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from the now-you-CAN-take-it-with-you? dept.
Seagate has launched the world's first 5 TB 2.5" hard disk drives (HDDs). However, they won't fit in most laptops:
The new Seagate BarraCuda 2.5" drives resemble the company's Mobile HDDs introduced earlier this year and use a similar set of technologies: motors with 5400 RPM spindle speed, platters based on [shingled magnetic recording (SMR)] technology with over 1300 Gb/in2 areal density, and multi-tier caching. The 3 TB, 4 TB and 5 TB BarraCuda 2.5" HDDs that come with a 15 mm z-height are designed for external storage solutions because virtually no laptop can accommodate drives of that thickness. Meanwhile, the 7 mm z-height drives (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) are aimed at mainstream laptops and SFF desktops that need a lot of storage space.
Seagate has also launched a 2 TB shingled solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) with 8 GB of NAND cache and a 128 MB DRAM cache buffer. The 1 TB and 500 GB versions also have 8 GB of NAND and 128 MB of DRAM. These are the first hybrid drives to use shingled magnetic recording.
Seagate press release (for "mobile warriors" only).
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:40PM
This is how I have it set up:
1) I use SSDs. My laptop is SSD, as is my desktop. I was worried about the excessive writes, but my current 128GB SSD has been going strong for years. I had one (OCZ) SSD fail on me due to excessive writes, but when it failed, it failed read-only, so just transferred the data to a new one and carried on.
The other SSDs I have setup are Sandisk (SanDisk SDSSDP064G). I even use two Sandisks as R/W cache on my ZFS array. Unless you are really swapping like mad, you should not see problems with writes*
2) I use My ZFS storage server, 12TB Array with redundancy (see my other reply below parent for all the ZFS details). Can connect to it via gigabit ethernet, 150MB wifi, or over the public internet (I paid a lot of money for Fibre, so get 100mbit/s). It is so fast that I forget I am not dealing with local storage when I am home.
For the laptop, I use the SSD, or just pull in what I need for the project from my home server. I also have an external 1TB USB drive I carry around as and when needed.
3) I use external disks, and a USB3 caddy. Have a script which automatically detects if the disk I have inserted has the specific backup labels I marked them with, and just kicks off automatically. Then sends me an email, I pull out the disk and take it off site. It has saved my files on two occasions in the last 5 years.
* I did tune my Linux laptop and desktop for SSDs though, used ext4, enabled TRIM, disabled atime, etc... to reduce write loads.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:45PM
I wouldn't recommend that unless the disks are have tons of empty space and you're not making constant backups. You can easily wear out a regular HDD with ZFS if you allow it to get too full through too much snapshotting.