Where are those 5tb WD we were promised in 4Q2013?


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Lots of us would like to know where WD's 5TB drives are  :)

 

Note that Seagate's announcement only said "in 2014" ... so they've got a year to meet that projection.    But WD DID say "4th qtr 2013" ... so they've now missed their target.

 

Hopefully that means they're coming "real soon now" !!!

 

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I was looking forward to a 5TB WD Red for use as a parity drive.  I wonder what the price point would have been at.

 

I'm sure you'll know fairly soon ... surely within the first quarter of this year.  It's purely a guess, but I'd expect the initial pricing to be in the $250 range ... moving down towards ~ $200 relatively quickly after volume shipments are ongoing.

 

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I was looking forward to a 5TB WD Red for use as a parity drive.  I wonder what the price point would have been at.

 

I'm sure you'll know fairly soon ... surely within the first quarter of this year.  It's purely a guess, but I'd expect the initial pricing to be in the $250 range ... moving down towards ~ $200 relatively quickly after volume shipments are ongoing.

I hope you are right about the price.  I expect an initial premium amount of $300+ myself.
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I hope you are right about the price.  I expect an initial premium amount of $300+ myself.

 

I'd have said the same not too many weeks ago.  But with both the WD Red and the Seagate NAS 4TB units routinely available for $180 (both are $179.99 at Newegg as I write this), I think it may be closer to the $250 range.    My thought process is:  figure about a 10% per/TB premium ... so (180/4) * 5 = $225 * 1.10 = $247.50    Of course they may want a bigger premium initially ... a 20% premium would put the price at $270.

 

My "personal threshold" is $250 ... anything at or below that and I'll get at least a couple to "play" with  :)

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Waiting anxiously already.  So far, WD has been vastly optimistic in its release schedule of the 5TB.  We are already almost mid-way through April and so far, nada.

 

The bigger the drives the bigger the stakes if something goes wrong! Not saying I wouldn't love to have an array of 5T drives, but when I look at how much of my library is on a single disk it does get scary. May have to look at one of gary's backup solutions.  :-\

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The bigger the drives the bigger the stakes if something goes wrong! Not saying I wouldn't love to have an array of 5T drives, but when I look at how much of my library is on a single disk it does get scary. May have to look at one of gary's backup solutions.  :-\

 

Well isn't that why we are using UnRAID so drive size shouldn't be too much of a concern?  Or are you planning to use these larger 5TB's in a non-RAID regular PC/workstation?  And what is this "Gary's backup solution?"

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Works the same until something goes wrong. Recovery can sometimes be problematic. And if you are unlucky enough to have 2 simultaneous drive failures, you'd lose 8T of data with 4T drives. When I first started wtih unRAID, drives were 500M. Big different between loosing 1T vs 8T!

 

You can read about some of the technologies that can help protect you from data loss HERE

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And what is this "Gary's backup solution?"

 

Nothing special -- I'm simply a very strong advocate of backing up your data.  UnRAID ... or any other RAID ... is NOT a substitute for backing up your data.  My thoughts are here (with several pages of comments following):  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31020.0

 

The bottom line is simple:  If you value your data, back it up !!  Storing your data on a fault-tolerant server provides some protection against a single drive failure and lets you continue to access it if that happens, but it is NOT a backup.  Some people think it costs too much to backup ... but if you consider the cost/TB of disks these days, and the time and effort involved in acquiring, organizing, and cataloging your data, I definitely don't agree.  [Catching up can certainly seem expensive if you've been acquiring TB's of data for many years and not backing it up.]

 

The size of the disks you use has nothing to do with whether or not you should backup your data  :)

 

 

 

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Incidentally, while I'm a big fan of UnRAID, if you aren't going to backup your data ... but would still be upset if you lost it (a clear recipe for disaster) => then you should invest in a good hardware RAID controller and build a RAID-6 array, so you at least have dual fault-tolerance, so even if a drive fails during a rebuild, everything will finish okay.    With the large, many TB arrays folks are building ... especially with consumer-grade drives ... it's actually fairly likely you'll get a bit error during a rebuild.  [Enterprise grade drives have an order of magnitude better error rate, so this is much less likely with them .. but RAID-6 is still a good idea].   

 

But an UnRAID server has many advantages for home use -- lower power consumption, ability to use consumer-grade drives since they're spun down much of the time, less data loss potential with dual-drive failures than a RAID-5 array (or than a RAID-6 array with 3 failures); etc.    I think it's a superb solution for home data storage ... but it's still NOT a backup, which many folks don't seem to grasp.

 

 

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