, but the datasheet http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/pipeline-fam/pipeline-hd/video-3-5-hdd/en-us/docs/video-3.5-hdd-ds1783-1-1302us.pdf
says 5 watts, which is far more realistic.
Also on the datasheet, a drive ready time of 15 seconds? Really? At 24watts of 12V power consumption it won't take long to spin up.
Some of the lower capacities says <17, or 6, or 12 seconds. Sounds like firmware bloat/excessive self testing before coming online if accurate, though I doubt those numbers are accurate at all.