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  • Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    First the Nintendo Switch, now 1TB HDDs. Looks like 2017 is the year of retro technologies. Let's hope that ryzen doesnt fall into that category.
  • Scabies - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    But retro AMD was a serious contender. "Retro" Ryzen is what we're all hoping for.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    Membertech.
  • alyarb - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

    ohhhhhhh! i membeh!
  • XZerg - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    1TB and 2TB mechanical drives in 2017? this just does not make sense and that too for Enterprise. The main issue is why create a product line for providing a "cheaper" drive when you can make larger capacity drives with negligible cost compared to the cost necessary to support that extra product line? Why get 100 1TB when I could get 30 5TB drives for the same cost? So it is aimed at those who just need a handful of drives, 3-4. For Enterprise, i understand the one time cost isn't that big a concern, especially when it is matter for ~ $100.

    what am i missing the point of these drives?
  • DanNeely - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    Legacy use in old systems that need 512b sectors instead of the 4k that everyone else has gone to a few years ago. I suspect that this comes down to it being cheaper to make a new revision of these off of current parts (and 1 or 2 1gb platters) than to keep producing a 5 or 6 year old design with a full stack of low capacity platters to support a very low volume product line.
  • Samus - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

    Something tells me these are just revamped WD RE4's. Specs are eerily similar.
  • Samus - Saturday, January 21, 2017 - link

    lol I didn't even look at the manufacturer, just the specs. Obviously they can't be WD RE's.
  • jordanclock - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    Enterprise usually is more expensive to justify better support expectations and longer life. This is not about being a value proposition in terms of storage space.
  • Arnulf - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    1 TB does not, but 2 TB (2.2 TB) is the limit for some older systems, as is the 512 B sector format.

    If these were 50% more expensive than consumer HDDs of identical capacity I'd actually go for the 2 TB model.
  • XZerg - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    actually now i realize the whole hoopla about hdd bigger than 2TB or and running into situations where the system (motherboard/chipset) wouldn't recognize it properly back then.

    512b is a bit news as i thought most drives were 4kb and 512b is actually a newer sector size to help "save" space for NoSQL type use case give that they don't delete/update old record and just append new version of the record at end of the file..
  • takeshi7 - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link

    Nope, 512B sectors is actually the old legacy size. Older computers can't even recognize drives with 4K sectors.
  • SharpEars - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    If you want high reliability, why in the world would you ever buy a conventional HDD? These drives make no sense, not even with their 5 year warranty and 2Mh MTBF.
  • Hulk - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    That's 228 years MTBF. Pretty significant in critical applications.
  • fanofanand - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    Wonder how they tested it to determine that.....
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    Probably like this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_fa...

    It makes sense if your application requires maximum reliability, average capacity, minimal performance, and minimal price. Like 386/floppy-based computers for machining, niche markets exist and not all niches are high-end. To put it another way - they probably wouldn't be selling it if they didn't think they could sell it. Could be just a means up dumping stock, but I doubt it.
  • SiSiX - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

    Because conventional HDD's can actually be recovered at the physical level if they stop working from anything short of a physical head crash (highly unlikely in a server or even business environment), degaussing (really unlikely except in a fire), or physical destruction. In both the of the last cast cases, SSD's also wouldn't survive. Of course, even short term, cells in SSD's lose information if not refreshed (on the order of weeks or months), SSD's have shown an annoying propensity towards bricking themselves and being unrecoverable after having the power suddenly pulled (yeah, that still happens in the real world), and of course there is our good friend electricity/static shock which actually can fry the flash memory chips themselves, rendering them completely unrecoverable.

    Spinning HDD's, for all the crap we talk about them, are surprisingly robust when properly used in server environment, and especially so when it comes to things like suddenly having the power pulled from them mid operation. Worst case scenario here is you have to use a recovery program to get your data back, not send it off to a recovery company and pray that it's actually recoverable. They also don't have EOL built in bricking features (I'm looking at you Intel) to "protect your Data" from premature loss either.

    In 25+ years of working with HDD's, I've never had one (including portable drives) that had a failure that resulted in a drive that was "completely unrecoverable", even by a service. I have a collection of 20 flash cards/drives and 1 SSD ranging in size from 64 MB to 32GB (ouch) and 120GB on the SSD that were completely unrecoverable by a service. Surprisingly fragile for "high reliability" technology don't you think?
  • Zan Lynx - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    This reminds me of companies that kept buying 9 GB SCSI drives when 36 GB were available.
  • bill.rookard - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    I'm really curious as well as to exactly who these are aimed at. I know here in my small business these would be great to have assuming that they are indeed hyper-reliable. I have quite a bit of business data that I need to keep safe (yes, I have dual remote backups offsite), but of course going down is a PITA.

    Right now I'm running dual 250GB ES grade HDDs which I picked up pretty cheap, but of course there comes a time when they will need replacing (smart monitoring indicates exactly zero issues even though they're 10 years old!!! zero pending sectors, zero write failures, zero remapped sectors).

    If these are a decent price (ie: $100 or so) they would be perfectly fine for use, but as mentioned, you can get a good 500GB SSD (850 Pro V-nand based) for $200ish and it will probably last longer than I will.
  • Dug - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    Legacy systems that can't be replaced or upgraded.
    There's thousands upon thousands of systems still running os/2 warp that need hard drives replaced, just as one example. Yes they need a sata/ide conversion, but the byte block size is what's important. Most of these will probably use less than a few GBs at most.
  • MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    I'm down with single platter. The one drive that's failed in my machine in the last 5 years has been an SSD
  • Lolimaster - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    And I tried to convince myself seagate stealthy released the 1st 10-20TB HARM HDD's and anandtech had a typical typo... oh well...
  • wavetrex - Thursday, January 19, 2017 - link

    They are probably single and double platter.
    Less disks = Lower noise = Lighter more resilient motor = Longer life.
  • alpha754293 - Friday, January 20, 2017 - link

    I don't really know why Seagate would even bother. I mean HGST (which is a WD brand now) has 12 TB enterprise drives. So....I wonder what Seagate is doing and/or what they're planning/where they're going with this...
  • stevenrix - Sunday, January 22, 2017 - link

    Hopefully the life expectancy of those drives won't be like 3 months.
  • BigDDesign - Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - link

    I just bought 2 WD Gold 2TB. I would rather have 2 than 1 4TB. The thought of losing 4TB all at once is scary and I can double up and more having a bunch of drives. Hard drives still have their place. Like the other lad said, they are recoverable. SSD sometimes brick. I remember when SSDs first came out. Only Intel was deemed reliable for business. Anywho, I'm hoping my new WD Golds are nice. Haven't set them up yet. I'm going to replace a 5 year old 2TB drive on my workstation, just for safety. Seems like a small price to pay and could see some performance increase. Dunno. I'm using Intel RST with a 64GB SSD for cache.

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