>4TB Drives - When?

[Red Squirrel]

With the availability of high density multi drive cases like Norco and Supermicro rackmount units allowing 20-24 drives or even more, it's not bigger drives that we need, it's more reliable drives, and cheaper drives. More importantly, more reliable.

Sadly most people don't even consider reliability, they just look at the one with the biggest number because they think it will be better.

I'm still using 1TB WD blacks in my server, and when I expand, I'll probably get more of those same drives. They have been reliable and are at a decent price point. Eventually I want to build a SAN, so I'll probably go with 2TB or 3TB ones. At this point 2TB seems to be the most cost efficient.

 

[Gunbuster]

As conventional HDD capacity goes up by 25% or 50% the speed goes up around 5%. No one likes to sit around for hours or days waiting for the drive or RAID to Initialize/format/scan.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

As conventional HDD capacity goes up by 25% or 50% the speed goes up around 5%. No one likes to sit around for hours or days waiting for the drive or RAID to Initialize/format/scan.

Honestly, if they made a 10 TB hard drive half the speed of today's 3 TB drives and the same cost, I'd buy two of them tomorrow.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I have 2x1TB drives and a 640GB drive. I had been thinking of replacing two of them with a single 3TB drive, but the prices aren't there for me to do so.

I think the main reason for stagnation is just demand. Hardly anyone needs more than 1TB, so there is little reason to push onwards to something like 5TB. Almost no one would make use of it.

Plus of course there's the backup problem. If you have a 5TB drive in your PC, you need a similar sized external drive to back it up.