Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate

Hello! 👋

Well, largest this week. And
Yeah, $800 isn’t a small chunk of change, but for a hard drive of this capacity, it’s monumentally cheap.
Nah, a 24TB is $300 and some 20TB's are even lower $ per TB.
- I paid $600+ for a 24 TB drive, tax free. I feel robbed. Although I'm glad not to shop at Newegg.
  
  Yes, fuck Newegg (and amazon too). I've been using B&H for disks and I have no complaints about them. They have the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 24TB at $479 currently, but last week it was on sale for $419. (I only look at 5yr warranty disks.)
  I was not in a position to take advantage as I've already made my disk purchase this go around, so I'll wait for the next deep discount to hit if it is timely.
- Omg I really have been out of the loop. I originally filled my 8 bay NAS with 6tb drives starting back in 2018. Once they would fill, i added another. 3 years ago, I finally ran out of space and started swapping out the 6tb for 10tb. Due to how it works, I needed to do 2 before I saw any additional space. I think i have 3 or 4 now, and the last one was 2 years ago. They did cost around $250 at the time, and I think i got 1 for just over $200. The fact that I can more than double that for only $300 is crazy news to me. Guess I am going to stop buying 10tb now. The only part that sucks is having to get 2 up front...
- I got some 16TB drives recently for around $200 each, though they were manufacturer recertified. Usually a recertified drive will save you 20-40%. Shipping can be a fortune though.
  EDIT: I used manufacturer recertified, not refurbished drives.
  
  Refurbished drives sound scary. Any data to point towards that not being a problem?
- I bought 8TB for something like $300. 36TB seems quite attractive.
- Depends on your use case. The linked drive according to seagate’s spec sheet is only rated for about ~6.5 power-on hours per day(2400 per year). So if just in your desktop for storage then sure. In an always (or mostly) on NAS then I’d find a different drive. It’ll work fine but expect higher failure rates for that use.

It will take about 36 hours to fill this drive at 270mb/s
That’s a long time to backup your giraffe porn collection.
- What kind of degenerate do you think I am? That’s 36 hours to back up my walrus porn collection.
- How did you know about my giraffe porn?
- How you 'bout to call me out like that ?

That's a lot of porn.
- And linux distros
  
  Just say it's full of porn, it's easier to explain
  
  Honestly, when I first got into forums, I thought they were literally talking about Linux distros, because at the time, that's literally all I was seeding since that's what I was into.
  
  Werd
  
  I have around 150 distros seeding 🤣. I need to get those numbers up!
- You wouldn't download your mom.
  
  No, but I have downloaded yours.
- You'd go broke. Of course it's all Linux, family archives and DNA test data, BTC blockchain, backed up FOSS projects, archives of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and OpenStreetMap, and of course - POVRay renders.

I wanna fuck this HDD. To have that much storage on one drive when I currently have ~30TB shared between 20 drives makes me very erect.

with this I can store at least 3 modern "AAA" games
- More like zero, cause modern AAA games require an NVME (or at least an SSD) and this is a good old fashioned 7200 RPM drive.
  
  Surely no games actually require an SSD?
- Oh definitely, game sizes are getting extreme and I prefer smaller indie games now 🥲

Defragmenting...
- Man, I used to LOVE defragmenting drives. I felt like I was actually doing something productive, and I just got to sit back and watch the magic happen.
  Now I know better.
- I've never had to defragment the ext4 drives in my server. Ext4 is fairly resistant to fragmentation.
  
  It's not really Ext4 doing that, it's a bunch of tricks in the OS layer and the way apps write files to storage that limits it.
  You'll see it if you use something like a BT client without pre-allocation, those files can get heavily fragmented depending on the download speed.
- One of the worst things that the newer Windows versions did is get rid of that little view of defragmenting. It was much more interesting than watching a number slowly tick up.

Seagate so how long before it fails?
- In my experience, not all Seagates will fail but most HDD's that fail will be Seagates.
  
  Because Seagate sell the most drives and all drives fail?
- About 3 hours.
- At least it's not a WD POS
- It comes with three monkeys inside for redundancy:

Do you need it? Probably not. Do you want it? Oh, yeah.
I feel seen

no thanks Seagate. the trauma of losing my data because of a botched firmware with a ticking time bomb kinda put me off your products for life.
see you in hell.
- I can certainly understand holding grudges against corporations. I didn’t buy anything from Sony for a very long time after their fuckery George Hotz and Nintendo's latest horseshit has me staying away from them, but that was a single firmware bug that locked down hard drives (note, the data was still intact) a very long time ago. Seagate even issued a firmware update to prevent the bug from biting users it hadn’t hit yet, but firmware updates at the time weren’t really something people thought to ever do, and operating systems did not check for them automatically back then like they do now.
  Seagate fucked up but they also did everything they could to make it right. That matters. Plus, look at their competition. WD famously lied about their red drives not being SMR when they actually were. And I’ve only ever had WD hard drives and sandisk flash drives die on me. And guess who owns sandisk? Western Digital!
  I guess if you must go with a another company, there’s the louder and more expensive Toshiba drives but I have never used those before so I know nothing about them aside from their reputation for being loud.
  
  And I’ve only ever had WD hard drives and sandisk flash drives die on me
  Maybe it's confirmation bias but almost all memory that failed on me has been sandisk-flash storage. Zhe only exception being a corsair ssd which failed after 3 yrs as the main laptop drive + another 3 as a server boot and log-drive.
- Every manufacturer has made a product that failed.
  
  but not every manufacturer has had class action lawsuits filed against their continued shitty products.
- but then wd and their fake red nas drives with smr tech?
  what else we have?
  
  Wait.. fake? I just bought some of those.
- Can someone recommend me a hard drive that won't fail immediately? Internal, not SSD, from which cheap ones will die even sooner, and I need it for archival reasons, not speed or fancy new tech, otherwise I have two SSDs.
  
  If you're relying on one hard drive not failing to preserve your data you are doing it wrong from the jump. I've got about a dozen hard drives in play from seagate and WD at any given time (mostly seagate because they're cheaper and I don't need speed either) and haven't had a failure yet. Backblaze used to publish stats about the hard drives they use, not sure if they still do but that would give you some data to go off. Seagate did put out some duds a while back but other models are fine.
  
  Hard drives aren't great for archival in general, but any modern drive should work. Grab multiple brands and make at least two copies. Look for sales. Externals regularly go below $15/tb these days.
  
  My WD Red Pros have almost all lasted me 7+ years but the best thing (and probably cheapest nowadays) is a proper 3-2-1 backup plan.
  
  I think refurbished enterprise drives usually have a lot of extra protection hardware that helps them last a very long time. Seagate advertises a mean time to failure on their exos drives of ~200 years with a moderate level of usage. I feel like it would almost always be a better choice to get more refurbished enterprise drives than fewer new consumer drives.
  I personally found an 8tb exos on servedpartdeals for ~$100 which seems to be in very good condition after checking the SMART monitoring. I'm just using it as a backup so there isn't any data on it that isn't also somewhere else, so I didn't bother with redundancy.
  I'm not an expert, but this is just from the research I did before buying that backup drive.
- Elaborate please?
  
  In my case, 10+years ago I had 6 * 3tb Seagate disks in a software raid 5. Two of them failed and it took me days to force it back into the raid and get some of the data off. Now I use WD and raid 6.
  I read 3 or 4 years ago that it was just the 3tb reds I used had a high failure rate but I'm still only buying WDs
  
  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/whats-behind-the-infamous-seagate-bsy-bug/
  this thread has multiple documented instances of poor QA and firmware bugs Seagate has implemented at the cost of their own customers.
  my specific issue was even longer ago, 20+ years. there was a bug in the firmware where there was a buffer overflow from an int limit on runtime. it caused a cascade failure in the firmware and caused the drive to lock up after it ran for the maximum into limit. this is my understanding of it anyway.
  the only solution was to purchase a board online for the exact model of your HDD and swap it and perform a firmware flash before time ran out. I think you could also use a clip and force program the firmware.
  at the time a new board cost as much as a new drive, finances of which I didn't have at the time.
  eventually I moved past the 1tb of data I lost, but I will never willingly purchase another Seagate.
- I had a similar experience with Samsung. I had a bunch of evo 870 SSDs up and die for no reason. Turns out, it was a firmware bug in the drive and they just need an update, but the update needs to take place before the drive fails.
  I had to RMA the failures. The rest were updated without incident and have been running perfectly ever since.
  I'd still buy Samsung.
  I didn't lose a lot of data, but I can certainly understand holding a grudge on something like that. From the other comments here, hate for Seagate isn't exactly rare.
- Some of Seagate's drives have terrible scores on things like Blackblaze. They are probably the worst brand, but also generally the cheapest.
  I have been running a raid of old Seagate barracuda's for years at things point, including a lot of boot cycles and me forcing the system off because Truenas has issues or whatnot and for some fucking reason they won't die.
  I have had a WD green SSD that I use for Truenas boot die, I had some WD external drive have its controller die (the drive inside still work) and I had some crappy WD mismatched drives in a raid 0 for my Linux ISO's and those failed as well.
  Whenever the Seagate start to die, I guess ill be replacing them with Toshiba's unless somebody has another suggestion.

I'm amazed it's only $800. I figured that shit was gonna be like 8-10 thousand.
- Well, it's a Seagate, so it still comes out to about a hundred bucks a month.
  
  Why do you wound me like this?
- Yeah, I expected it to level out around $800 after a few years, not out of the gate. 20TB are still $300 ish new.

Yeah, but it's Seagate. I have worked in data centers, and Seagate drives had the most failures of all my drives and somehow is still in business. I'd say I was doing an RMA of 5-6 drives a month that were Seagate, and only 4-5 a year Western Digital.
- Is that just observational, or did you keep track? Backblaze does track their failures, and publishes their data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2025/
  
  And they do have more Seagate failures than other brands, but that's because they have more Seagates than other brands. Seagate is generally pretty good value for the money.
  
  Three companies, kept track, but not after I left. It was always funny to me that they bought out Atlas and Maxtor. "Of course they did. Why not dominate the market on shitty drives? lol" I am surprised they hadn't bought Deskstar.
- What models of Seagate drives?
  I've been running x4 Seagate ST8000NC0002s 24/7 for almost 5 years, plus 2 more I added about 6 months ago and they've never given me any trouble.
  To be fair, the only HDDs I've ever had that failed were two I dropped because I wasn't being careful enough.
  
  All over the map: Barracuda, SkyHawk, Ironwolf, Constellation, Cheetah, etc...
- I hear you. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a Seagate drive not fail on me.
- Out of the roughly 20 drives I've bought over the last decade or so, the only two failures were Seagate and they only made up five of the drives purchased. The other 15 are WD and all have been great (knock on wood).
  
  I've had the same experience. The first HDD that failed on me was a Barricuda 7200.11 with the infamous firmware self-brick issue, and a second 7200.11 that just died slowly from bad sectors.
  From then on I only bought WD, I have a Caviar Black 1TB from oh, 2009-ish that's still in service, though it's finally starting to concern me with it's higher temperature readings, probably the motor bearings going. After that I've got a few of the WD RE4 1TBs still running like new, and 6 various other WD Gold series drives, all running happily.
  The only WD failure I've had was from improper shipping, when TigerDirect (rip) didn't pack the drive correctly, and the carrier football tossed the thing at my porch, it was losing sectors as soon as it first started, but the RMA drive that replaced it is still running in a server fine.
- I use all WD Golds for storage now but I have some Seagate barracudas from 2005 that still work. I don't use them anymore but the data is still there. I fire them up every so often to see. I know that's purely situational. I pretty much only buy WD now.
- Every drive I've had fail has been a Seagate. I replace them out of habit at this point.

This hard drive is so big that when it sits around the house, it sits around the house.
- This hard drive is so big when it moves, the Richter scale picks it up.
  
  This hard drive is so big when it backs up it makes a beeping sound.

Sorry but without a banana for scale it's hard to tell how big it really is
- 36 Typical Bananas
  
  That quite large then.
  I wonder how many pictures of nude bananas you could fit inside??
  
  28 plantains

Imagine having that...then dropping it...
- Summon Linus

Me who stores important data on seagate external HDD with no backup reading the comments roasting seagate:
- Uh oh!!! Uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh

That's a lot of porn. And possibly other stuff, too.
- Nah, the other stuff will all fit on your computer's hard drive, this is only for porn. They should call it the Porn Drive.
  
  I "only" have a 1TB SDD. If I wanted to download a new game I would have to delete one that's already on here.
- It isn't as much as you think, high resolution, high bitrate video files are pretty large.
  
  Especially VR files
  
  high resolution, high bitrate video files are pretty large.
  Can it actually transfer data fast enough to save or play them back in real-time, though?
- And possibly other stuff, too.
  Ehhh don't test me

Why did they make an enterprise grade drive SMR? I’m out.
- Because they simply cannot do it otherwise.
  
  That’s fine…they don’t need to release it under their Exos line of enterprise drives. SMR don’t do well in raid arrays especially not highly utilized ones. They require idle time to cleanup and the rebuild times are horrendous.
- For affordable set it and forget it cold storage, this is incredible. For anything actively being touched, yeah definitely a pass.

Pretty sure I had a bigger hard drive than that for my Amiga. You could have broken a toe if you’d dropped it.

Great, can't wait to afford it in 60 years.

Makes me shudder. I have to replace a drive in my array, because it is degraded. It's a 4TB. Imagine having to replace one of these. I'd much rather have a bunch of cheaper drives, even if they are a bit more expensive per TB, because the replacement cost will eventually make the total cost of ownership lower.
Also, repeat with me: "Please give me a Toshiba or Hitachi, please"
- Until you run out of ports or cage space 😂
- So if you have been around long enough you might remember the Hitachi (IBM) deathstars https://wizardprang.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/the-last-deathstar/
  I see Hitachi and think no fucking way, where as Seagate I used to see as an always yes. Now I just stick the disks in a zfs array and call it done
  What I'm really waiting for is large capacity ssds with sata.
  
  Yes I remeber Deathstars. However, these past years I perfunctorly peruse Backblaze's yearly drive failure reports, and have noticed a trend, which is that most drives are fine, but every year there are a few that stand out as very bad, and they usually Seagate/WDC.
  Exceptions yada, yada

finally i'll be able to self-host one piece streaming

What is the usecase for drives that large?
I 'only' have 12Tb drives and yet my zfs-pool already needs ~two weeks to scrub it all. With something like this it would literally not be done before the next scheduled scrub.
- there was a time i asked this question about 500 megabytes
  
  I too, am old.
  
  I am not questioning the need for more storage but the need dor more storage without increased speeds.
- It's to play Ark: Survival Evolved.
- High capacity storage pools for enterprises.
  Space is at a premium. Saving space should/could equal to better pricing/availability.
  
  Not necessarily.
  The trouble with spinning platters this big is that if a drive fails, it will take a long time to rebuild the array after shoving a new one in there. Sysadmins will be nervous about another failure taking out the whole array until that process is complete, and that can take days. There was some debate a while back on if the industry even wanted spinning platters >20TB. Some are willing to give up density if it means less worry.
  I guess Seagate decided to go ahead, anyway, but the industry may be reluctant to buy this.
- There is an enterprise storage shelf (aka a bunch of drives that hooks up to a server) made by Dell which is 1.2 PB (yes petabytes). So there is a use, but it's not for consumers.
  
  That's a use-case for a fuckton of total capacity, but not necessarily a fuckton of per-drive capacity. I think what the grandparent comment is really trying to say is that the capacity has so vastly outstripped mechanical-disk data transfer speed that it's hard to actually make use of it all.
  For example, let's say you have these running in a RAID 5 array, and one of the drives fails and you have to swap it out. At 190MB/s max sustained transfer rate (figure for a 28TB Seagate Exos; I assume this new one is similar), you're talking about over two days just to copy over the parity information and get the array out of degraded mode! At some point these big drives stop being suitable for that use-case just because the vulnerability window is so large that the risk of a second drive failure causing data loss is too great.
- Jesus, my pool takes a little over a day, but I’ve only got around 100 tb how big is your pool?
  
  The pool is about 20 usable TB.
- Sounds like something is wrong with your setup. I have 20TB drives (x8, raid 6, 70+TB in use) .... scrubbing takes less than 3 days.
- What's scrubbing for?
  
  A ZFS Scrub validates all the data in a pool and corrects any errors.
- I worked on a terrain render of the entire planet. We were filling three 2 Tb drives a day for a month. So this would have been handy.
- Data centers???
- It's like the petronas towers, everytime they're finished cleaning the windows they have to start again
- What drives do you have exactly? I have 7x6TB WD Red Pro drives in raidz2 and I can do a scrub less than 24 hours.
  
  I have 2*12TB whitelabel WD drives (harvested from external drives but Datacenter drives accourding to the SN) and one 16 TB Toshiba white-label (purchased directly also meant for datacenters) in a raidz1.
  How full is your pool? I have about 2/3rds full which impacts scrubbing I think. I also frequently access the pool which delays scrubbing.

my qbittorrent is gonna love that

I think if I needed to store 36TB of data, I would rather get several smaller disks.
- But if you hate your data there's no quicker way to lose it than a single 36TB Seagate drive.
  
  That's why Seagate is the last word in the title.
- But if you need a Petabyte of data you'll appreciate this existing
- I don't think the target audience of this drive is buying one. They are trying to optimize for density and are probably buying in bulk rather than paying the $800 price tag.
- That's roughly what I have now, and I only have about 200gb left, so I kind of wish I could get a little more right now. This is across 7 drives. I really hope storing data becomes faster and cheaper in the future because as it keeps growing over the past few decades, it gets longer and longer to replace and move this much data...
  
  SSDs are getting crazy cheap.
  If you need 10tb of storage, you could get 2x used 10tb hdds in raid 1 for $200, but 6x used 2tb nvme in raid 5 is only $600 and 100x faster. Both take up the same amount of space.
  
  Well, it does cost less and less every year. I bought two 8TB drives for $300 each or so, and today a 24TB drive is about that much.
- Multiple drives in a RAID.

Is it worth replacing within a year only to be sent a refurbished when it dies?
- Use redundancy. Don't be a pleb.

Finally, a hard drive which can store more than a dozen modern AAA games

I'm gonna need like 6 of these
- monkey's paw curls They're SMR
  
  Seems fine with a couple TB of SSDs to act as active storage with regular rsyncs back to the HDDs. This is fine.

Can't wait to see this bad boy on serverpartdeals in a couple years if I'm still alive
- if I'm still alive
  That goes without saying, unless you anticipate something.

Is Seagate still producing shitty drives that fail a few days after the warranty expired?
- Hey, they told you how long they expected it to last 😅
  
  Fair point. But still pretty bad. Literally two days after the warranty expired my Seagate drive was broken. This was my first and only Seagate drive. Never again.
  Meanwhile my old Western Digital drive is still kicking way beyond it's warranty. Almost 10 years now.
- Some models are quite a bit worse than average while some are on par with competition
- Mine have been going strong for five years. Ironwolf Pros.

So how much data would I lose when it dies?
Edit for those who didn’t read the smirk, yes 36Tb, as a way to point out what someone answered below: if you’re using a drive this big have your data recovery procedures on fleek.
- about 36TB?
  
  Nooooooooo not all my pr0ns!!
- Assuming you aren't striping, up to 36 TB. If you follow even halfway decent practices with basically any kind of RAID other than 0, hopefully 0 Bytes.
  The main worry with stuff like this is that it potentially takes a while to recover from a failed drive even if you catch it in time (alert systems are your friend). And 36 TB is a LOT of data to work through and recover which means a LOT of stress on the remaining drives for a few days.
  
  aren’t striping
  I think you mean "are striping".
  But even with striping you have backups right? Local redundancy is for availability, not durability.
  
  It would probably take days to rebuild the array.
  It's important to also note that RAID (or alternatives such as unRAID) are not backup systems and should not be relied on as such. If you have a severe brownout that fries more than two or three drives at once, for example, you will lose data if you're not backing up.

You need a week to fill the hecking disk. flips server rack up in disappointment
- But this would be great for tape-like storage where you only need to write once and maybe query little individual bits of it. Slap RAID on top of it and you've got yourself your own nation state intelligence service datastore.

Are people still mining chia ?

Do people actually use such massive hard drives? I still have my 1 TB HDD in my PC (and a 512 GB SSD), lol.
- Data hoarders could be happy, but otherwise it's mostly enterprise use.
  Still, I personally hold about 4 TB of files, and I know people holding over 30 TB.
  As soon as your storage needs exceed 1-2 games and a bunch of old photos, demand for space raises quickly.
- I have 50t of data total : archival, old project, backups, backups of my physical medias, etc
- This is an enterprise drive, so it's useful for any usecase where a business needs to store a lot of lightly used data, like historical records that might be accessed infrequently for reporting and therefore shouldn't get be transfered to cold storage.
  For a real world example, the business I'm currently contracting at is legally required to retain safety documentation for every machine in every plant they work in. Since the company does contract work in other people's plants that's hundreds of PDFs (many of which are 50+ page scans of paper forms) per plant and hundreds of plants. It all adds up very quickly. We also have a daily log processes where our field workers will log with photographs all of their work every single workday for the customer. Some of these logs contain hundreds of photographs depending on the customer's requirements. These logs are generated every day at every plant so again it adds up to a lot of data being created each month
- I have just shy of 8TB of data on my home file server.
  That's not including my NVR (for security cameras) which has a single 6TB SATA drive sitting around 40% capacity.

Hello

Not really https://www.techradar.com/pro/worlds-largest-ssd-is-on-sale-for-almost-usd12-400-and-yes-it-is-quite-a-bargain-if-you-can-afford-it-of-course
- SSD ≠ HDD
  
  Never change pedantic Internet, never change!

for POrn, but who downloads porn nowadays. unless its the illegal kind. to the idiot below who brigaded and downvoted, i was repeating other people saying it was for porn.
- Get your meds, man